Scout Quotes on Maurice Hurst
Bleacher Report's NFL Draft Lead Writer Matt Miller posted this quote from scouts regarding Maurice Hurst. Any thoughts?
Link- https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2773921-matt-millers-scouting-noteb…
"—Raiders "Irresponsible" for Drafting Maurice Hurst
And finally, this one is shocking. After the draft ended on Saturday—and even during our Bleacher Report live stream coverage—I was asking if Michigan defensive tackle Maurice Hurst was going to be drafted. Hurst was flagged at the combine for a heart condition but was later allowed to participate at the Michigan pro day. If the Wolverines felt he was healthy, why did he fall so far in the draft?
I spoke to over 10 scouts, coaches and executives regarding Hurst. One, in a heated rant, labeled the selection "irresponsible" by the Raiders because of Hurst's heart condition (which hasn't been publicly shared) and hoped the talented defender would "never put a f--king helmet on again in his life."
That sentiment was echoed many times over, with one head coach adding, "Only the Raiders would draft a guy who could literally die on the field from a known condition.""
Joke's on you:
site search doesn't work right now. This completely invalidates your entire point.
Good day.
The internet is where subtlety goes to die. I know the site search is down. Has been for years.
Aside: your avatar's outdated. no pics of Ibra in a galaxy jersey?
goodday.gif
I think the same thing about all the jabronies who have pictures of ex-Michigan players as their avatars. THEY DON'T PLAY HERE ANYMORE! GET WITH THE TIMES!
Also, every player minus the kicker can die on the field from a hit that breaks their neck.
I just don’t get the NFL.
Kickers get hit too. It's just not legal when it happens.
But they are also asked to make tackles, which could produce the same result.
Anyone else find irony in the idea that they're supposedly worried about Mo Hurst's losing his life, but they didn't worry about players' brains for years? Ok NFL...
Correct - they don't give a shit about his health; that's just that guys excuse for not drafting him.
He's had this issue his whole life and played HS and college football at the highest level. I'm sure he will be fine.
The same was said of Hank Geathers.
Hank Geathers also quit taking the medicine because he thought it was affecting his play. He also, skipped doctors appointments.
If Hurst monitors it he should be fine.
Harvard/Michigan wouldn't clear him if they didn't think he was fine. It would be horrible for PR if they cleared him and something ended up happening.
"If Hurst monitors it he should be fine."
This is the key statement. There is a level of trust an organization has to have that the player will put their physical well being first and foremost. Unfortunately, there is a history of athelets putting playing the game ahead of their health.
As an NFL owner, I would be somewhat hesitant about a situation where the player had an active role in making sure he was taking care of himself when the potential consequence could be so great.
A heart condition is very different from a broken bone, a torn muscle, and even brain trauma. You are potentially talking about the difference between being alive one minute and dead the next.
I'm sure the Raiders will make him take frequent tests to make sure he is healthy. Things were a lot different back then. Teams are held to a higher standard now when it comes to health conditions, especially the NFL.
Unfortunately, there is a history of athelets putting playing the game ahead of their health.
I don't know, man; while this may be true for some we're talking about Mo Hurst here. The kid has done nothing in 5 years at Michigan to demonstrate a "win at all costs" mentality and was coached by Greg Mattison for his entire career, a coach who makes sure his guys do things "the right way."
Add to that the high likelihood that he will not only have his team doctors on him but Mattison, Brown, and Harbaugh as well as guys like Wormley and Taco. And while this may sound like a biased view (of which I'll stipulate) any team that does adequate enough homework on a kid and the school he comes from will understand the kid, the culture he was surrounded by, and the support system he has around him.
Yes, it's still on Mo to do what he has to do to make sure he takes care of his health but he has demonstrated his willingness to do whatever he needs to do to take care of his body, is conscientious and doesn't take shorcuts, and does everything that's expected of him.
Gathers
This is really scary. Knowing that NFL teams don't really care about the players health, for a coach/scout/exec to make this statement means whatever medical information he or she has seen is incredibly dangerous. Definitely hope it turns out to be okay.
