Thread: Bears Looking to Avoid Players with Medical Issues...............

Bears looking to avoid players with injury risk

Chicago Bear Gabe Carimi was injured during a game against the Saints in 2011. (Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune / April 23, 2012)

By Brad Biggs Tribune reporter 1:23 p.m. CDT, April 23, 2012


Too often in the recent past for former Chicago Bears general manager Jerry Angelo, the team wound up with draft picks that had problematic medical histories.

First-round pick Chris Williams was sidelined on the second day of training camp as a rookie in 2008 and required preseason surgery for a back condition that was documented during his college career. Angelo acknowledged right tackle Gabe Carimi came with a yellow flag last year when he was selected with the 29th overall pick. Carimi underwent two surgeries on his knee and is expected back at full strength.

Wide receiver Mark Bradley, a second rounder in 2005 and defensive tackle Dusty Dvoracek, a third rounder in 2006, are other players who had checkered injury histories in college that translated into the NFL. Less than a year after the Bears drafted linebacker Marcus Freeman in the fifth round in 2009, he was diagnosed with a heart condition that wound up with him failing a physical, effectively ending his career.

So, one challenge for Phil Emery is to avoid adding players to the fold who have durability concerns. Instead of calling them red or yellow flags, Emery said the team angles the player’s card on the draft board, and he explained the process.

“Guys can get flagged for certain things,” he said. “We’ll go through a process where we might … we call them tilts and flips. We’ll tilt a player on the board, we’ll turn his card going south a little bit if they’re in that risk area. Usually we move those players to the right of the column. The players that are clean are to the left. We’ll flip them all the way over if the risk is too high, if their medical grade puts them in a situation where we feel the risk is too high, meaning we would not pick them. If they’re tilted, we’re going to have a lot of discussion before we would move forward with that player.”

Concussions are part of the medical process. NFL teams are taking a close look at head injuries for players at the college level because of the scrutiny being paid to concussions.

“That's part of our research,” Emery said. “Any time a head injury, knocked out of the game, headache, any of those words are used, we get it down in our injury incident report so that our physicians can follow up with the proper questions or proper screening and medical tests for that situation. The schools are very forthcoming but you always use that data that you've collected yourself and with interviews with a player.

“Sometimes, players are much more revealing in the process leading up to the draft than they might even be with their school officials about issues such as concussions because they want to make sure they're forthcoming on everything and so you gather all of that information and you evaluate it and yes, we're very conscious of that as we are with any other injury.”

bmbiggs@tribune.com

Twitter @BradBiggs