Spring football remains the most hazardous college sport, although the NCAA has worked hard to reduce player injuries.
You have to look no further to see this spring football injury phenomenon than BYU's spring football camp on Thursday, when linebacker Terrance Hooks tipped a pass from Brenden Gaskins intended for Luke Ashworth. Hooks battled to get his hands on the ball, leaping up twice as the ball caromed around. He crashed the turf with the interception, but tore his patellar tendon in his knee. Hooks will be out six to eight months.
Hooks' injury occurred despite BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall's major efforts to limit contact and take-down tackles during spring. Hooks was injured in a non-contact drill during a no-contact practice.
Mendenhall planned a 50-play scrimmage on Friday but limited that to just over 30 plays as a precautionary move to protect the health of his players.
Gone are the days of long, physical spring scrimmages. Hint: Saturday's Blue-White game, that concludes Cougar spring drills, will be interesting, but it won't be a game like the old days.
Shortly after huddling around Hooks as trainers worked on his left leg, Mendenhall told reporters the incident left him sick and without words to explain.
He emphasized his focus all spring was that this session was a marathon, not a sprint, in terms of work to be done. No hurry to get anyone killed or figure out starting roles.
"Actually, we have practiced a lot longer this spring, but we have limited the contact," said assistant head coach Lance Reynolds.
An NCAA study, published in the Journal of Athletic Training this past year, took reporting information from college athletic programs the past 16 years and showed men's spring football had the highest injury rate of all sports with 9.6 injuries per 1,000 participants.
The second-highest injury rate sport is women's gymnastics at 6.1 per 1,000, followed by men's wrestling (5.7), women's soccer (5.2) and men's soccer (4.3). Men's football in the fall has a 3.8 injury rate, almost one-third that of spring football.
The sport with the lowest injury rate is men's baseball, which features lazy days under the sun with sunflower seeds, itching and spitting mixed with hits and catches and running the bases (1.9).
The NCAA changed it rules for spring football back in 1998, limiting the number of practices and restricting the number of contact practices and scrimmages.
A recently released study conducted by the Big 10 conference showed that the rule change didn't change the spring football injury rate. If anything, it has continued to climb for three years after the rule change.
"Our hypothesis was that the rule changes would not reduce the injury rate back down to the level seen in the fall," said John Albright, M.D., physician with the Sports Medicine Center at the University of Indiana Hospitals and Clinics and first author on the study. "We also discovered some interesting characteristics about the injury rates."
The Big 10 study showed that the spring game was not as bad as expected and was more injury-free than most scrimmages. "However, the two remaining spring scrimmages had the highest injury rates. Interestingly, limited-contact practices defined as 'practice with pads but without tackling' actually produced a higher injury rate than full-contact practices," the study said.
Albright believes playing football at full speed while attempting to avoid contact leads to a pattern of more broken fingers, dislocated elbows or shoulders rather than the lower extremity injuries such as Hooks suffered.
The Big 10 study concluded the only way to reduce spring injury rates is to eliminate or reduce scrimmages and limited-contact practices.
But, interestingly enough, the study offered a reason why spring football is so much more dangerous than fall practices. And this underscores why Hooks may have been injured as he competed with Matt Bauman for a starting spot.
Said Albright, "Spring is the time of year when players are trying to impress the coaches and prove that they are better than the person in front of them on the roster. So it is a relatively competitive time among players.
"During the fall playing season, the practices are very careful to ensure that people do not get injured between games. In the spring, it is much harder to control the safety of the practices because everyone is competing for the playing spots."
Film shows Hooks making a super effort to make a play last Thursday when his knee got torn up. But nobody knocked him around or crashed into his legs. "It was just as if he got hurt jumping," said Reynolds.
Interesting, indeed.
E-mail: dharmon@desnews.com