Posted by Will Brinson

The NFL Head, Neck and Spine committee announced Friday the new standardized sideline concussion assessment protocol that team medical personnel will use during the 2011 season.

A combination of a symptom checklist, a limited neurologic examination including a cognitive evaluation, and a balance assessment, the new protocol is designed to better evaluate players who may have suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), the fancy -- and much scarier -- medical term for a concussion.

"This tool provides a standardized format for evaluating head injury that medical staff can use on the sideline," said Dr. Margot Putukian, member of NFL Head, Neck and Spine Committee and chair of the Return-to-Play Subcommittee. "It incorporates the most important aspects of a focused exam, so that injury is identified, and athletes with concussion and more serious head and spine injury can be removed from play."

Essentially, the protocol will use a preseason test as a baseline and determine whether there's a "decline in function" from a player who suffered an injury on the field of play.

Clearly, this is good news for people who are concerned about player safety in the NFL (and, really, that should be everyone), but the announcement is a little disturbing in that, as noted in the press release, "a standardized protocol did not exist."

Teams previously used some sort of combination of the new protocol to determine if a player was sufficiently healthy to play, which means that there wasn't any proper objective safety measure to keep teams from allowing injured players to return to the field.

But this is still a good step -- there's definitely more that the NFL can do to improve the quality of their concussion testing, but getting a standard protocol in place is a pretty good start.

For more NFL news, rumors and analysis, follow @cbssportsnfl on Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed.