Colts’ Tyler Varga retires following concussion
By Joe Tacosik
Tyler Varga, the undrafted free agent out of Yale who made the Indianapolis Colts 52-man roster in 2015, retires after just one year in football.
Indianapolis Colts running back Tyler Varga suffered a severe concussion in Week 3 of the 2015 NFL season, and it appears that was the last time Varga will see the football field as a professional player.
Varga was placed on the team’s reserve/retired list on Tuesday afternoon after failing to report to the team’s training camp in Anderson, Indiana. The subsequent paperwork has since been filed with the league, confirming his retirement.
Following his injury, fans were left wondering what would become of Varga, who was eventually placed on the injured reserve in Week 4.
“I didn’t want to go through the concussion protocol and maybe lose my job,” Varga told The Indianapolis Star’s Zak Keefer, in a story on the player’s concussion and resulting problems. “I wanted to believe I was just sick.”
“What you didn’t see was the concussion that lasted four months,” Keefer wrote. “The days and weeks he spent inside dark rooms, the test he kept failing, the words that got stuck in his mind that his mouth couldn’t spit out.”
Varga joins an alarmingly long list of players under the age of 30 that have retired in 2016, as the NFL faces a critical juncture when it comes to concussion protocols and the handling of former players faced with CTE. On Wednesday, it was announced that the NFL’s “Heads Up” campaign was reporting inflated safety numbers on concussions.
For more NFL news, follow our hub page!