It doesn't mean anything of the sort.
It means that they said something. They referenced no information.
Assuming that people moving their lips aren't talking with their heads up their ass is a dangerous assumption.
It's funny to see a bunch of NFL people getting worked up about a cleared medical condition with Hurst when there is a stupendous amount of evidence that playing football shortens players' lives and can lead to debilitating ailments, from lingering paid to CTE and the attendant mental degradation. How many stories have we heard about coaches, medical staff, and players pushing guys well beyond their safe physical limits, prescribing pain killers that lead to addiction, and everything else and yet because apparently none of them followed up with Hurst or other medical professionals to see if, hey, maybe this isn't a condition that should preclude him from playing, it's not a crime that the Raiders actually took a chance on him? And that doesn't even account for the stone-cold fact that there are guys who have played and are now playing with conditions that could lead to sudden death that have simply gone undiagnosed.
I've had a hard time really giving a shit about the NFL in recent years, but I'm going to be a Raiders' fan just so that I can see Hurst succeed. And yes, obviously I don't want to see him be put in heightened risk of serious injury or death. But if I keep being spoon-fed the shit from the NFL that concussions are part of the game and these are adults who consent to this danger, acting all paternal about Mo Hurst's known and apparently not-so-serious heart condition is the fucking height of hypocrisy.
The NFL's position is hardly hypocritical. Teams are perfectly fine with slowly murdering their players, so long as no one really notices. It's the specter of sudden murder that scared them off. It's much harder to deflect responsibility when it happens all once, rather than over the course of a career.
Well, sudden death that could place them in legal liability. If Manziel had died on the field because of a cocaine overdose, I doubt anyone would have been heartbroken over it.
GMs probably know he is gonna be good, were told by their owner not to draft him for possible bad PR if he dies/is otherwise hurt on the job, and are pissed that someone else has an owner who doesn't care and gets the benefit of a 5th round steal.
I get that the condition might scare a few teams off even considering Hurst, but the reaction of the scout mentioned in the OP is.....yikes. Since it is a known condition and he's been cleared here in Ann Arbor and again at Harvard, wouldn't this be enough for teams that he can play? Not sure why the apprehension was so severe with teams, to be honest.
Hell being cleared by the Michigan CVC aught to be good enough, it's a top 10 Cardiology & Heart Surgery hospital in the country.
I've read the news articles saying Harvard and Umich Drs have cleared Mo, but I don't think we'll ever know the extent of him being "cleared" is (unless I haven't read the right articles). "Cleared" is not an end-all term.
Like is Mo totally OK to play football w/o any health issues? Or did the Drs say he can play football but there's a substantial risk (more so than not playing) for something wrong to happen and he has to monitor himself? Or did the Drs say you are going to have some cardiac event in life and playing football will probably not effect that chance?
I simply don't know the facts and I can see where a Scout is coming from if an NFL doctor says "I don't think X should play football". Drs will disagree.... BUT, Mo is obviously a very mature and educated man and his decision regarding playing in the NFL is IMO his decision.
I'm going to love watching him dominate in the NFL. Never been a Raiders fan, but I am now.
I'm going to love watching him dominate in the NFL. Never been a Raiders fan, but I am now.
A couple things to consider:
1) For those comparing a known heart condition to CTE. The ability to scan for CTE is a recent development (last 18 months). Prior to that, there was not a test that you could do ahead of time to difnitively decide if a player was at significant risk of further brain injury. That is not true of heart conditions. For decades, doctors have been able to test, measure, and use x-ray/MRI to see if specific heart conditions exist which could have dire consequences.
2) I have no idea what Mo's condition is, but the toll on his heart is not going to get less or easier with age. That very well could be playing into the decision making. Maybe it was ok to play in college, maybe the situation changes considerably each year he gets older putting the strain of being a professional athlete on his body.
3) Hank Geathers. For those that remember the Loyola Marymount teams in the 80's and 90's, or were Michigan basketball fans in 1990, you know this name (as well as Bo Kimble). He was cleared to play. The rest of the story is very sad. I wouldn't want that to happen to Mo no matter how bad he wants to play.
