Jaelan Phillips is an exciting edge rusher prospect. He would fix the direst problem facing their roster. The offensive line gets the headlines, but their pass rush looks like it has a great chance to be the worst in the league. The Minnesota Vikings could trade back and possibly still have a chance at him. He’s been going in the late first round in a lot of mock drafts, hovering around the low 20s, according to Benjamin Robinson’s Grinding The Mocks project.
As a pass rusher, Phillips has it all. His athletic tests are elite. He beat agile linemen with power and beat powerful linemen with agility. Before opting out of Miami’s bowl game, he was one of the best pass rushers in the country despite his mid-college retirement. He even moved into the interior to crush some guards, just like the Vikings like to do on third downs. He could do with some extra deception and comes up a little stiff, but he projects as a Day 1 starter according to pretty much everyone.
So what’s the catch? That mid-college retirement was due in large part to concussions. Phillips suffered a rash of injuries over his college career, including a moped accident that necessitated two surgeries and delayed his start to the 2018 season. He has also suffered three concussions, including one that ended his 2018 season in October. After UCLA team doctors wouldn’t clear him, he started thinking about how much he had put his body through.
He kept asking himself, “Who am I without football?”
From his accounts at the time, the grading wrist pain was on his mind more than the concussions were. The fact that he couldn’t stay on the field weighed on him. “When your body starts failing you, it’s a weird feeling. It derails what you’ve got going on,” Phillips said in an interview with ESPN during his 2020 season. He thought that if he could pursue music, he could be happy. You can rap with a broken wrist, after all.
That decision is probably the biggest question about his draft stock. It seems reductive to imply that he retired solely because of concussions, but a player who has sustained three diagnosed concussions is a concern nonetheless. But it seems more like a beat-up 19-year-old needed some time to think about what he wanted to do with his life. Eventually, he returned to his old flame.
Phillips had lost about 35 pounds and was cycling through unfulfilling career alternatives in his effort to embrace life without football. While on a family cruise, UCLA coach Jim Mora called him and asked if he would consider returning. Stanford and Miami expressed interest as well. He eventually entered the transfer portal and joined the Miami Hurricanes. That meant sitting out the 2019 season, but it also meant a fresh start.
His 2020 season with Miami was a breakout year. PFF’s draft guide condemns his “late breakout” as a concern. Breakout age is essentially a way of adjusting for when a 24-year-old super senior beats up on 19-year-old sophomores. If a player didn’t play well until they were the oldest kid on the field, it could be a concern. With Phillips, it’s hard to assign that. He could have broken out in 2018 if he had stayed healthy, or in 2019 were it not for the NCAA’s transfer rules.
While Phillips played all 10 games for Miami last year (he opted out of the bowl game due to COVID-19), those lingering injuries are difficult to ignore. An ankle sprain in 2017 and a wrist injury in 2018 are long in the past, and he has demonstrated that they are no longer holding him back. But concussions are a different beast entirely.
Every concussion is different, which makes this a really difficult issue to assign value to. When you get a concussion, your brain is damaged at a cellular level. Think of your brain as a city with a lot of roads. When everything is working out well, traffic can spread across those roads and avoid jams. Then imagine Godzilla crawls out of the ocean and destroys a bunch of those roads. Traffic might get a little backed up.
Concussive brain damage works similarly. Neural pathways in your brain are like roads. For your brain to do everything it has to, it’s going to utilize as many neurons as it can to keep the traffic down. When you’re concussed, there aren’t as many neurons to use, so your mental processing slows down.
It gets really scary when multiple concussions pile up. If you try to come back before a concussion has fully healed, your balance and processing may be slower. That puts you at risk of sustaining more concussions. Even after you’ve healed, a history of concussions puts you at greater risk of sustaining more concussions down the road. With each subsequent concussion, the recovery window tends to get longer. Re-building that city over and over gets more expensive, and the city more brittle, each time Godzilla attacks.
That’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Phillips suffered symptoms of his 2018 concussion for long enough to encourage UCLA doctors to end his season, but that doesn’t guarantee that a concussion would necessarily end another season. It does increase the probability, however. The long-term effects of the concussions that Phillips has already sustained are also concerning. All of this is to say nothing for the risk of CTE and other complications well after Phillips’ playing career.
But if you were to synthesize these medical red flags into an availability concern, it would be easier to define. Every player is at some risk of missing a few games due to a concussion. Jaelan Phillips is at a higher risk and would likely miss more time than a player without his history. His retirement seemed more linked to the rash of injuries leading up to his season-ending concussion, but the existence of that concussion is the problem here. If you’re okay with accepting that higher risk (and, as the draft wears on, the gamble gets cheaper), then you’re open to a standout stud at a position of dire need.
