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Breaks of the game Illinois WR Lloyd recovering from freak injury
Astute readers of Sports Illustrated's college football issue last August may have noticed we erred slightly in our predictions for the 2000 season. We picked Alabama at No. 3 and the Crimson Tide finished 3 all right -- 3-8. We also fanned on nearly the entire Big Ten. We expected too much out of Michigan and Wisconsin. We didn't see Northwestern's rise and we didn't see Illinois' fall. The Illini, after an 8-4 season in 1999, dropped to 5-6 last season, closing with a humiliating 61-23 loss to the Wildcats. Illinois' long journey to mediocrity began with a single step -- one sophomore receiver Brandon Lloyd took last July. Lloyd showed glimpses of an outstanding future during his freshman campaign, catching 30 passes for 511 yards. In the 63-21 rout of Virginia in the 1999 MicronPC.com Bowl, Lloyd even threw a 30-yard touchdown pass to quarterback Kurt Kittner. But one night last July, Lloyd and a few of his teammates were walking to tailback Rocky Harvey's apartment. Lloyd stepped off a curb with his left leg -- and his leg locked. "At first I thought it was my knee," he says. "I couldn't move my knee or anything below it. My teammates carried me and put me in a Jeep Cherokee and took me to the hospital. On the way there I could flex my calf and move my toes, then my knee. I knew then it wasn't my knee. I was holding the back of my leg, my hamstring. "At the hospital, they put me in a wheelchair and took me in for X-rays. The doctors were pulling my leg all over the place." The X-rays showed that Lloyd had broken his femur. "The doctors leave," he says, "and a few minutes later one of them comes back in. He says, 'What really happened? You didn't get hit by a car? You didn't fall off a balcony?'" No, Lloyd stepped off a curb and earned a pair of crutches for four months. He learned some lessons about self-doubt that he had never had reason to learn in his 19 years. "I was scared," he says. "The mental rehab was harder than the physical rehab: going to the weight room and to three or four hours of physical therapy, then sitting in my room at night with my leg hurting and thinking that I would never play again." At the beginning of January, Lloyd was cleared for doing weight work with his left leg and some running. Then he began to work out with Kittner and the other receivers and corners in seven-on-seven drills. He and Kittner had to rediscover one another, relearn the timing that makes a quarterback and a wideout operate like two cogs in the same machine. "I was only about 50 or 60 percent," Lloyd says. "We started getting it back. In the first scrimmage, I was only 70 percent. By the spring game, maybe 75 to 80 percent." In that first scrimmage, on March 31, Kittner waited until third down to throw to Lloyd. The result was a 75-yard touchdown pass. In the spring game last Saturday, Kittner didn't wait at all. On the first snap, he threw a 47-yard touchdown pass to Lloyd. Without Lloyd, Kittner's Heisman Trophy campaign will make all the impact that Gary Bauer's bid for the presidency did. (There is a connection: Bauer didn't step off a curb; he fell off a stage.) Lloyd understands the ludicrous side of his injury. "As athletes, we're supposed to be invincible," he says. "That's how we're seen by our little brothers, nephews, nieces, our peers at school. Then something like this happens. As many times as I got hit [on the field], I walk off the curb and break my leg." Lloyd has learned a lesson that only deprivation can teach. He no longer considers conditioning a chore. He didn't dread a single session of the 15 spring practices. "I was on crutches throughout two-a-days last August," Lloyd says. "I thought, 'Man, I want to be out there.'" He laughs. "Man, I never thought I would say that." Just the other day, Lloyd was walking across campus and came to a street corner. He used the slope rather than step off the curb. When Lloyd's Heisman Trophy candidacy gets off the ground, we've got the slogan: Brandon Lloyd -- Ramping Down for Success. Sports Illustrated senior writer Ivan Maisel covers college football for the magazine and is a frequent contributor to CNNSI.com.
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