The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football
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SEASON-ENDING INJURIES BY CONFERENCE IN THE 2012–13 SEASON
ACC: 31
Big East: 22
Big Ten: 38
Big 12: 31
Conference USA: 24
Independents: 15
Mountain West: 31
Pac-12: 44
SEC: 46
Of the 282 season-ending injuries, 190, or 68 percent, were lower-body injuries. The 2012 data come as the most recently released NCAA figures, which tracked injuries between 2004–5 and 2008–9, found that 50 percent of all football injuries, both season ending and not season ending, were lower-body injuries. The 93 knee injuries alone made up almost one-third of the season-ending injuries in 2012.
TOP FIVE SEASON-ENDING INJURIES IN 2012
1. Knee, 93
2. Shoulder, 31
3. ACL, 29
4. Leg, 27
5. Ankle, 19
Even with nearly three hundred season-ending injuries in 2012, there were undoubtedly far more, given the reluctance to release such information. For instance, conferences such as the Pac-12 do not mandate their members file NFL-style injury reports that list player injuries in various categories such as “probable,” “doubtful” and “out.” In the Pac-12, at least five programs—Oregon, Stanford, USC, Washington and Washington State—declined specific comment on injuries, sparking considerable controversy throughout the conference in 2012. (This happened while California became the first state to mandate financial protections for student-athletes at Cal, Stanford, UCLA and USC who suffer career-ending injuries.)
“It’s just a competitive disadvantage for us when other teams don’t and we do, so that’s going to be the road we take,” said Washington’s head coach, Steve Sarkisian, in September 2012, referring to his decision not to report or comment on injuries.
Overall, while the SEC accounted for half of the teams in the final top ten poll, the conference also suffered the most season-ending injuries in 2012—with forty-six. (Alabama would lead the conference with six season-ending injuries in 2012.) The positions with the most season-ending injuries in college football’s premier conference came at running back and offensive line, reflecting the SEC’s physical, ground-and-pound schemes. On average, SEC teams lost at least one running back or offensive lineman in 2012. The Pac-12 was just off the pace with forty-four season-ending injuries, with injuries to defensive linemen and defensive backs leading the way.
Some programs in particular were challenged by losses of big-time talent at various points of the season. TCU running back Waymon James went down with a left knee injury in the second game of the season, a significant blow to the Horned Frogs’ attack. Texas’s standout defensive end Jackson Jeffcoat ruptured his right pectoral muscle during the Red River Rivalry against Oklahoma in October 2012. Tailback Fitz Toussaint of Michigan needed surgery after he took a serious hit to his left leg against Iowa in November 2012.
Arguably, the most significant discovery of the 2012 data could be called the October Surprise. It indicated—in a significant way—that if teams can physically survive their October slate of games, the odds of having a player go down with a season-ending injury are lowered considerably. Just 20 percent of reported season-ending injuries in 2012 came after October. But in October alone, there were ninety-eight season-ending injuries. That works out to 35 percent of all season-ending injuries for 2012.
MONTH-BY-MONTH INJURY BREAKDOWN IN 2012
August: 67
September: 62
October: 98
November: 48
December: 7
Jim Thornton is the president of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association and the head athletic trainer at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. He said that the sharp uptick in October injuries was likely the result of fatigue and teams not adjusting their conditioning programs as the season wore on.
“Football is a taxing sport that is a great sport, but by October you have to realize that they have been through spring conditioning, summer conditioning, camp and a season that has hitting, collisions, et cetera, associated with it and they get tired,” Thornton said. “Subsequent to all this, the conditioning they get sometimes is not focused on what will prevent these injuries; rather, it is focused only on overall strength and getting ‘big.’ ”
He added, “There has to be a paradigm shift that is specific to prevention and performance enhancement rather than just throwing weights around. The programs that are not focusing on these concepts are most likely the ones that have a higher incidence of injuries.”
Among the eight BCS conferences and the independents, Maryland suffered the most season-ending injuries in 2012—ten. At one point the Terps lost all four of their quarterbacks to season-ending injuries, forcing them to use a freshman linebacker under center to finish out the season.
