HOUSTON, TX - FEBRUARY 01: The NFL shield logo is seen following a press conference held by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (not pictured) at the George R. Brown Convention Center on February 1, 2017 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Tim Bradbury/Getty Images)Today, Marshall Faulk took to Twitter to share his thoughts on college players sitting out of bowl games to prepare for the NFL Draft.
Last week, LSU’s Leonard Fournette and Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey announced they would not being playing in their respective bowl games, and today NFL analyst and former NFL RB Marshall Faulk tweeted out his thoughts on that. Take a moment and brace yourself for the ensuing hot take:
If a RB can't play in a bowl game vs college competition without getting hurt. How in the hell is he going to play 16+ games in the NFL?
— Marshall Faulk (@marshallfaulk) December 20, 2016
Yeah. Pretty much what you would have expected. There’s a lot to unpack here, and it’s not worth going into it too deeply, but suffice it to say that the false equivalency he’s set up here doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Reading between the lines, it’s Faulk seemingly trying to criticize the toughness of a player, and that entirely misses the point of why Fournette and McCaffrey are sitting out in the first place. If anything, it reinforces the notion of why they should.
Because, for Fournette and McCaffrey, these bowl games amount to little more than meaningless exhibition match-ups. What more could they possibly show scouts that they haven’t already? There is zero incentive. None. They’re both two of the most talented NFL prospects in recent memory, and college football is little more than a vehicle to get them to that next level. To hold them to some arbitrary moral standard of toughness or especially allegiance—while coaches bounce from team to team at will, with pay, no less—is absurd. If Faulk wants to criticize something, he should direct his tweets at the broken and antiquated system these players are forced to play in.