Alex Kanellis's career is over

We mentioned last week that Alex Kanellis would be hanging up the cleats for the year. As it turns out, the concussions are forcing Alex off the field for good.

Eric Page over at the QC Times' Hawkmania.com (the site that should have replaced HawkCentral in your bookmarks long ago) has a writeup about Kanellis, and it's predictably depressing.

“You have to be smart,” Ferentz said. “Everybody’s career is going to end at some point. We all have a picture of when it’s going to end, and when it doesn’t end that way, it’s tough. It’s just not worth taking any unnecessary chances.”

And to be sure, by "unnecessary chances," Ferentz is referring to the vastly increased likelihood that Kanellis's brain would leak out of his ears the next time he concussed himself.

It's always a shame to see a young player's opportunity cut short for medical reasons, and this scenario is no exception. The good news is that Kanellis will probably stick around the program and help the S&C program, much the same way fellow medical casualties Vernon Jackson and Alex Wilcox are doing so.

The 40-yard dash is quaint, and that's bullcrap!

Notre Dame Stadium. Joe Paterno. Yes, college football is unmatched in its reverence for relics, long past the point of utility. There is perhaps no better illustration of such strange allegiance than the relatively useless 40-yard dash.

While there is probably some merit to how quickly a college football player can sprint straight ahead for 40 yards without pads on, well, there isn't much. There are, at any given time, about 10 people on a football field who can reasonably expect to sprint 40 yards in a straight line during the course of the game. All 22, however, can be damned sure that their 5- and 10-yard quickness will be vitally important on every snap. A tenth of a second in those first few yards is a metric fuckload more important than a tenth of a second between yards 30 and 40.

The S&C community, of course, is fully aware that the 40 doesn't mean much. So why is it the most recognized combine test?

The answer, of course, is that everyone's intimately familiar with the test. We know that anything over 4.9 is sloowwww, and everything below 4.4 is fasttttt (five t's fast, to be precise). Most football fans and about 95% of the coaching community know that it's not the end-all, be-all of tests. And sometimes, if you're really lucky, one of those 5% joins your conference.