You are correct, thank you. I happened to be watching that game and I will never forget it. The image remains these many years later even if my brain can't remember the spelling.
1. Sure, but they've known for decades now that football destroys guys' bodies, especially the legs and back, and the pain killer abuses that come with that treatment both during and after careers. The NFL was sued years ago by almost 2,000 players about the drug culture there and how it was used to mask debilitating injuries. And CTE isn't the type of injury that suddenly kills you, but let's not act like most people didn't sort of believe that getting hit in the head for years wasn't bad for your health; we've had numerous boxers stumble through the latter part of their lives punch-drunk. The fact that people so often tried to diagnose it as something other than the direct effect of the sport they played doesn't mitigate the awareness.
2. Again, sure. But football is a strain on anyone's body. And this pre-supposes that everyone else who plays football doesn't have the same or similar condition, which may be far more common than we assume. So again, this feels like the NFL getting really annoyed with a single tree in the forest.
3. Finally, sure. But Len Bias died because of a drug overdose, and it was known by people that he had a drug problem. Reggie Lewis collapsed I believe twice before his untimely death on the practice court. As an avid runner, I've long heard and read stories of guys and gals dying while running marathons unexpectedly, and I'm guessing that some of them had conditions that went undiagnosed. And yet, we've also seen athletes do fine with similar health issues.
I agree nobody wants to put Hurst at risk. But football is inherently risky, and it's weird that everyone seems worked up about this particular, known, and treatable medical condition while we have untold unknown medical conditions in players and the sentiment is "ah well".
Who says Mo's condition is treatable? All I've heard is that it's treatable only with surgery that would definitively end his playing career.
I haven't heard much either way about his actual condition; people compare it to what Star Loluteleli purportedly had, or what Nick Fairley had, which are two completely different diagnoses as far as I can tell. Fairley I was know was told to retire immediately by his doctors, while Hurst was cleared by two sets of doctors to test for teams at the pro day. Obviously I don't have his medical records in front of (or would know what they even mean if I did), but maybe "treatable" isn't the right word as much as it isn't so serious that multiple doctors feel it would needlessly endanger his life to play football.
Please do not try to be a specialist on the internet and spread misinformation.There is no scan routinely done for CTE. Nothing ready for primetime yet. X-ray/MRI are not the primary imaging to diagnose cardiac issues.. ECG and Ultrasoud are.
Dude. Check your source.and go back to that link again. Thanks for telling me to keep up with the times. I could pull rank on you (not mgopoints though).
Gandy, who cautions that the results are preliminary, is currently recruiting pro hockey players from Canada to New York for his latest research. The findings of such studies could shape the payouts from the NFL's billion-dollar concussion settlement, which is currently a subject of federal court appeals.
As far as I can tell, NONE of this has been verified in a subsequent study in a scientific journal.
Be patient. Don't double post.
If the scouts are to be believed and Hurst does have a condition that makes him more likely to die on the field, wouldn't that also mean he could die doing anything strenous like yard work, running on a treadmill or playing basketball with his kids when he is 30? Can't imagine sitting around and doing nothing for the rest of your life is any life or that is good on the rest of the body. So I'm going to stick with my gut that Hurst, and the doctors got it right.
The medical professionals at a school where Hurst doesn't play anymore (so there's no "on-field results" to prioritize anymore) and ALSO at another school (Harvard) that has no dog in the hunt whatsoever, or anonymously quoted scouts (with vested interests in making themselves look good by passing over Hurst) in a bleacher report post?
Each scout is part of an organization that has a vested interest in making its decisions sound like the right ones. As explained by others in this thread, NFL teams tend to be risk averse, and I'm not questioning their right to make whatever cost/benefit analysis they wish, even at the price of settling for a marginally worse player. Once that decision is made, however, I wouldn't count on a team's scouting staff (quoted anonymously) as the best, most neutral source of the information that went into that decision.