As noted earlier this week, Chris Borland's decision to hang it up should get our attention. It should amplify the conversation about brain trauma and its threat to the very existence of football itself.
That's part of the point Matt Hayes was making in this column visiting with Bret Bielema. But not all of it.
"We have an obligation to do what's right," he says, his voice getting stronger. "I can't understand how some guys can't see that."
That's right, Bret Bielema is getting heated again about injuries in the game. Watching one of his favorite players - a young man he recruited and developed at Wisconsin - cut short his career for fear of injury does that to a coach.
You laugh and take your shots at Bielema and his stance against up-tempo offenses that have overtaken the game, or you can open your mind to listen.
You can talk about how Mr. Crawl Ball with his power run offense at Arkansas is simply looking for an advantage and using injury scare tactics to rig the system, or you can take a deep breath and embrace reason:
The more times a 245-pound linebacker and a 230-pound tailback - in the prime of their athletic lives - meet on the field in a violent collision, the more chance there is for destructive injury.
The more plays run in the hurry-up, no-huddle offense, the more chances there are for destructive injury. The more injuries there are, the more 24-year-old players like Borland, who Bielema says has a passion for the game like few he has ever coached, up and walk away from it all.
It's one thing to say we need to do everything we can to protect these kids. It's a leap over a vast chasm to say that more plays means more concussions.
It is just not that simple, folks. And it's quite interesting that Borland played college and pro ball for teams that were smashmouth and physical throwbacks to a positively brutal era.
It is absolutely true that there are some staggering collisions taking place today. Offensive football is largely a space game, introducing faster players who have more space in which to run before they collide.
But one of our main problems today is forgetting about yesterday ... or, more precisely, yester-decade.
If you want to gain some context in this issue, you absolutely must go back and watch some of the games in the 1980s and 1990s. They were not running 80 and 90 plays per game back then, but you'd better believe they were totaling more violent collisions per play.
Let's take the wars between Alabama and Florida in the 1990s. Alabama was regarded as meat-and-potatoes and Florida was regarded as flashy and finesse with Steve Spurrier's Fun 'N' Gun.
But a lot of time has passed since then. Offensive football, and offensive innovation, moves at a breathtaking speed. If you flip on one of those aforementioned SEC title games and take a close look at Florida, they are just as physical and punishing (and perhaps more) as any of the supposed old-school teams of today.
They were running I-formation, under-center, play-action football featuring huge fullbacks colliding with huge MIKE linebackers with massive percussive (and concussive) force.
Florida of those days is strikingly similar to Alabama or Wisconsin of these days. Or Beliema's Arkansas.
Let's talk about concussions. Let's talk about the safety of current players, future players. But please ... let's be rid of this flimsy argument that more plays equals more concussions.
By the way, just last summer at SEC Media Days Bielema was asked about the inaugural playoff.
"It's a great starting point. Rome wasn't built in a day."
A few Wednesday links:
-- Hey, what ever happened to Boston College's Steve Donahue?
Without any prompting, Steve Donahue directly addressed one of the most important challenges he will face as the 20th head coach in the 115-year history of the Penn men's basketball program.
"The days are over in this league where you can rely on this building and the Big 5, and it's going to take you to the NCAA tournament," he said. "This league has changed. It has changed over the last 25 years, the last 10 years and the last five years... We just cannot afford to think this is enough."
Donahue's remarks were a none-too-subtle reference to the rise of Harvard as the Ivy League's new superpower.
In addition to Tommy Amaker's recruiting skills, the Crimson have been able to use the school's unrivaled endowment; fundraising support from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and former Staples chairman Tom Stemberg; and an athletics-friendly admissions department to become an unstoppable force in ways that extend beyond the walls of Lavietes Pavilion.
-- Bill Barnwell of Grantland writes about Borland's retirement and what it means.
I can't find another player who did this in quite the same way. There are players who retired earlier than they had to because they were already struggling with injuries and had financial security, with Jim Brown and Barry Sanders as obvious examples. Some, like Willis, had a religious awakening. There have been young players who fell out of love with football, like former 49ers running back Glen Coffee and Rashard Mendenhall.
Borland hasn't suggested that he is injured or doesn't love football anymore; it's simply that the risk wasn't worth the reward of playing. Think about what that says: Football is so inherently dangerous, so obviously flawed, that the incentive of living a childhood dream after a lifetime of training and for millions of dollars isn't strong enough to continue.
The natural question, in light of Borland's announcement, has been what this means for the future of football. Is Borland's decision a watershed moment - the first player actively recognizing just how perilous football is and walking away before the prime of his career even begins? Does it hint at a future without football?