CONFERENCE LEADERS FOR MOST SEASON-ENDING INJURIES IN 2012
ACC: Maryland, 10
Big East: Pittsburgh, 6
Big Ten: Wisconsin, 7
Big 12: Oklahoma, 8
Conference USA: Rice, 8
Independents: BYU and Notre Dame, 5
Mountain West: Hawaii, 8
Pac-12: Arizona, 7
SEC: Alabama, 6
The most peculiar case of injuries may well belong to Rice. Starting off 2-6, the Owls reeled off four straight wins to finish 6-6 and become bowl eligible for the first time since 1961. To cap it off, the Owls won their bowl game against Air Force.
“We research every injury to our players,” said Dave Bailiff, the Owls head coach. “Our medical staff, strength coaches and our coaching staff look at it, and we try to do our due diligence to determine if there was some way to avoid the same thing happening in the future. We’ve not had a rash of one specific kind of injury, and some of the injuries that have hit us hard in the past have come on noncontact drills.
“We do our best to keep every player as physically prepared to play as possible, but injuries are always going to be a by-product of this game.”
Lying on his back at Williams-Brice Stadium last October, Marcus Lattimore wanted—and needed—to know his fate from the South Carolina trainers. He had to hear it for himself.
“I asked them right there, ‘Am I done?’ ” the South Carolina running back recalled. “And they told me, ‘Yeah, you’re done.’ ”
Lattimore knew the feeling. He had torn the ACL in his left knee the year before reemerging as one of college football’s premier running backs. His thirty-eight career rushing touchdowns topped the all-time list at South Carolina. The junior had also reestablished himself as the No. 1 running back on most scouts’ big boards heading into the 2013 NFL draft.
But now it was all in jeopardy.
On October 27, 2012, No. 13 South Carolina held a 21–14 second-quarter lead over its SEC East rival Tennessee. Lattimore, who ran for nearly six yards a carry against the Volunteers, led the Gamecocks offense, highlighted by a twenty-eight-yard touchdown run in the second quarter. The performance had been a return to form for Lattimore, who had accounted for just forty-eight yards on sixteen carries in consecutive losses to LSU and Florida.
He had burst onto the national scene in 2010, earning National Freshman of the Year honors after running for 1,197 yards and seventeen touchdowns, helping turn the Gamecocks into a force in the SEC and nationally pushing South Carolina to a No. 2 ranking before back-to-back losses to LSU and Florida.
With 4:55 left in the first half against Tennessee, the Gamecocks were at their own twenty-five-yard line, facing second and ten. South Carolina had called a power running play to the left.
“It’s one of my favorite plays, actually,” said Lattimore.
As the play unfolded, Lattimore missed an open lane to the inside, so he bounced it outside. Tennessee defensive back Eric Gordon hit Lattimore with his helmet on the inside of Lattimore’s right knee. Lattimore went down as if he’d been shot.
“Guy came out of nowhere,” Lattimore said. “It kind of felt like it was a drea
m because of how it happened. I didn’t even really feel it happen.”
Lying on the turf, Lattimore caught a glimpse of his right knee—then went into shock. “I had never seen anything like it,” he later said. In that netherworld, he said, he thought about his future, about whether or not he should even move. He remembered placing his hands over his face.
“All I could do was pray,” Lattimore said. “Pray that everything was going to be okay.”
The 80,250 fans inside Williams-Brice Stadium suddenly fell silent.
“Oh no,” said ESPN analyst Brian Griese.
By now five trainers and three teammates had surrounded Lattimore on the field. It was clear the knee was at the very least dislocated. Behind a human curtain, the trainers told him to stay calm. The knee was popped back in place, Lattimore experiencing a feral, almost apocalyptic kind of pain. About five minutes passed. With a towel on his head and tears streaming down his face, Lattimore was ever so carefully helped to his feet and onto the cart. The entire stadium stood and applauded. Both South Carolina and Tennessee cleared their sidelines as players from both sides gathered around Lattimore. The ultimate show of respect.
