Hahaha! Brodie is fragile!

[Hammock Parties]

http://www.kansascity.com/sports/chi...ry/847419.html

If Croyle is to be Chiefs’ man, he has just a few games to prove his sturdiness


Damon Huard has watched dozens of men try to play quarterback in the NFL. It’s tough, he’ll tell you. Beyond comprehension.

A man needs talent and coaching and luck, and even all that might not be enough. Heck, Huard’s younger brother Brock, a third-round pick in 1999, had it all. Seattle thought Brock Huard might be its quarterback of the future. He threw a touchdown on his first career pass. But then his back gave out. He was out of the league by 2004.

“You don’t want to get that bug,” Damon Huard says. “Some guys, it just happens to them.”

The NFL treats players, and quarterbacks in particular, like men whose wiring either was installed correctly or was not. The “bug” that Damon Huard was talking about is a label that means a player is injury prone, and it’s enough to drive a promising passer right out of the lineup, off a team, out of the league.

The Chiefs are trying to find out whether Brodie Croyle has the bug or not. He’s played in 12 games for Kansas City, starting seven of them, and he’s been hurt three times. His latest injury, a separated right shoulder, kept Croyle out for more than four games. He’ll return to the starting lineup today against Tennessee.

But it comes down to this: He suffered a serious injury in a crucial year for Croyle and the Chiefs. Like many of the young Chiefs, this is Croyle’s audition year. His ability to handle the grind will tell Kansas City whether Croyle is its man or whether the Chiefs need to draft someone next year.

The Chiefs want Croyle to be their starting quarterback. They hope he’s back there for a long time. But they’ve already decided: If he suffers one more injury, one more incident that causes him to miss time, it’s over for him. Croyle would finish the season as the starter, but then the Chiefs would move on without him, eyes toward drafting their next project in April, because the last one had the bug.

Croyle would, in a sense, be forgotten. That’s why the next 11 games are so important for him and the Chiefs. They’re at a fork in the road, and Croyle’s slight body is the only thing that can signal them which way to go.

Croyle won’t say much about it, but he also knows how his health can shape the rest of this season and his career. He gets fewer than a dozen games to prove whether he can become what the Chiefs want — or whether he’ll fade out of the league like those men Huard has seen come and go, all of them unable to shake that label.

“You get hit, get up, feel all your body parts, make sure your shoulder is still in place,” Croyle says. “Then we can go.

“You can’t really say anything. You’ve just got to go.”

• • •

The woman on the other end of the phone wants you to believe her. She’s not sure why she has to go through this again.

It’s August — a few weeks before the season — and Tee Croyle is up late, talking to a stranger about whether her son is wired the right way to be an NFL quarterback.

“It’s nothing that we haven’t heard before,” she says. “There are people who are criticizing all the time. It doesn’t make me happy, because he’s my son. But it’s part of the game. Well, it’s not part of the game; it’s just people’s opinions. Time will tell.

“From being the quarterback at Alabama and being under such scrutiny, he’s developed a thickness in his skin. At the end of the season, if you want to say all that, fine. But now until then, he’s going to do what he wants to do.”

The Chiefs aren’t worried about the thickness of his skin. It’s what goes on beneath Croyle’s skin that’s important.

Croyle doesn’t much like talking about injuries — few NFL players do. But he’s had a long list of them that followed him through high school and college and now into the NFL. He’s torn the anterior cruciate ligaments in both knees; Croyle says he was born with abnormally sharp bones in his kneecaps that led to the tears. He’s since had the bones filed down and says knee ligament tears shouldn’t be a concern.

He’s also separated that right shoulder twice, cracked some ribs and missed a game last year after being kneed in the back. It’s the recurrence of some of those injuries — the two shoulder separations and the two ACL tears — that give the Chiefs the most pause.

“I don’t know if he’s built for it, and that’s a concern,” coach Herm Edwards says. “Can he withstand constantly getting hit? Thus far, it hasn’t been good.”

Maybe it’s his size. Croyle is 6 feet 2 and listed at 206 pounds.

His mother says he’s a solid 210 now, the result of an offseason workout program and frequent eating that she might have thought would pack more than 4 pounds on her son’s body, but they’ll take what they can get.

Gil Brandt is the Dallas Cowboys’ former personnel director. He helped identify quarterbacks for the Cowboys, and his list included Troy Aikman and Roger Staubach. He says Croyle was a gamble because of his size, but it’s a gamble the Chiefs can afford because they’re rebuilding.

“Maybe you roll the dice with a guy like him because of his talent and hope that past history doesn’t prevail,” Brandt says. “I think he’s a smart person. But you know, quite honestly, that is one of the things that concerned me about him: Will he be able to stand up to the pounding?

“It would be a big concern to me.”

And the Chiefs don’t deny it is a concern. Edwards says he thinks Croyle has the ability to be a longtime starter. He can make the throws, is a player his teammates rally around and is a calming influence in the huddle. He is almost everything the Chiefs want in a quarterback.

It just might not be enough.

“If he plays 11 games,” Edwards says, “I think he’s going to win some football games for us. But there comes a point, too, where you say, ‘You know what? This is the information that we’ve gathered. Is he the guy? Do you upgrade that position? Do you draft a guy?’ We’ll find out a lot about that.”

• • •

Edwards has watched the footage a dozen times, reliving the moment that might go down as the crossroads of Brodie Croyle’s career.

It was the New England game, and Patriots linebacker Adalius Thomas hit Croyle, landing on his right arm. Croyle got up, his right arm dangling, and he didn’t throw a football again for four weeks.

Edwards says Croyle should have thrown the football before he did. Croyle was waiting on wide receiver Dwayne Bowe to get open on a double move, and that was Croyle’s first mistake.

Edwards says he hasn’t given up on Croyle.

But time is running out, and some think his injury risk is beginning to outweigh his upside. Randy Cross is a television analyst for CBS. He says the Chiefs need to see more out of Croyle if they’re going to pass on a quarterback next year and further invest in Croyle as their quarterback of the future.

“I’ve seen flashes of a very good quarterback,” Cross says. “But besides the natural ability, he’s got to be available. You’re the guy everybody looks at. Not much of that can you absolutely answer about him.

“Is that fair? No. Is the NFL about fair? No. Everybody gets their shot. Everybody gets their opportunity. He’s had an extended shot at being the guy.”

In a sense, Croyle gets one more shot. He’ll have the rest of this season, but one more injury means the Chiefs will have learned all they need to know about Croyle. They would enter the offseason and the draft knowing a quarterback is their top need. Croyle’s story would be written in Kansas City, and it would say that he had the bug, a label that canceled out his talent and demeanor and experience.

In the end, that would be all that mattered.

“We need him to be healthy,” Edwards says. “We feel if he’s healthy, he can win in this league. He can be a good quarterback for us. That’s all we’d really like from him.”