And this:
It's natural to want to pinpoint moments in time like that and extrapolate a domino effect, but I'm skeptical of that reading. The pool of young men who want to play professional football remains enormous. Michael Wilhoite, the inside linebacker who will take Borland's place in the starting lineup for San Francisco, isn't retiring. Nick Moody, Shayne Skov, and Chase Thomas, the other inside linebackers on the 49ers depth chart, aren't retiring. There are dozens of inside linebackers who will be under consideration in the upcoming draft, and there are thousands more around college football who would be in the running to be drafted behind them.
The player pool for professional football is just so enormous that it's going to take thousands of people making this same decision over several generations before the future of the game is seriously threatened. In 20 years, maybe the star linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers will be a player who wouldn't have made the NFL without hundreds of other possible football players choosing another path (or having football removed as an option by their parents). Will 49ers fans cheer him any less than they would if he had been the best possible candidate to play linebacker in America?
-- In Winston-Salem, where they are still playing football apparently, Dan Collins provides an update on the quarterback competition.
The green jersey No. 2 worn by freshman quarterback Kendall Hinton at Wake Forest's spring practices is a little darker than that worn by his competition, John Wolford.
That raises the question of whether the color signifies that Hinton is more, or less, green than expected this early in his college career.
Coach Dave Clawson said it signifies neither.
"It just signifies that the bleach works better when they wash the other green one," Clawson said. "I would not read into that other than maybe Wolford has had a little heavier dose of bleach when they washed it."
What Hinton's presence does mean, however, is that Wake Forest is better stocked at the critical position than they were in Clawson's first spring, when both Wolford and Hinton had yet to arrive and holdovers Tyler Cameron and Kevin Sousa - both since departed - were struggling to complete a pass.
-- The feds are investigating former N.C. State football player Eric Leak.
Former N.C. State football player Eric Leak is under investigation by the federal government on suspicion of Medicaid fraud.
According to a 15-page affidavit for a seizure warrant, prepared by IRS agents and filed in a United States District Court in Durham, Leak illegally obtained Medicaid funds through his mental health company, $8.7 million in a two-year span from 2012 to 2014, and then siphoned more than $200,000 to his sports management company.
Four vehicles, connected to Leak and his wife, Emily, and the use of the fraudulent Medicaid funds, were included in the seizure warrant, according to the district court documents.
One car, a 2013 Porsche Panamera worth more than $137,000, was purchased for former N.C. State basketball player C.J. Leslie, according to the court document.
Leak, 37, a receiver on the Wolfpack football team from 1997 to 2000, had gotten Leslie in trouble with the NCAA in 2011 for providing Leslie with $410 of impermissible benefits before Leslie's sophomore season at N.C. State.
Oh my.
-- In Athens, the Doggies open the post-Bobo era.
Nick Chubb smiled Tuesday night when asked the critical question: After one spring practice, had he detected how Brian Schottenheimer was different from Mike Bobo?
"He's a lot nicer," Chubb said. "That's pretty much it. They're both great coaches."
The niceness may not last either, Chubb added.
"It's his first day," Chubb said. "It'll come."
Georgia opened the post-Bobo era Tuesday, and the offensive side of the field seemed much quieter without the former coordinator, who's now the head coach at Colorado State. His replacement, Schottenheimer, had a more low-key approach, at least during Tuesday's practice.
During the media viewing period, the former NFL offensive coordinator spent some of the time squatting down stoically, in contrast to Bobo's active and verbose style.
But that's just a style difference, players said. Otherwise, continuity for Georgia's high-scoring offense remains the keyword.
"I don't think anybody's really detecting any differences," offensive tackle Kolton Houston said. "We still have the same expectation, the same pro-style offense. So the same thing: We're gonna try to establish the run and throw off that."
-- And here's the story from the Grand Strand last night as Clemson baseball lost for the seventh time in nine games since the supposedly breakthrough series win over South Carolina.
From circling the calendar to circling the drain. Just astounding.
"We've been battling and we'll continue to battle. That's just what we do. It's just unfortunate we've had to battle from behind and that's kind of been the story I think in the last week in a half," said Clemson coach Jack Leggett, whose team has lost six of its last seven games. "We've been kind of battling from behind. It makes it difficult on us, but these guys will keep on working hard, we'll keep on battling, we've still got a lot of baseball to be played."
It marked the Chants' first win over Clemson since the 2012 regular-season and just their third in the last 15 meetings.
"I've been dreaming of doing that since I was 10 years old," Young said. "It's a great feeling to whip up on them. We've just got to keep climbing up."
Parrett finished 2-for-4 with four RBIs and two runs scored, Young was 2-for-5 with two RBIs and a run, junior Anthony Marks was 2-for-3 with a run and Chadwick was 1-for-3 with his homer.
LW
This post was edited on 3/18 9:17 AM by Larry_Williams
