Landon Dickerson blew up my story idea.
I figured coming out of last week’s medical combine, finding a player most affected would be a smart play for this week’s GamePlan column—getting a guy who’s going through and/or coming back from something serious, and has been hit particularly hard by the weird circumstances of 2021. And on paper, the two-time All-SEC linemen and winner of the Rimington Award, given annually to the nation’s best center, was perfect.
Dickerson blew out his ACL in the SEC title game in December, an injury that cost him the Sugar Bowl, playing for a national title and essentially any opportunity to show teams who he is physically ahead of the draft. I figured he’d at least have given himself a few days, or even a week or two, to grieve or feel sorry for himself. I figured wrong.
“I mean, honestly, there’s no reason to sit around and mope because you’re just wasting a day you can go rehab,” Dickerson said. “So there’s no reason to feel sorry for yourself. There are people that go through things a heck of a lot worse than I do. And at the end of the day, this is kind of the entertainment industry, it’s not life-or-death for me. So honestly, there’s no reason to be that upset.
“I’m way better off than the majority of people in this world. I have nothing to be sad or moping about. I have only things to be happy about.”
Absent the injury, Dickerson was considered a very good bet to go in the first round.
Thanks to how he’s handled all this, he still might.
And that’s why, as I went looking for a story on another tough circumstance of this pandemic-ravaged draft cycle, I found something else. I found the guy who’s basically written the playbook on how to handle something that we all hope never happens again.