Right before the cart eased off the field, South Carolina tight end Rory Anderson hugged his teammate and kissed the white Gatorade towel over Lattimore’s head. The home crowd gave Lattimore one last roar as he exited a college football field for the final time.
Towel on his head, faced buried in his hands, Lattimore cried his way into the tunnel, where his mother, Yolanda Smith, was waiting. They cried together as Marcus’s father looked on.
“It’s over,” said Marcus. His NFL dream, it seemed, had died.
In his postgame press conference following South Carolina’s 38–35 win, Steve Spurrier chose his words carefully. There was no need to belabor the horror of what had occurred. He lauded Lattimore as the most popular player in team history. He called the injury “severe.”
The subsequent medical exam confirmed everyone’s fears: Lattimore had torn the right ACL, detached both the MCL and the PCL and dislocated his knee.
The outpouring of support for Lattimore was immediate and overwhelming. Lattimore received letters from as far away as California and Hawaii. Two days after the game Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a fierce Clemson fan, declared Lattimore’s twenty-first birthday, October 29, 2012, to be Marcus Lattimore Day. “[My husband] and I ask every South Carolinian to join our family as we lift up in prayer Marcus Lattimore and his mother Yolanda Smith during this challenging time,” the Republican governor said. “He has been more than just a Carolina football player—he is a great role model for our state.”
As soon as he saw the hit on Lattimore, Dr. James Andrews figured the injury would be significant. The go-to surgeon for knee, arm and shoulder injuries, Andrews knew Lattimore’s ligaments had almost certainly been torn and the knee dislocated. On November 2, 2012, Andrews, a South Carolina team consultant, operated on Lattimore. He was joined by the esteemed physicians Jeffrey Guy and Lyle Cain. In the operating room the doctors found—just as Andrews suspected—that Lattimore’s ligaments were torn. The good news was there was no nerve damage. After reattaching the MCL and the PCL, the group repaired Lattimore’s ACL with a patella tendon. Given the explosive damage, the surgery went better than expected.
Meanwhile, Lattimore had been thinking. Hard. After he had suffered the torn ACL in his left knee in an October 2011 game against Mississippi State, Lattimore and his family had taken out a $1.7 million insurance policy, the number based on what round in the NFL draft Lattimore figured to be selected. The policy cost the family between $5,000 and $15,000. They could claim the $1.7 million if Marcus could not play football again. Following the horrific scene against Tennessee, cashing in on the insurance policy had become a real possibility. Doctors put Lattimore’s initial timetable for recovery between twelve and fifteen months, meaning there was a good chance he would not play a single down in 2013.
With his future in doubt, Lattimore knew one thing for sure: his dream could not wait. On December 12, 2012, a little more than a month after the surgery, he declared for the NFL draft.
“The main thing I was thinking about was, what if it happened again and I came back to college?” he said. “I was thinking that I’d rather not get hurt at all, but if it was to happen again or anything was to happen again, I’d rather it happen at the next level.”
Even when a running back has two good knees coming out of college, predicting his long-term health is risky business; it’s far and away the most disposable position in sports, with an average NFL life span of about two and a half years. In parts of three seasons at South Carolina the junior running back had already racked up 629 plays from scrimmage (accounting for 3,444 yards) and two torn ACLs. His body had been battered. His NFL future appeared anything but bright.
If Lattimore was looking for hope—and he most certainly was—he found it in the story of former University of Miami running back Willis McGahee. On January 3, 2003, McGahee took a screen pass in the fourth quarter of the BCS National Championship game when Ohio State safety Will Allen leaned his shoulder into McGahee’s left knee. Right before that hit, like Lattimore, McGahee was considered the top running back on NFL draft boards. After the hit he was staring at a torn ACL, PCL and MCL. Faced with a similar decision on insurance, McGahee decided not to cash in the $2.5 million insurance policy. Instead, he declared for the NFL draft and, against all odds, worked his way back into the first round despite missing the entire 2003 season. Nine NFL seasons later, McGahee had more than eight thousand yards rushing and sixty-eight total touchdowns.
