Stars skipping big game no surprise
What’s happening in NCAA football has plenty of parallels to junior hockey circuit
The news that a U.S. college football star has decided to skip bowl season in order to “prepare for the draft” is both surprising and a long time coming.
Running back Christian McCaffrey’s choice was no doubt made easier by the fact that his Stanford team is having a disappointing 9-3 season and will play in the Sun Bowl later this month. It’s not quite on the lowest rung of such games among the Dollar General Bowl or the Advo Care V100 Texas Bowl — actual things! — but it’s fair to say that not too many young kids go to sleep at night dreaming of one day being the hero of the Sun Bowl. Whether Stanford wins or loses is of minor consequence to both McCaffrey’s team and the college football championship picture.
Those same reasons also apply to Leonard Fournette, who is not joining his 7-4 LSU Tigers at the Buffalo Wild Wings Citrus Bowl. He’s also recovering from an injury that caused him to miss most of his junior season.
Fournette was so good as a sophomore, piling up almost 2,000 yards on the ground, that there was speculation he might skip his junior season entirely to avoid the exact thing that ended up happening. Fournette hurt his ankle in August and never fully recovered, missing four games at various points in the season.
So while the reasons to sit out meaningless bowl games are obvious — why risk an injury that could jeopardize draft stock and immediately cost the player millions of dollars? — the surprise is that these decisions are made in the face of an industry that constantly preaches the team over individualism.
You do not even have to turn on the various sports-chat shows to know that someone is blasting these players for letting down their teammates in what will be the final game of many of their careers. Bear Bryant wouldn’t stand for such nonsense!
The self-benchings, though, highlight the dirty non-secret that underpins the whole multi-billion-dollar U.S. college football industry: that these athletes are forced to play in a system that is at once the only way to advance to a professional career and one that also offers them exactly no protection from a catastrophic injury that could end that career before it begins.
Only because McCaffrey and Fournette have demonstrated their ability so well to this point in their careers — McCaffrey ran for more than 3,600 yards in his last two seasons alone — have they gained enough leverage to effectively turn the exploitation of the college system on its ear. They have proven that they will be significantly attractive in the NFL draft whether or not they play another game.
In Canada, where our student-athletes really are more student than athlete — compared to the farm system that is the NCAA — there’s no comparison to be made with what McCaffrey and Fournette are doing. But there is one parallel. Our best male hockey players are funnelled into a major junior system that both prepares them for a professional career and also forces them to work on the cheap for a few years while at risk of an injury that could have long-reaching consequences. The logical extension of what is being seen in this U.S. bowl season is that a hockey player, his draft stock assured, will end his junior career early rather than put himself at further risk.
Would Connor McDavid have seen his draft prospects damaged in 2015, after he had scored 120 points in 47 games with the Erie Otters of the Ontario Hockey League and helped Canada to a gold medal at the world juniors, if he had decided to take a pass on the OHL playoffs? Oh, the hot takes would have been fiery and there might have even been a team or two who had questions about his attitude and decided to take someone else at the top of the draft. And then those teams would look like right morons now that McDavid is demonstrating he is the biggest talent to hit the National Hockey League since Sidney Crosby.
McDavid did break a bone in his hand — in a fight, no less — in his final junior year, but what if that injury had instead been a blow to the head? Would he have been vilified if he had bailed early on a junior career? It didn’t hurt Auston Matthews when he opted to skip the junior system entirely.
The NCAAs and Canada’s major-junior system all make a point of insisting that their players are amateur athletes, full stop, even though everyone knows that the best of them are just biding their time until they can turn professional. In the interim, they make lots of money for everyone but themselves.
We probably shouldn’t be surprised when some of those players realize they no longer have to continue the charade.