National Football League

Even in offseason, injuries just happen

Published Aug. 28, 2010 1:00 a.m. ET

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The latest cruel chapter in the Stephen Strasburg Saga, with the Washington Nationals' 22-year-old flamethrower set to undergo Tommy John surgery and now likely to miss most or all of next season, should serve as a cautionary tale for NFL coaches and players.

No matter how intricate the best-made plans of rodents and humans, you just can't keep some people out of harm's way, right?

"You can't be a guardian angel, looking over the shoulders of these guys 24 hours a day," Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin lamented, after standout offensive right tackle Willie Colon suffered a season-ending Achilles’ injury during a springtime workout. "Even if you could, well ... "

There isn't a whole lot the NFL can learn from Major League Baseball. But the Strasburg situation is a reminder that, if football coaches don't believe in the old adage that you strive for the best but still plan for the worst, well, they should.

Guys get hurt in the offseason. It's a fact of life. The coaches who deal with the reality and pragmatically shake their heads at the misfortune and move on tend to be those with lengthy resumes. Or normal blood pressure. The others spend their careers belting down ulcer medications.

Nationals management couldn't have been any more careful with Strasburg had team president Stan Kasten packed him in bubble wrap between starts. Strasburg never worked more than seven innings or threw more than 99 pitches in a game. Between the minor leagues and the majors, he tossed just 123 1/3 innings, and the plan was to shut Strasburg down at 160 innings max, even if that meant he might have sat for much of September.

But when the ulnar collateral nerve of Strasburg's right elbow snapped like a rubber band stretched beyond its elasticity last week, none of those well-detailed fail-safes much mattered.

The hubris and tough-guy mind-set so prevalent in the NFL aside, football players get hurt. Most of the injuries -- blown-out knees, separated shoulders, sprained ankles -- occur on the job. But some of them, particularly the kind of soft-tissue injuries that tend to drive coaches mad, happen away from the field. Try as they might, players and coaches can't avoid them.

Call it karma, bad luck or fate, they happen. And if there is any real-world lesson to be learned here, it's that players are not automatons. If their kids have the flu and keep them up all night, they're usually grouchy. If the wife is late with dinner, they are miserable. Cut them and they bleed red.

There is no invulnerability.

New York Giants rookie safety Chad Jones was simply driving this spring when he wrapped his car around a telephone pole in New Orleans and smashed his leg. Jones is doing well, but his football future is in jeopardy.

Colon was working out in a non-contact situation, and his right Achilles’ suddenly unraveled up his leg. One player in the NFC, who asked that his name not be used, considered asking his team to put him on the physically unable to perform list at the start of camp (he didn't), because he had problems with the vasectomy he'd undergone this spring.

The latter-day warning, so popularized by those off-color bumper stickers, is unfortunately true.

Stuff happens.

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