Former Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa will be selected somewhere in the upcoming 2020 NFL Draft. He could go as high as second. He could fall, according to some mocks, into the bottom half of the first round.
That all depends on his health. The one knock on Tagovailoa, who won a title with Alabama in 2018 and is a former SEC Offensive Player of the Year, is the idea that he is injury-prone.
Which is a bizarre thing to try and evaluate. Being “injury-prone” is an amorphous, weird thing to consider in someone, and impossible to really understand barring some underlying ailment. Does someone suffer a lot of injuries because their body is structurally unsound? Or did he just get hurt a bunch?
Tagovailoa, who released video of him throwing the ball (well) this week, is pushing hard to get NFL teams to understand it’s the latter option here. He plays a violent game, and he got hurt a few times. That’s not about him; rather, it’s about the sport.
“I’m not playing badminton. I’m not on the swim team,” Tagovailoa said during an Instagram Live show with Mike Locksley, his former offensive coordinator with the Crimson Tide and the current head coach at Maryland. “[Football] is a physical sport. You’re gonna get hurt. That just comes with it. And it was just very unfortunate that I got hurt every season.
“It’s a part of the game. It’s a contact sport. I can only control what I can control. I can’t control that.”
First off, let’s be easy on badminton and swimming, Tua. Those sports are plenty intense and injuries happen all the time.
Aside from lazy generalizations on those sports, Tagovailoa is right. If doctors can’t find an underlying illness or something structurally unsound with his body, there is absolutely no way to know if he’ll be injury prone or not in the NFL.
He could play 15 years and not miss a game. He could break his leg in the third game and his career could be over. That’s true of any player in the draft. Bo Jackson was the most indestructible athlete alive, right up until he wasn’t.
None of this would have anything to do with his body, but rather the realities of playing an extremely violent sport in football.
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