Miami Hurricanes football coach Mark Richt isn’t happy with college stars taking a pass on bowl games so they can look ahead to the NFL draft.
To date, LSU’s Leonard Fournette, Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey and Baylor’s Shock Linwood have notably decided to sit out of bowl games.
For Richt, this gross shrug at a team-based sport is, in a word, sad. Susan Miller Degnan of the Miami Herald captured his thoughts:
I think it’s sad, personally. Football is the greatest team sport there is, and I think until the season is over, you should be with your team, really and truly.
You can take out whether I want a guy to stay to help us win and all that. Football is the greatest game. It’s the greatest game because it’s a team game. Everybody is counting on each other.
I bet their teammates are like, ‘I understand. I understand.’ Maybe face to face. But I bet you when they lay their head on the pillow, they’re like, ‘Why is that guy doing that? We’re a team. We paid the price together.’
It’s sad.
Many will probably concur with Richt on this front. This is a new trend and it’s not often players up and sit out games while healthy.
At the same time, it’s not hard to understand. Coaches often leave before a team’s bowl game for promotions elsewhere. Unpaid players ensuring their health before a promotion of sorts makes plenty of sense and is surely going to become bigger soon.
For now, this story only gets more interesting if one of Richt’s players decides to sit out a bowl game.
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