Jaxson Dart wanted to go back into the game.
After the New York Giants quarterback was injured against the Los Angeles Rams, he was evaluated, went to the locker room, and reportedly wanted to return. The medical staff did not allow him to do so. At first, the injury appeared to be an MCL sprain. Subsequent reporting, including Adam Schefter’s, indicated that further testing showed the injury was more serious than initially thought, with the possibility of season-ending surgery being considered. The medical picture is still developing. However, before we even knew exactly how serious the injury was, the moment had already raised a familiar question in sports:
How tough are you?
There is something about watching an athlete get hurt that makes all of us hold our breath. We watch the replay, look at their face, watch the coach and medical staff, and then wait for the signal. Are they going back in? Can they walk it off? Are they tough enough to keep playing?
We don’t know what was going through Dart’s mind when he wanted to return, and I don’t think we should pretend that we do. Maybe he wanted to help his teammates. Maybe he believed he could play. Maybe he was frustrated. Maybe, like many highly competitive athletes, he simply wanted desperately to keep competing.
But the moment raises a question that goes well beyond Dart: What happens when being tough becomes something athletes feel they have to perform, rather than simply something they possess? That question brings us to perfectionism.
We often talk about perfectionism as though it simply means wanting to be the best. However, the science is more complicated than that. Striving for excellence is not the same thing as demanding perfection. An athlete can be conscientious, hold high standards, and genuinely want to do their best without believing that anything short of flawless performance is unacceptable.
The concern is what happens when those high standards become tied to a demand for perfection, and that can depend a great deal on the environment around the athlete. Recent work on perfectionistic tipping points and perfectionistic climate is particularly useful here. Striving for excellence may look very different in an environment where mistakes and vulnerability are treated as part of learning than in one where they are met with criticism, rigid expectations, or the sense that recognition depends on performing perfectly.
So the question isn’t simply how much an athlete wants to achieve. It’s also what they’ve learned achievement requires, and what they believe will happen when they inevitably fall short.
Studies also add another piece to this puzzle: perfectionism isn’t only about what we expect from ourselves. It can also be about how we think we need to appear to other people. Perfectionistic self-presentation involves trying to look perfect, hiding imperfections, or avoiding situations where those imperfections might be seen.
That matters enormously in sport because performance is public. Athletes don’t just have a bad game, get injured, or struggle emotionally. They experience those things while being watched, evaluated, and compared.
And that’s where the question can shift from Can I do this? To What will people think if I can’t?
For an athlete, that is not a trivial question. What will my coach think? Will my teammates think I’m unreliable? Will I lose my place? Will people think I’m weak? Will I disappoint everyone? When an athlete’s identity is strongly tied to being tough, dependable and able to perform under pressure, acknowledging pain or vulnerability can begin to feel like more than acknowledging pain. It can feel like exposing an imperfection in the self.
We saw a different version of this tension with Caleb Williams. When the Chicago Bears quarterback went down against Minnesota, he was visibly in pain, struggled to get up, was helped from the field and then carted to the locker room with a towel over his head. For a few moments, the natural question was simply: How bad is this? The subsequent medical news was relatively reassuring, but in the meantime, something else happened. His reaction went viral.
The memes appeared almost immediately. Some were harmless and genuinely funny, comparing Williams to Lieutenant Dan, Paul Pierce and people who have just stepped on a Lego. However, other posts were less playful, questioning his toughness and suggesting that his reaction was excessive or “performative.” The basic joke kept circling back to the same idea: if the injury wasn’t as serious as it initially looked, then perhaps his emotional response was somehow inappropriate. NFL analysts and former players joined the conversation as well. Some questioned the intensity of Williams’ reaction and what it supposedly said about his toughness, and even his ‘manhood’. Others pushed back on the idea that we can watch someone experience an injury and then, after the fact, decide which emotions were justified: how much pain was acceptable, how much fear was understandable, or how much frustration a “tough” player should be allowed to show.
Kyle Brandt addressed the conversation on Good Morning Football, acknowledging that he understood why some people saw Williams’ reaction as over the top. But he questioned why that had to become a measure of toughness in the first place. He said he would rather see more quarterbacks take the cart, show emotion, and let people see what they are actually experiencing than feel pressured to hide it. Perhaps that is what makes this whole episode so revealing. Williams was experiencing an injury in real time. He didn’t know yet how serious it was. He didn’t know whether his season was over. He didn’t know what the next few weeks would look like. Fear, pain, frustration and disappointment can all exist in that uncertainty. Yet, before we knew exactly what his injury was, thousands of people were already evaluating whether his emotional response was acceptable.
Dart and Williams, in very different ways, illustrate the same cultural tension. One athlete wants to get back on the field; another becomes visibly emotional when he cannot. One risks being seen as someone who should perhaps have protected himself; the other risks being seen as someone who should perhaps have controlled himself. We celebrate the player who gets up without showing pain. We admire the athlete who insists on returning to the game. But we can just as quickly criticize the athlete who returns too soon or the athlete whose emotions are too visible. The standard keeps moving, but the underlying message can remain remarkably consistent: show us that you’re tough, but don’t show us too much of what it costs you to be tough.
This is where perfectionistic self-presentation becomes so interesting. The athlete isn’t simply being asked to perform; they are being asked to manage the image of the person who performs. Pain becomes something to conceal. Fear becomes something to regulate out of sight. Disappointment becomes something to process privately. Vulnerability can become a reputational risk.
