Are you hurt or are you injured? This is an old football adage I learned in high school.
It means, can you push through your pain? Or do you need to come off the field? At its heart, this gut check is football’s guiding ethos. The further your football journey goes, the more pain you endure.
In the NFL, everything hurts and everyone is injured. So the new question becomes: Can you play or not? This puts the player, who is always fighting to keep his job, in a precarious position. Can you play or not?