PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Stewart Bradley tried to get up. He made it to his feet, took about six steps, wobbled, then crumbled to the turf.
The reaction from the soldout crowd at Lincoln Financial Field was one of collective shock. The broadcasters announcing the game were shaken by what they saw.
Did Bradley really get his bell rung that badly? How could such a freakish athlete — a 6-foot-4, 250-pound middle linebacker, defined by his combination of speed, athleticism and strength — just collapse like that?
“We were extremely concerned,” said John Bradley, Stewart Bradley’s father.
John Bradley and his wife, Ann, were in the stands that day for the Eagles 2010 season opener against the Green Bay Packers. The late afternoon matchup between potential Super Bowl contenders was supposed to be a triumphant moment for their son. Stewart Bradley had missed the previous season with an ACL tear — his second in five years.
During the 2010 preseason, he reclaimed his spot in the starting lineup and was expected to anchor the Eagles’ defense. In an instant, after colliding with fellow linebacker Ernie Sims on a tackle with less than five minutes to go in the first half, his health was once again uncertain.
The Bradleys didn’t know what to think. First, there was the immediate concern for their son: What went wrong? Was it the impact of the hit that caused him to go down, or something else?
“It was kind of freaky because you see him fumbling around and you’re like, ‘Oh no, this is not good,’” John Bradley said on the unCovering the Birds podcast.
Stewart Bradley’s fall capped a chaotic second quarter: Key offseason fullback acquisition Leonard Weaver, veteran center Jamaal Jackson, and freshly minted starting quarterback Kevin Kolb all went down with significant injuries.
Stewart Bradley got up with the assistance of the Eagles medical staff. They continued looking at him on the sideline.
“We were sort of like, ‘What’s going on?’” John Bradley recalled.
What happened next confused them even more.
A mere three plays later, Stewart Bradley was back on the field and played the final three minutes of the half. How was that possible after an entire stadium and national TV audience saw him go down the way he did?
Stewart Bradley and the Eagles handled the situation the way teams typically dealt with hits to the head in that era. The Eagles gave him a basic baseline concussion test on the field. He passed, and he said he was OK to continue, so they let him back in.
It wasn’t until the Eagles were in the locker room at halftime that they realized their mistake. Upon further examination, Stewart Bradley was concussed.
The Eagles held him out the rest of the game, but the visceral damage was done. The image of him tumbling over like a drunken sailor, then checking back in moments later, couldn’t be unseen. Making the optics even worse was that the NFL was trying to tamp down public outrage over its track record with concussions. This incident didn’t help the league’s case.
Stewart Bradley may have had a concussion, but he had enough wits about him to sense the Eagles’ concern. They knew they had a problem on their hands. He was given an extra reminder not to talk about his injury.
“There were clearly things at halftime where they’re like, the brass … kind of reiterating our standing position around how we deal with injuries in the press and yada, yada, yada,” said Stewart Bradley. “Clearly there had been word passed.”
His parents caught up with him after the game and drove him home. The next morning, when they dropped him off at the Eagles training facility for more testing, John Bradley said then-head coach Andy Reid expressed regret over the situation — a gesture the Bradleys respected and appreciated.
“That was a really stupid thing that happened,” John Bradley said. “We got a sense after the game that [Stewart] going back out was really, really a bad thing.
“The NFL messed up.”
Listen to unCovering the Birds
In the unCovering the Birds episode “Head Games,” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff McLane catches up with Stewart Bradley and his former teammates to revisit one of the scariest moments in recent Eagles history. McLane pulls back the curtain on how Stewart Bradley was allowed to return to play, and talks to him about the impact head trauma has had on his life since his playing career ended.
Look for new episodes of unCovering the Birds throughout the spring.