ALLEN PARK, Mich. – Detroit Lions cornerback Rashean Mathis said he has not made a decision on whether he will play football in 2016 after being placed on injured reserve with a concussion on Saturday.

“It’s a decision that we’ll make down the road,” Mathis said. “Family, organization, the whole shebang. I’m here now and it’s all about now. Next year will take care of itself and we’ll see then.”

Mathis said the concussion and being placed on injured reserve have led him to think about his future – but it was also something he thought about before he even decided to come back this season. He signed a two-year deal to return to the Lions earlier this year.

Mathis was placed on injured reserve Saturday after having symptoms of his concussion – headaches, essentially – remain with him for weeks after he suffered it in Week 7 against Minnesota. At the time against the Vikings, he was cleared through testing on the sidelines but headaches began showing up Thursday morning.

They persisted long enough to keep him out of the Week 8 game against Kansas City and then when the Lions returned to the United States following the loss to the Chiefs, Mathis went to an independent neurologist who put him in concussion protocol. Almost two weeks later, he had not yet been cleared to play, so the franchise and Mathis decided to shut him down for the year.

“It was a conversation that I had with the heads of the team and so it was like, ‘OK, well, what do we do from here?’ “ Mathis said. “I don’t know if they would want me to say this, but I’m a grown man and Coach gives us free will to speak. I don’t think it would have looked well on the organization or my part, me as a man, for me going back out there and something worse happened and then the organization and my family would have to answer questions about that and not knowing.

“If I’m not experiencing any symptoms now or in the future? Great. We made the right call. And I could have technically still played but if I went back out there and something worse happened, oh wow, what have they done? You know. That’s how you have to think about and me as a professional, that’s how I think about it as well.”

The 35-year-old Mathis said his headaches have gone away and that while he’s “disappointed” to have his season end, he understands the reality of why it happened. Mathis said he is going to stick around Detroit through the rest of the season to work with his teammates.

Mathis’ biggest issue came with how his concussion was covered. He saw headlines and tweets linking his being placed on injured reserve to a brain injury. While he knows that the terminology is correct, the combination of the two instead of the word concussion caused many calls from his family and friends, thinking something more dire had occurred than the concussion.

It also led to him taking to Twitter from his private account to explain what was going on with him.

“If we’re labeling all concussions brain injuries, then OK, let’s do that. And then the public will respond as such,” Mathis said. “Like I said, I never read an article when someone had a concussion and then it was termed a brain injury, but then I haven’t read every article, either. So that’s why I chose to respond to it. Just because it happened to me, I’m not saying it is not serious.

“I have responded and did articles on concussions and I do think they are serious and we should treat them as such and I think the organization, the Lions organization, has done that. I just wanted to publicly say that it’s a concussion [and it] is technically a brain injury but I’m not going brain dead. And that’s for my family and friends and the fans who were concerned as well.”