Mike Celizic

Bill Cowher says it’s up to the doctors, which he and the Steelers organization say is the only thing they can say. But that’s not really true. They could say something else. They could say, “Big Ben isn’t playing this week, and maybe not next week or the week after. He’s not going to play until he’s totally healthy.”

They won’t say that, because it’s the same as saying, “Our quarterback’s health is more important than our season — honest.” And that, in the National Football League, isn’t the way business is conducted.

Maybe it should be, though. Because no matter how Ben Roethlisberger does on the neurological tests that will determine his fitness for a return to combat, if he gets hit hard again so close to his most recent concussion, he could be on his way out of the game. That’s the way it works: If you suffer multiple concussions in a short period of time, the odds of serious long-term problems skyrocket. And every time you get concussed, it gets a little easier for it to happen again with the next hit.

Most of us never have to worry about such things. If we have a freak accident and hit our head, we can go right back to work as soon as the doctors say it’s okay, because we don’t have to worry about it happening again. But football players are always one play away from the next big hit. And do you really want to put a player as valuable as Roethlisberger back in harm’s way so quickly?

Caution dictates that you sit him down for weeks or a month or more, let Charlie Batch, who is a pretty darned good back-up, carry the load, and see if you can get lucky. But football isn’t about caution. And no one willingly risks a season to protect a player who may or may not get hurt again and suffer serious damage to what Woody Allen called his second-favorite organ.

I’d hate to be Cowher right now, just as I’d hate to be one of the doctors who has to decide when Ben Roethlisberger’s twice-concussed brain is ready to stand up against blitzing linebackers and blind-side hits.

On the one hand, there’s the short-term prospect of a season that isn’t yet beyond rescue. On the other, there’s Roethlisberger’s long-term prospects of health and mental acuity. What’s more important, this week’s game, or living without headaches and nausea and scrambled thoughts 15 years from now?

It was a lot easier in the good old days when you cracked an ammonia cap to revive players who had been knocked out and sent them out to get whacked in the head again, joking afterwards about how goofy the old gunslinger was when he got his bell rung.

Now that we say soberly that a player was concussed — a technical term for a form of brain damage — rather than laughing about how he was “dinged,” it’s not as easy to just point him in the right direction and send him back into the fray. Not this week and not next week.

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But that’s the decision facing the Steelers. Roethlisberger, who the Steelers hope is their ticket to many years of contending for yet more Super Bowl titles, was knocked out Sunday for the second time in four months. He suffered the first concussion in that motorcycle accident last summer, in which his head, unprotected by a helmet, had a close encounter with an automobile’s windshield, with the windshield winning the decision. Now, four months later, he’s been knocked out again.