Want the secret to finding the soft spot of one of college football’s hardest coaches? Apparently all you’ve got to do is be able to hit 500 foot home runs and gun a runner out at home off one hop from deep centerfield.
So is the curious case at Nebraska, where notorious hot-head/big-scary-mean-guy Bo Pelini is allowing prized quarterback recruit Bubba Starling to sit out the first few weeks of football practice… to decide his baseball future.
You see, Starling wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill superstar signal-caller out of Kansas, with scholarship offers from virtually every major college football factory in the country. Nope, not by a long shot. Hell, football might not even be his best sport. Not at least according to the Kansas City Royals, who made him the fifth overall choice in June’s Major League Baseball draft.
And now, Bubba’s got a tough choice to make: Play football in Lincoln, or cash in a multi-million dollar paycheck from the Royals. Because of it, Starling has gone incognito at Nebraska football practices, which opened Saturday. If he shows up at all, it likely won’t be until August 15, the last day that Major League Baseball draftees can sign professional contracts. This from an AP report released Saturday evening:
“Obviously, he has got a lot at risk,” Pelini said. “We communicated with the family about the best way to go about it. We’re all on the same page.”
Starling’s father, Jimbo Starling, confirmed that Bubba was still a member of the Nebraska football program. He declined to comment further.
There are a few interesting things about this story. (Beyond Bubba’s father being named Jimbo. Which is surprising to absolutely no one.)
For one, the news doesn’t seem all that shocking to Pelini, who likely knew all of this while recruiting Starling. It’s no secret that most top baseball draftees elect to wait until the last possible day (and in a lot of cases, the last possible minute of the last possible day) to sign pro contracts, with many high school draftees using the option of going to college to only further increase their leverage. Alex Rodriguez was famously minutes away from stepping into his first college class at the University of Miami before signing on the dotted line with the Seattle Mariners in 1994. Talk about keeping a great poker face! (What, too soon?)
At the same time, it does seem a bit surprising that a coach is quite so willing to bend over backward for a kid, especially a coach with the short of fuse of Pelini’s.
Again, this was expected. But at the same time, don’t coaches always talk about “no one player being bigger than the program?” Isn’t Starling proving to be exactly that?
Then again, just as Starling and his family are using Nebraska as leverage over the Royals, to a degree, it seems like he’s using the Royals as leverage over Nebraska. Can Pelini really take a hard stance on the kid, when he can bolt and cash a million dollar paycheck tomorrow?
Needless to say, this will be an interesting situation to watch in the next few weeks.
The AP report indicates that according to Jimbo Starling, football is Bubba’s first love, and it’d be quite noble of the 18 year old to turn down millions for his true love. (Doesn’t Disney make 15 movies off that same premise every year?) At the very least, it’d prove to be an interesting case study for all those who believe that much like chivalry, amateurism is dead. Starling refusing all that money to stay a broke college kid – would have to make Mark Emmert’s eye twinkle just a little, no?
But even if Starling does remain in Lincoln, it opens up a whole other can of worms. How understanding will his new teammates be of their bonus baby buddy, who got to skip two weeks of camp? Won’t there be some animosity? And what if Starling quickly moved up a thin depth chart and into a back-up’s role behind starter Taylor Martinez? Will juniors and seniors on the offensive line and in the backfield be excited to listen to an 18 year old who wasn’t even with them for the toughest practices of the year?
Either way, I’ll be curious to see how Starling handles the situation.
Does he choose the love of the game? Or straight cash, homey?
It’s a decision that few could ever understand, and one that we should all be so lucky to have to make.
But it’s a tough one none the less.
Be sure to follow Crystal Ball Run on @CrystalBallRun
Be sure to follow Aaron Torres on Twitter @Aaron_Torres
