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Walking wounded College teams fight to keep players healthyPosted: Friday May 03, 2002 12:20 PM
Spring football is over and if your favorite team survived with all its ligaments intact, consider yourself lucky. Notre Dame coach Tyrone Willingham wasn't kidding last week when he boasted of extending his streak of no major injuries during spring practice to eight years. Keeping players healthy through these workouts without reducing them to wearing flags around their waists continues to be a concern within the college ranks. Five years ago, the NCAA cut back the number of practices that Division I and II schools may hold to 15, 10 of them in pads. While that rule has caused the injury rate to decrease, the numbers merely have returned to the level of the early 1990s. The bottom line is that players get hurt more than twice as frequently in spring practice as they do in fall practice. Obviously, there's more contact in the spring than during the fall, when coaches prefer that players do their hitting on Saturdays. Injury rates in spring games have plummeted, a result of the renewed caution of coaches once this issue began to get legs, which, now that I think about it, may be a poor choice of words. Check out the disabled list from this spring: And those are just the serious injuries I found doing a cursory search. The quartet of players who tore knee ligaments may return to action this fall. That's not a reflection of the severity of the injury so much as it is of improved methods of rehabilitation. "That was the only injury we had all spring," Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen said about Kelley's misfortune. Friedgen, as does every coach, likes spring practice. He can live with 15 sessions. He can live with 10 in pads. "I don't know if everybody is observing the rules," he says, stating every I-A coach's belief in the moral fallibility of the other guy, "but the rules are adequate." Kelley's injury, he said, had less to do with contact than with how the quarterback planted his knee. (The same goes for Evans at Wisconsin.) Friedgen doesn't believe that hitting is the culprit. "If you take out the scrimmages, I don't know if it would be right," he said. "These kids want to play football." Friedgen blames some injuries on roster limits. A team is allowed 85 scholarship players, but during the spring -- without last fall's seniors and next fall's freshmen -- the number is usually closer to 60. "If you have three full teams, you're doing pretty well," Friedgen said. "We had enough players for two offensive lines this year. If someone gets nicked up, then another player has to do double duty. Kids get tired." Coaches have about as much chance of getting more scholarships as reformers have of eliminating spring football. The current system is the result of an uneasy truce. The game, and too many of its players, will continue to limp along toward the fall. Sports Illustrated senior writer Ivan Maisel covers college football for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.
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