If you’re paying the slightest bit of attention to college football this fall, you’ve heard about LSU sophomore running back Leonard Fournette. The visual descendant of Jim Brown or Herschel Walker, he has gained 631 yards in just three games this season, weighs 230 pounds, runs a 4.35 40-yard dash and looks to be good enough to be playing in the NFL next year, if not next week.
But he can’t do that. NFL rules say Fournette must wait three years after graduating from high school before entering the league. That means he must play college ball for the remainder of this season, and all of the next, before becoming eligible for the NFL draft in 2017.
There are those who say this is unfair, that Fournette, like a college violinist or male basketball player, should be able to turn pro at any time (in the violinist’s case), or after one year (in the case of the basketball player). This school of thought says that Fournette needs to get to the NFL as quickly as possible to sign a huge contract before he suffers a potentially career-ending injury in college.
To that end, there already has been chatter about whether Fournette should be taken out of games he isn’t needed in this season, and, even more interesting, whether he should play at all next season or just take the year off and wait for his name to be called first in the 2017 NFL draft.
So far there’s been no word about how people in this camp will react when Fournette actually steps off a curb.
There is another side to this story, of course, and it’s the side that says the three-year wait is a smart rule that works for the vast majority of college players who are headed to the NFL. This is the side that I’m on.
It’s one thing for a 20-year-old basketball player with spectacular individual skills to go to the NBA. It’s quite another for a 20-year-old football player to think he’s ready for the intense physical demands of the NFL, not to mention the mental and emotional challenges attached to the leap from college to pro football.
I think we can safely say that all of our pro leagues, including the NFL, already have a full complement of young men who are working on their maturity. So if we can keep a few more in college for another year or so, where we hope they might learn a couple more life lessons, if only by osmosis, that has to be a good thing.
For the sake of argument, though, let’s say we change the football rule to the men’s hoops rule: one and done. Can you imagine the number of kids who would want to turn pro who should not? Can you imagine the number of agents who would be swarming around them?
We know that our universities and football coaches have a lot riding on the Leonard Fournettes of the world. We know they make more money when a star like Fournette plays better. But I would still rather put the fate of Fournette and talented phenoms like him into the hands of officials of our athletic-academic industrial complex than I would into the hands of agents — some good, some not — who would be leading their change into the NFL.
Of all the people on Earth, college coaches and administrators are the ones who most want to see these athletes do well. They are the people whose success is tied to the athletes' success. They are the ones who chose to give these athletes scholarships — which, contrary to popular opinion these days, are not worth nothing. They are in fact worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over a college career, what with the free ride to college, including room and board, the free, state-of-the-art coaching and the free massive job-fair exposure on national TV every Saturday. What would our violinist give for that?
We know that Fournette wants to stay healthy so he can sign a huge contract that hopefully takes care of him and his family for life. There’s someone else who feels the same way. It’s LSU coach Les Miles.
“You want to take care of a guy like Leonard Fournette,” he told reporters Wednesday. “We just want Leonard to go to class, go to football and enjoy a smattering of media opportunities and play ball on Saturday and have fun. Have fun with his college. I think the approach that we have for him is a quality one.”
It's only natural that many would want Fournette in the NFL next year. But that's not going to happen. So, because he gets hit hard running the ball as often as he does, Miles and his staff need to be creative about how much they use him. And Fournette and his family need to be wise and take out an insurance policy against a severe injury, as others have done before him.
Waiting for anything is difficult in 21st century America, yet they know there are going to be no exceptions to this rule, even for the most exceptional among us.