Interestingly, this is not simply an NFL problem. In fact, the NFL itself increasingly recognizes the importance of changing how athletes think and talk about mental health. The league has developed a formal mental-health infrastructure with the NFL Players Association, including its Comprehensive Mental Health and Wellness Committee, team behavioural-health clinicians, NFL Total Wellness and the NFL Life Line. Its It Takes All of Us campaign has featured players talking publicly about depression, anxiety, therapy and emotional wellbeing. The Indianapolis Colts’ Kicking the Stigma initiative has similarly used player stories and public education to challenge the idea that seeking help is a sign of weakness.
That progress matters. I don’t think it is fair, or particularly useful, to call this hypocrisy. Many people inside football are clearly working to change a culture that they themselves experienced. The more interesting problem is that these messages now exist alongside another set of messages that athletes receive constantly, often without anyone explicitly saying them: don’t look weak, don’t let people see you hurting, get back up, play through it, control your emotions.
The young athlete watching all of this doesn’t necessarily experience those messages as separate. They see the commercial telling them that it is okay to talk about mental health. They see a player discussing therapy. They see another player praised for returning to a game while injured. They see Caleb Williams crying after being carted off the field, followed almost immediately by memes and commentary about whether his reaction was “tough” enough. They see Jaxson Dart wanting to get back onto the field. They hear analysts debate what these moments say about an athlete’s character.
They absorb all of it.
This is where I think the perfectionism literature gives us something important to consider. We can tell athletes, “You don’t have to be perfect”, while simultaneously communicating very specific expectations about what a successful athlete is supposed to look like: strong, composed, fearless, resilient, in control. For an athlete vulnerable to perfectionistic self-presentation, those expectations can become more than ideals. They can become rules about what is safe to show other people. The issue isn’t simply “I need to perform well”. It becomes “I need other people to see me as the kind of person who performs well”. And once that image includes toughness, vulnerability itself can begin to feel like a failure.
This doesn’t mean that every athlete who plays through pain is a perfectionist, or that every emotional athlete is somehow healthier. That would be another oversimplification. High standards, ambition, and persistence can be adaptive. What matters is how those standards are experienced, when they become excessive, and the social climate in which they develop. A young athlete can want desperately to excel without believing that a mistake makes them a failure. The psychological difficulty arises when performance becomes entangled with worth, or when maintaining a particular image becomes a goal in and of itself.
That is also why we need to be careful about how we talk about emotional control in sport. Athletes absolutely need to regulate emotion. They need to recover after mistakes, manage frustration, tolerate anxiety, and perform when the stakes are high. But regulating emotion is not the same thing as eliminating it. There is a difference between “I am disappointed, and I can still move forward” and “I can’t let anyone see that I am disappointed”. There is a difference between “I am scared, and I can make a decision anyway” and “I can’t allow anyone to know that I am scared”. One is emotional regulation; the other is emotional concealment.
Even the philosophers we sometimes invoke when talking about toughness were more nuanced than our modern sports slogans. The Stoics were not simply telling people to stop feeling. Epictetus was concerned with how we respond to what happens to us, not with becoming emotionally lifeless. Moreover, Aristotle’s account of courage offers an even more useful distinction for sport: courage is not recklessness or the willingness to confront every danger. It requires judgment. The courageous person must recognize what is worth facing and what a particular situation actually calls for.
That seems remarkably relevant to athletes. What if the courageous athlete is sometimes the one who goes back into the game, and sometimes the one who stays out? What if toughness includes the capacity to tolerate pain, but also the capacity to acknowledge it? What if resilience means being able to experience disappointment without needing to hide it?
There is a temptation to turn all of this into an argument that we need softer athletes. That is NOT the answer. We don’t need athletes who care less, compete less fiercely, or give up whenever something becomes uncomfortable. We don’t need to pathologize ambition or high standards, and we certainly shouldn’t infer an athlete’s psychological health from a single emotional moment.
What we need is a different definition of toughness.
Football will always demand sacrifice, discipline, competitiveness, and a willingness to do difficult things. A tough athlete can take a hit, shake it off, stay focused after a mistake, and keep competing when the game gets hard. We should not lose that. Those qualities are part of what makes football compelling.
But toughness isn’t the same as pretending nothing affects you.
Sometimes toughness means acknowledging that you’re hurt. Sometimes it means asking for help. Sometimes it means letting yourself be disappointed, frustrated, or afraid without treating those emotions as evidence that you’re weak…and sometimes it means crying.
That doesn’t make an athlete less tough. It means toughness isn’t measured by how little emotion you show. It’s measured by what you do when the emotion is there.
A quarterback can cry after getting hurt and still be tough. A linebacker can admit he’s scared and still make the tackle. A player can tell the trainer, “Something isn’t right,” and still be every bit as committed to his team. The point isn’t to take toughness out of football. It’s to stop confusing toughness with the absence of vulnerability.
Because the toughest thing isn’t always proving that you can take it. Sometimes it’s having the courage to say, “I’m hurt.” Sometimes it’s taking the cart. Sometimes it’s going back into the game. Sometimes it’s asking for help. Sometimes it’s letting yourself cry.
The point is that toughness shouldn’t be measured by which of those choices looks toughest from the outside. It should be about having the courage to respond honestly to what is happening, rather than making a decision simply because you feel you have something to prove.
Toughness should be a capacity, not a costume.