Dan Wolken, a columnist at USA Today, lives in Atlanta and takes advantage of his close proximity to Clemson by making fairly regular visits here for stories.
A couple years ago he wrote a fantastic feature on Dabo Swinney, and now he produces a must-read profile on Deshaun Watson.
The money quote, without a doubt, is Deshaun's appreciation for what it means to beat South Carolina.
"Watching Clemson lose five straight times to South Carolina, playing in that game was something I wanted to do," Watson said.
"My high school coach was a big Clemson fan and I told him, as long as I'm the starting quarterback here, I'm not going to lose to South Carolina. It's a big rivalry. Who wouldn't want to play in that game? It was a family decision. They put it on me, and it's what I wanted to do. Of course people say I have a future down the road (to protect), but I live in the moment and that moment was then and I wanted to play."
As if No. 4 wasn't already beloved enough in these parts? At this point the kid could probably run for office and win in a landslide.
More good detail here:
Unbeknownst to Clemson or Watson, his left ACL was already partially torn when he entered college, quite possibly related to an injury suffered his senior year of high school that was characterized as an MCL sprain.
That injury became apparent on Nov. 15 when Watson returned to the starting lineup at Georgia Tech. After missing three games because of a broken bone in one of his fingers, Watson looked very much like his old self in the first quarter. But on the third series, just after getting Clemson in position to take a 10-0 lead, Watson finished a rather routine run for a first down and didn't immediately get back up.
"My knee felt fine that day," Watson said. "I was trying to find a hole and planted and my knee just gave out. Honestly, I was thinking a lot of things. At first, just, 'Will I be able to come back?' They took me to the locker room and did the test and they told me I was done for the day. It was hard to see myself go down like that after being out four games and preparing myself for this moment and having to go out again."
When Watson got the MRI results the next day, it was diagnosed as an LCL sprain – not as bad as he feared. But doctors also saw the pre-existing ACL defect and told him it was going to tear at some point and would need to be fixed, probably sooner rather than later.
"I was presented with a scenario of, it's OK for him to play but we don't know how long this thing is going to hold up," Swinney said. "It may be two more years. We just didn't know."
One pervasive theory in the two weeks leading up to the South Carolina game was that Swinney was orchestrating a giant smokescreen and that Watson was just fine. We said at the time we thought Swinney was being completely genuine in his public progress reports leading up to the game, and that account is confirmed in hindsight:
Deshaun Watson's family back home in Gainesville, Ga., wanted him to play. His doctor said they could brace up his left knee, which no longer had a functional anterior cruciate ligament, and get him on the field without risk of long-term damage.
Still, Swinney was skeptical about what Watson could do.
"I was like, 'You're going to have to prove to me during the week that you can, No. 1, protect yourself and do what we need you to do to win," Swinney said.
"We can't just put a guy out there who can't protect himself. After Wednesday's practice, I was just blown away, then he had another great day on Thursday and then tore it up in the ballgame. It was incredible how he played. It just kind of furthers the lore of Deshaun Watson."
A few Monday links:
-- Really good story in Vanity Fair on what really happened between ESPN and Bill Simmons.
And a sensible conclusion that casts some blame on both parties:
In the end, one could say with minimal originality, but considerable accuracy, that Bill Simmons simply flew too close to the sun. He miscalculated how much value ESPN put on him and on his unique abilities and talents. He might also have forgotten a cardinal company rule that remains sacred whether it’s ESPN’s Old Guard talking or its new one: Nobody, but nobody, can be bigger than those four initials.
On the other hand, it could be said that Bristol forgot a kind of cardinal rule itself: In an era where fans can get not just scores but highlights, and a ton more, on their smart phones, distinctive and original content is the way to engage and hold onto an audience plopped in front of big 99-inch screens. That content often comes with a big price tag—and with a requirement that the people with unique abilities and talent who create it be treated like the stars you’ve paid for.
-- And at Grantland, a creation of the aforementioned parties, a humorous look at 10 college sports proposals that are less insane than freshman ineligibility.
10. Make Seniors Ineligible
To its credit, the NCAA is the first to remind us that college athletes seldom develop into professional athletes.
