As Panthers rookie Chandler Zavala recovers, injury shines light on football’s cost

Every NFL Sunday is something of an American holiday for sports fans. Even now.

Even with all we know about the price the game extracts from the people who play it. Even after the discovery of CTE, the stories about concussions and the movie “Concussion.” Even after Junior Seau, Mike Webster and Damar Hamlin.

Still, the game not only persists but thrives. This is in large part because it is relentlessly entertaining, a mixture of sanctioned violence and extraordinary athleticism that remains perfectly calibrated for American attention spans.

But then something like Sunday happens, when Carolina Panthers offensive guard Chandler Zavala falls to the ground and is face-first and motionless after what appeared to be a routine NFL play — “routine” meaning in this case, a series of collisions that would feel like a car wreck to almost all of us.

After the play, Zavala had a neck injury, and he wasn’t getting up. The now-familiar rites of potentially serious injury: the silent players in a semi-circle, the prayers, the cart.

Fortunately, it now sounds like Zavala is going to be OK. He was talking a little to teammates during the seven minutes the game was delayed, while he was on the ground. He went from the stadium straight to a local hospital in Detroit, got checked out and was deemed in good enough health to fly back with the team Sunday night.

“I talked to him on the plane,” Reich said. “His spirits were good. Obviously thankful that everything checked out well. So he’s doing well.”

Reich said it was to early to know how long Zavala would be out of action, but didn’t rule out the possibility of Zavala playing as early as Sunday at Miami. Zavala hasn’t been made available to reporters since the injury and wasn’t Monday, although he was back with the team in Charlotte and going to meetings.

“Those things: There are no two that are the same,” Reich said of Zavala’s injury. “You don’t know how they’re gonna respond to them. Sometimes guys respond really quickly and it’s like, boom, they’re playing the next week. Other times, it’s a couple of weeks. You just can’t tell.”

An injury like Zavala’s reminds us all again about what is gained and what can be lost every Sunday.

“You never want to see when your brothers goes down on the field and he’s not moving,” said Panthers tight end Hayden Hurst Monday. Hurst was with the Cincinnati Bengals last season during the Hamlin episode, when the Buffalo safety went into cardiac arrest on the field. (He eventually recovered). Hurst was reminded of that incident when Zavala went down.

“Bring the cart out,” Hurst said. “Bring the stretcher out. I mean, it’s pretty terrifying.... I know it’s a pretty violent game, but it’s tough to watch, and it’s tough to bounce back from as a team, to go back out there after you see one of your brothers get carted off the field. But that’s what we signed up for, unfortunately.”

A 24-year-old rookie out of N.C. State, Zavala had been one of the bright spots of a dark start for the 0-5 Panthers, the NFL’s last winless team. A fourth-round pick, he quickly became a starter, due to other injuries to other players. He re-teamed with left tackle Ickey Ekwonu, a former college teammate with the Wolfpack. Then came the first-quarter injury.

“Definitely, definitely scary,” Ekwonu said.

“It was scary,” Reich agreed.

It was also unclear what happened.

“We’re thinking it’s just a bad stinger,” Reich said Sunday, using a colloquial football term for a pinched nerve. “It was a big pile. ... Big collision. I’m not sure what happened underneath there, but sometimes you just kind of get hit sideways in the neck. I don’t want to project too much, but I do know that there was a pretty big pile there because we were trying to look at it on the replay, and you couldn’t really tell because there were too many bodies in there.”

“I didn’t notice until the play had stopped and I was walking back to the huddle,” said Ekwonu, who was blocking directly next to Zavala as usual. “And that’s when I saw him kind of laying there.”

Bryce Young, the Panthers’ quarterback, said Zavala was occasionally speaking to teammates while he was on the ground.

Said Young of those seven minutes: “It was really, really scary. ... And Chandler being the warrior he was, he was egging us to keep pounding. He was egging us to keep fighting. He was encouraging us even in that state which speaks to him and his character.”

Zavala’s injury is only the latest public example of what football costs.

Another reminder: I went to see former Panther linebacker Lamar Lathon in Houston in 2022. He made millions playing the game. Made a Pro Bowl. Was half of the “Salt and Pepper” combo in 1996.

And, Lathon told me: ““If I had known what I know now? No, I wouldn’t have played.”

But, of course, thousands would pay that price.

Tens of thousands, really. The NFL dream has a brutal cost, but it is powerful. We saw that once again Sunday. And we’ll see it again every Sunday, somewhere.

In the meantime, enjoy your fantasy football team.