The NRL's head of football, Todd Greenberg, later said: "The health and safety of our players is of paramount importance to us. We deal with every case on its merits."
Now, if that's so, why wasn't Burgess given a head check straight away? Greenberg told both teams the new NRL focus on concussions would be intensified for the final.
Fines of up to $22,000 have been levied during the season. The NRL can issue much harsher penalties for breaches during the grand final, including de-registering medical staff or competition points docked the following season.
Yet NRL chief medical officer Ron Muratore told the Telegraph the NRL believed it was not the governing body's place to dictate to clubs when players should be taken off for non-concussive injuries.
"The NRL does not get involved with acute management," Muratore said. "Obviously we give [club doctors] guidelines on issues such as concussion but it's not our position to say, 'you've got to take this bloke or that bloke off'. That would be interfering with the doctors' clinical judgement."
That would also ignore the issue.
Until there is some direct and meaningful control, suspicions will continue to mount that forces within the game are more interested in the health of the occasion than the health of the player. The NRL's decision on the Burgess incident will be interesting.
Some of us believe true intervention in concussive injuries won't come until someone takes out a hefty legal action, with an enormous bill, as has happened in the NFL in the US. They have agreed to pay at least US$765 million over 65 years, and more if needed, to compensate brain injuries linked to concussions.
The settlement covers about 20,000 former players, unless they pursue individual lawsuits against the NFL (so far, nine are). Prediction: it'll take something like that before league and other contact sports take real action.
Rugby isn't perfect but has gone a lot further down the road than league. Football isn't blameless, as made obvious by former US football player Taylor Twellman's piece in the Guardian after Chelsea goalkeeper Thibault Courtois was laid out in a collision during last weekend's match against Arsenal.
"Courtois suffered what at first appeared to be a serious head injury and was allowed to play on," Twellman wrote. "I suffered seven concussions between the ages of 10 and 28, but it was the last one that ended my career because I was not properly assessed. I continued to play the rest of that game and carried on for the next eight weeks.
"My career was over after that. I developed the full spectrum of post-concussion symptoms, from headaches to nausea to fatigue. I could not work out, or even walk too far, because my heart rate would go through the roof. For years, I could not read a book or watch a whole movie ... ignoring a head injury can have even more serious consequences. Second-impact syndrome occurs when a person experiences a second concussion before the symptoms of the first one have fully resolved. It leads to rapid swelling of the brain. Athletes have died from this. It's not a matter of missing games, it is fatal."
Twellman says medical advice insists a minimum of seven minutes is needed to assess a concussion - but many players return to the field faster. Fifa have ruled their checks will be only three minutes long. Courtois was cleared to carry on after about a minute.
Maybe the answer is for suspected concussion victims to miss that seven-minute period to make certain they are not affected. Better to lose time in the middle than lose your mind. Or $765 million.