In his darkest hours Lattimore reached out to McGahee.
“He mainly told me to just keep family close right now,” said Lattimore. “That was the main thing he drilled in my head, because there’s going to be times that you’re going to be real down and you’ll need somebody there. He just said, ‘Keep that same focus that you’ve had before this happened, because this happened for a reason, and this situation will set you up for success in the future.’ That has stuck with me, and it’s going to stick with me. He believed it, and look what happened to him.”
Two days after declaring for the NFL draft, Lattimore moved to Pensacola, Florida, to start an intensive rehab program with Dr. Andrews’s staff at the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine. During the course of the rehab, Lattimore worked with Stephen LaPlante, who specializes in rehabilitation of cartilage injuries, ACL rehabilitation and return-to-field drills following knee injury. LaPlante also developed the protocol for the institute’s Athletic Performance Division’s Bridge Program to ensure the correct rehabilitation techniques following ACL surgery.
In Florida, Lattimore found himself living a life far removed from college. He was for all intents and purposes a pro now. Up by 8:00, at rehab by 10:00, working with LaPlante from 10:00 to 11:45. After a break, he would return at 2:00 p.m. and continue the rehab protocol—heavy on single-leg workouts—until late afternoon. In January, he started jogging in the pool to help build up strength in the right ACL. Soon, Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, recovering from ACL and LCL damage, joined Lattimore in the pool, cheering on the running back during daily sessions. Lattimore said that the single-leg squats he was doing less than ten weeks after surgery stunned his therapist and his agent, Pat Dye Jr.
“If anyone saw that injury, and I saw it, I happened to be watching the game live, it’s amazing he is where he is,” said Dye.
Physical recovery was one thing, climbing the emotional mountains something else entirely. By the end of March 2013 the South Carolina star had yet to talk with Gordon.
“In about five years, I’ll reach out to him,” Lattimore said.
“There have been bad days,” he added. “On those bad days, the one thing I think about and the one thing my girlfriend always tells me is, ‘Somebody has it worse than you do. Somewhere in the world, someone has it worse. Someone doesn’t even have
legs right now. Somebody can’t even walk right now.’
“That puts it all into perspective. I’m down here by myself, down here living on my own. It’s rough. But with my faith in God and knowing everything is going to be okay in trusting his plans and not my plan, I know these dark days will pass.”
In the weeks leading up to the draft, it became clear NFL teams had high interest in Lattimore. Before the draft Dye said he would have been shocked if the running back wasn’t picked somewhere in the middle rounds. There was hope Lattimore could get on the field in 2013.
“It’s going to take a special effort,” Dr. Andrews told NFL.com. “Mother Nature’s got to help us. The good Lord’s got to help us. This kid’s future is good regardless of what happens, because of his character.”
The San Francisco 49ers selected Lattimore in the fourth round with the 131st pick. As a Niner, he would join former University of Miami star Frank Gore, who overcame two serious knee injuries to excel in the NFL. On the surface, the faith and will of an extraordinary athlete had been rewarded with a perfect place to continue his comeback.
The Ricky Seals-Jones sweepstakes
In what would turn out to be the final day of his son’s high school football career, Chester Jones stood at the end of his driveway with a stack of recruiting letters in his hand.
It was an early November Friday in 2012 in Sealy, Texas, a working-class, countrified city of six thousand about fifty miles west of Houston. Sealy High’s annual backyard brawl with its archrival Bellville Brahmas was just three hours away, and Jones, a tall, outgoing bull of a man, was feeling a bit anxious, particularly about the bum right ankle that had kept his son pretty much sidelined the last few weeks.
Back in the mid-1970s, Chester Jones was an all-state center in basketball who earned a football scholarship to Prairie View A&M before a torn hamstring cut his college career at tight end short. After graduating, he took to the roads, making a living hauling manhole covers for sixteen years. Now he worked with a friend in the insulation and air-conditioning business, which kept him closer to home.