(05-19-2024, 10:00 AM)Goose Wrote: (05-19-2024, 09:48 AM)dabigv13 Wrote: Do people here really believe Bryce Love's lack of NFL success was because of college injuries?
Undoubtedly his lack of the speed he had before he got hurt was a major factor in his lack of success in the NFL. One might say that he was too small anyway to make it in the NFL, but we will never know.
Quote:I doubt very much that he regrets playing in his senior season. Most athletes, even ones that aren't high level ones like Bryce Love, want to play if they are physically able to.
Agree that most players will play if the are physically able. Unknowable whether that "extra effort" prevented his full recovery from injury. It may be that he knew that if he didn't play, the NFL wouldn't want him from the beginning. He at least got a shot. It may be that in hindsight he would do it differently, but counterfactual speculation is just that. He may or may not "regret" it now, but certainly he was all in at the time.
Very few people have the superhuman durability required to play in the NFL, especially at the running back position.
Have you seen the hits CMac takes over the course a season? He takes at least a dozen bone crushing hits right on his head that you’d think would end a college player’s career, and he pops up, and refuses to even be examined. I wondered whether the Super Bowl fumble was due to being pumped up with so many pain killers he wasn’t able to feel his arm.
You can’t take one or two more college games — Pac 12 ones at that (not playoff games against the SEC) — and think a person would’ve had a long, healthy nfl career had he not played in those two pac 12 college games.
Concussions are different. We know it’s wrong to put a kid back in a game after they’ve suffered a concussion, and even though there’s evidence of college coaches trying to get around this rule, as far as I know, Shaw was excellent about this.
By chance, yes, I will grant that if Love had been pulled from that final big game a few plays earlier, he may not have finished the season injured, and he may have been drafted earlier and may have gotten more guaranteed money. But that to me is just bad luck timing. You can point to any player’s injury ever and say if the coach hadn’t put them in for that one particular play, then the player wouldn’t have been injured.
The evidence is that Love wouldn’t have had a long NFL career whether he had played in that big game or not. I wish he could have. I always thought he was an amazing person and if there was anything possible that he could have influenced — in terms of hard work, dedication, or character — he did it. It just wasn’t going to be. I wish he’d gotten more guaranteed money. I wish him the best. He signed items for my son and me after the spring scrimmage, and from what I saw, he was a fantastic person and a model student athlete.
The injury makes me sad, but also, he is a Stanford graduate, with an amazing background and an incredible community of people who want to see him succeed. Who is to say he does not have a great life ahead of him?
