The Side Line
ACL. MCL. Blowout. These are words football players and coaches don’t like saying or hearing, ever.
They remind everyone associated with the game that every player (and coach, which I’ll get to in a second) has an Achilles heel, a weak point that can end a season or even a career in a split second.
Every season, NCAA and NFL coaching staffs struggle with controlling practices and preseason games to minimize dangerous contact to their star players, knowing that getting through an offseason without a major injury boils down to plain old luck.
I mention this because in the last two weeks, two famous figures in the game of football have been bitten by the blowout bug, in similar yet very different scenarios.
Tom Brady and Charlie Weis, interestingly a former pupil/teacher tandem, were both cut down in the heat of battle recently.
Both had players blocked or pushed into their knees at game speed, and neither one saw it coming.
Brady’s injury was a dark day for the Patriots and the NFL as a whole. They lost their golden boy.
Weis’ injury became an instant YouTube classic. Not going to lie, it’s pretty entertaining to watch.
The difference is simple: taking Brady off the field for an entire season is similar to a pilot jumping out of a moving plane, while Weis can hobble on the sidelines and still coach.
Odd connections aside, let’s examine the injury itself.
The tearing of a knee ligament is not difficult in a game like football, where large men crash into each other at full speed, often into joints and vital organs.
It doesn’t take anything more than an odd step or bad timing to face a snap, crackle, pop scenario and season-ending surgery.
Blowouts are football’s version of line drives to the face in baseball: they can happen at any time, and players prefer to not talk about them. They are simply a harsh reality of the game.
A reality which a certain quarterback and portly Notre Dame coach are dealing with right now.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Sep 19 2008. Filed under Sports.
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