wlayton wrote:
Man was he drilled. I think he will be fine. Admit it or not, he's a very tough kid. My quess is he will be 100% for LSU.
If I were his parents, Urban Meyer or a Florida fan, I'd be worried by that attitude. \"Tough kid\" doesn't mean a damn thing when you get hit in the head. Him playing through shoulder injuries and a broken hand makes him tough. You get hit in the head that hard, it doesn't matter if you're Bubba Smith or Bill Gates; you are hurt and don't need to be playing contact sports. If he plays in the LSU game, it's because the doctors, coaches and yes, parents around him are idiots.
They haven't released the grade of concussion yet to the press, which means that I'm close to believing my worst fears: that they're going to play him if he
says he feels fine. That's dangerous as hell. If he takes another blow to the head too soon after a major concussion (which could mean another blow to the head within two weeks, or within one year, or within one lifetime), it could kill him or cause permanent brain damage. The cemeteries and rest homes of the world are littered with football players, boxers, professional wrestlers and others who took one too many hits to the head because they were \"tough kids\" and felt the need to \"play through it.\" Willis Reed was a hero for limping out onto the court and helping the Knicks win a championship, right? He would have been an idiot to have played that soon after a
brain injury.
Let's make no mistake: this is not a
head injury, it is a
brain injury. Nobody on this planet has a physically tough
brain. If Meyer plays Tebow against LSU (which he probably will, because he's slime who only cares about himself), then he's just as culpable in whatever happens to his quarterback as the doctors who cleared him and the parents who signed off on it are.
This isn't about me not wanting Tebow to play. The Georgia fan in me knows that Tebow couldn't beat Auburn by himself, or he'd've beat Auburn, and he couldn't beat us by himself, or he'd've beat us in 2007. So I'm just as scared of John Brantley with a good Florida team around him as I am of Tim Tebow with a good Florida team around him. And it's not about him breaking Herschel's record, either, because Herschel did it in three years, and Tebow could never have done that, so the record stays intact in my mind, and even if it didn't, it's just a damn number and who cares about it anyway.
But BEFORE the 2007 game, when Tebow was playing with a shoulder bruise and Meyer KEPT running him the rest of the season anyway, I said, \"Someday Urban Meyer is going to end that kid's career trying to run up his stats.\" And maybe, just maybe, keeping his #1 QB in a 31-7 blowout late into the third quarter proved me right.
So what do you do?
You play John Brantley. You get Tim Tebow a medical redshirt and let him play next year, if that's what it takes to keep him off the field. But you certainly don't kill him or permanently disable him (and, having seen the effects of brain damage, I don't know which is worse) by chasing that crystal football. After all, Orson Charles proved how impermanent those things are.
Read Christopher Nowinski's research if you're doubting what I'm saying. Hell, take a look at the Chris Benoit brain scan, or the scans of dozens of former NFL players who've killed themselves or hurt people they loved because their brains looked like swiss cheese after one too many concussions. Tim Tebow should take the year off, or all of the rabid Georgia fans and Florida State fans and Tennessee fans who yell \"Die Tebow Die\" in jest will get their false wish granted. We have to get past this \"a tough kid can come back from a concussion\" mentality and deal with the fact that a concussion
is brain damage, and that the extent of that damage often is determined by whether or not the people AROUND THEM allow them to continue the behavior that got them concussed in the first place.
I don't know what else to say on this matter, except that I'm disgusted by the HYPEspner's and all of the other idiot sportscasters' -- whose only expertise on the subject is that they like sports or played sports -- saying that they expect Tebow to \"pull through\" and \"play tough.\" He has a brain injury. He should not play until 2010. Period.
