State agencies can suspend concussed fighters. Why not NFL players?

And then, as the quarterback slowly rolled over with his hands in front of his face mask, his fingers stiffened and, grotesquely, pointed in different directions. It was what we’d imagine an electrocution to look like.

Tagovailoa was eventually secured to a stretcher. And with the hands of six men on his gurney like pallbearers guiding a coffin, surrounded by that all too familiar prayer circle of gloomy NFL players when one of their own has been incapacitated by their violence, he was carted off the field, out of sight.

The diagnosis was concussion.

“We’re just focused on making sure he’s at optimal health and then crossing that bridge, so it’s a little early for a definitive timeline beyond that,” Dolphins Coach Mike McDaniel said Monday in explaining why Tagovailoa wouldn’t play this week.

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But were Tagovailoa a combat sport athlete — a boxer or mixed martial artist — there would be a timeline for return as perspicuous as if he were found to be taking banned PEDs. He wouldn’t play this month. Probably not next month, either. And it wouldn’t be the team or league’s decision.

Because as brutal and barbaric as fighting sports are, athletes in the ring or the octagon who are rendered impaired by knockout — i.e. concussed — are protected by state laws that govern their activities. Those laws err on the side of extreme caution — keeping fighters out of competition, and even practice, for a month or more.

In New Jersey, where the Dolphins will travel this weekend to play, state law for concussed combat athletes would’ve forced Tagovailoa to the sideline. “Any boxer who is knocked out in a boxing match,” New Jersey law states, “shall be suspended from boxing for a minimum 60-day period. The knocked-out boxer shall not be permitted to participate in a bout until a thorough medical examination is completed and submitted …”

Even for the two weeks after Sunday’s contest — when the Dolphins are to return home to Miami for a pair of games — Tagovailoa would be a mere spectator. To be sure, when a 58-year-old Evander Holyfield was KO’d a little over a year ago in a boxing match in Hollywood, Fla., the Florida State Boxing Commission medically suspended him from fighting in the state for 30 days.

That’s what should await Tagovailoa, if football’s claim about protecting its players from the dangers that lead to mentally debilitating CTE is genuine: regulation outside of the sport. It’s time for the game to accept the same drastic actions as fighting sports to keep the injured brain out of more harm’s way, no matter what the team doctor, or outside physician working for the sport, decides.

At 58, the long-diminished champion Holyfield shouldn’t have been granted a license to fight. But Tagovailoa probably shouldn’t have played against the Bengals on a Thursday after having been diminished the Sunday before when a hit left him looking like a Bourbon Street reveler at 3 in the morning.

What happened to Tagovailoa in the span of those few days elicited criticism that the NFL’s directives for handling concussed players were inadequate. But the league isn’t at fault alone. It is all of us. That’s football’s protocol problem.

It’s the players who see themselves as gladiators. “It’s war,” tight end Kellen Winslow Jr. infamously expressed long before he was convicted as a rapist. “They’re out there to kill you, so I’m [going] to kill them. If I didn’t hurt him, he’d hurt me. They were gunning for my legs. I’m going to come right back at them. I’m a f—ing soldier!”

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It’s the parents and guardians who see their sons as Lotto tickets and sit quietly by while they amble about the field despite injury.

It’s the fans who grow up imagining players as cyborgs in a computerized game, as supermen who can’t be broken, and increasingly as mere fantasy characters on a spreadsheet or website.

It’s those of us in the media who prop up those prototypes, as sport scientists Eric Anderson and Edward M. Kian observed in a 2012 journal paper titled “Examining Media Contestation of Masculinity and Head Trauma in the National Football League”: “The image of the emotionally and physically impenetrable football player has been reified by the dominant sporting media. Media-portrayed sporting narratives of heroic disposition, even in the face of debilitating injury or risk of death, are produced as part of orthodox notions of commitment to sport and victory. This is for several reasons. Foremost it is because the preponderance of individuals in sport media is men.”

We’re all enablers.

Combat sports and football aren’t waged, of course, with the same purpose in mind. It is the explicit aim of a fighter to discombobulate his or her opponent, with the coup de grace being to concuss.

But football has always been a collision sport, with getting one’s bell rung — as old coaches once called what they didn’t know was brain trauma — a frequent consequence. And despite all the rule changes, precautions and equipment improvements meant to decrease brain damage, players are bigger and stronger and seem to play with a greater esprit de martyrdom than ever before. More than a dozen players who joined Tagovailoa on the NFL’s injury list for this weekend were indicated as concussion victims.

But they all could be cleared for kickoffs shortly, no matter how much we’ve learned in recent years about the long-term dangers of head injuries in (and out of) sports. Because the game needs its stars. Because the stars are the heartbeat of the biggest, richest, most addictive sport on the planet. Because the players earn the league and its broadcast partners and Madden game-makers bazillions. Because we just can’t get enough.

So if we can’t control ourselves and the game to which we’re all addicted, some entity outside of it should.