But this reality raises an important question: To adequately prepare for the demands of the workplace, shouldn’t college athletes stop playing sports after their junior year? You know, to ensure real-world readiness? I think we all know that the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.” The ball, as they say, is firmly in Jim Delany’s court.
-- The ACC Network is one of many topics on the table this week's spring meetings in Amelia Island.
Though it has a syndication deal that brings it into homes up and down the eastern U.S., the ACC is for all intents and purposes the only Power Five conference without a standalone cable channel. That means it is potentially losing out on major bucks.
The SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 have eponymous networks, and Big 12 fans are served in part by The Longhorn Network. The SEC Network, according to data procured by Fox Sports, brings in $547.3 million a year in revenue. That’s fifth among any cable sports network (behind only ESPN, NFL, Fox Sports 1 and ESPN2).
Clearly, the ACC wouldn’t immediately challenge the SEC (or Big Ten, which reportedly brings in around $290 million), but its continued negotiations with ESPN on a dedicated channel are of major interest.
-- In Orlando, Mike Bianchi says Florida State has become the NFL's favorite team.
"My theory is this," Fisher told me earlier this week. "If a young man wants to be a business major, he takes business classes. If he wants to be an education major, he takes education classes. If he wants to be a criminology major, he takes a criminology classes. A lot of guys that get to our level, they want to get an education ... and they also want to play in NFL. It's our job to present what it's going to be like (in the NFL) and put them in the best possible position to succeed with offensive schemes, defensive schemes ... how we practice, how we think, how we work in the offseason."
While many other college coaches have gone to the no-huddle, spread offense with the quarterback taking snaps almost exclusively in the shotgun, Fisher runs more conventional pro-style schemes. His quarterbacks know how to read defenses and set protections; his receivers know how to alter their routes based on defensive coverages; his offensive linemen make their own calls at the line of scrimmages; his defenses have the same zone-blitz packages that NFL teams run.
-- And in New York Times Magazine, what Tom Brady told this writer during Deflategate ... and what he didn't.
I spoke with Brady that Wednesday, ostensibly to go over some final fact-checking inquiries for the article, but there was now a more urgent matter at hand. I had, to that point, found Brady in person to be every bit the commanding presence he projected on the field: thoughtful, engaging and even audacious at times. But suddenly the confident quarterback was displaying an uncharacteristic shakiness — the verbal equivalent of happy feet. He was, to use another quarterback term, scrambling (not one of his best gifts on the field). Chris Mortensen of ESPN had reported the night before that 11 of the 12 balls that the Patriots used were found to have been inflated significantly less than what the league required. Brady told me he was immersed in studying film of the Seahawks. He said he was fully in the mode of “ignore the noise,” a favorite mantra of his head coach, Bill Belichick. The noise included my inquiries about the air pressure of pigskins. “I’ve got so many things to focus on in the next 10 days,” he told me. “And this is not one of them.”
As we now know, Brady was able to abandon that focus long enough in those days to spend nearly an hour over the course of six phone conversations talking to a Patriots employee who has since been closely tied to the then-spiraling scandal. We know this thanks to the N.F.L.’s release this Wednesday of Ted Wells’s clinically titled “Investigative Report Concerning Footballs Used During the A.F.C. Championship Game on Jan. 18, 2015.” Were Brady and the Patriots employee, John Jastremski, conspiring to get their stories straight? Were they orchestrating a cover-up of some kind? Or was Brady simply comforting a scared friend and co-worker during a bizarre media storm? The report concluded that it was “more probable than not that Brady was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities.”
In our phone conversation, I asked Brady whether he preferred a harder, fully inflated football or a softer, less inflated one. The question came out sounding weird (“Do you prefer a hard ball or a soft ball?”), and Brady laughed. But when he eventually answered, he took a distinctly indirect route to the ball. “I get a chance to pick ’em out every week,” he said of the footballs. His evasive construction jumped out at me, as someone who normally covers politics. It was a very Washington construction. And why was Brady answering in the present tense when I was asking specifically about something that happened three days ago?
-- And for today's musical selection, we bring you two versions of "Never Been to Spain;" one from Waylon, the other from Chris Robinson Brotherhood.
LW
