Crouch: I still want to play
digg it!
Facebook
del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit
BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
OMAHA — If his football days are over now, it is not because Eric Crouch wishes them to be.
The 2001 Heisman Trophy winner, the man who was arguably the best quarterback in Nebraska football history thinks he can still play the game. He's sure of it.
He wants to play football, and he says he's truly serious this time.
But he's finding — and this is a most cruel thing to a guy who owned football fields the way he once did — that the game just might not want him.
"The only way to keep playing is to keep going for it, until either your drive is gone or the opportunity is depreciated," he said. "You never know, though. The way you go out in your career is not always the way you want to."
Those words came from Crouch Thursday afternoon, hours before being honored at the Omaha Press Club along with Johnny Rodgers, Mike Rozier and the late Nile Kinnick.
All four football players had connections to the state and won Heismans, which is why they were being linked together on a caricature drawing that is to hang in the posh Press Club dining area.
While the award was a great tribute to Crouch's football past, it's the football future he's more worried about.
Just weeks ago, he was released by the Kansas City Chiefs, who had rights to him while he started seven games at free safety the past few months for NFL Europe's Hamburg Sea Devils.
"I wasn't surprised by it at all," Crouch said. "I had a good feeling that was going to happen, a good bad feeling if you know what I mean. (The Chiefs) needed someone to step in right away and play for them. I don't blame them. It's a business.
"But sometimes you got to take chances out of the norm. It takes a special person to give that chance. I just hope I run into that person."
Crouch understands why he's labeled a risk. For starters, he played quarterback in college and it doesn't seem any NFL teams think he's got the game at that position. Teams have also tried him at receiver, a position he said he has no interest in, and now, at safety.
For seconds, and this is probably the most damning stuff in the view of NFL teams, he left the St. Louis Rams five months after being drafted. The Rams had used their third-round pick on him and wanted him as a receiver.
"Playing the receiver position, it came down as just not being too interesting to me," Crouch said. "I probably could have gone a different way, but it's all dust in the wind now…
"I was a little injured, a little burned out, and my mind-set at that time was that I did not want to play football."
That seemed to be the end of football for Crouch until he made an attempted comeback in 2003 with the Green Bay Packers. The Packers even seemed to be considering Crouch as a quarterback.
The whole camp with Green Bay was just one big "awkward situation," Crouch said.
He'd sit in Green Bay coach Mike Sherman's office talking about being a quarterback, yet they were saddling him with both offensive and defensive playbooks.
When the Packers brought in quarterback Akili Smith and informed Crouch he wouldn't even be able to play in the preseason, he didn't see the point in sticking around.
He knew what people would say.
"If I listened to all the things that had been said to me, I probably would have hung myself by now," Crouch said. "You can't live life on how other people say or think you should live it. If you did that, I'm sure you wouldn't be happy with yourself."
Since he left Green Bay, football opportunities have been few. His action as a safety with Hamburg was his first actual game experience since Nebraska's 2002 Rose Bowl game against Miami.
"It's hard to believe with the college career I had that it's that tough to get a look," Crouch said. "But I haven't really even scuffed the surface of a pro career at all. To me, I still feel like I have a lot of football left in me.
"It's just hard to get an opportunity based on my past history. People are always going to be like, ‘Well, are you going to stick with it or not?' But I wish if someone had a question to ask me, they would just ask me."
Now 26, Crouch has two kids with his wife, Nicole — Alexi (5) and Carsen (1) — and owns an Omaha business that distributes playground/park equipment.
If football's over, he's ready to make it as a business man, he said. But he still trains just in case that phone rings.
Crouch said he's in the best shape of his life. But he has been released at about the worst possible time for a player.
While he graded his experience at safety for Hamburg as an "A+," adding that "it felt like it was a real position, a real job, like I had become a real free safety," he's pessimistic about a team calling him up now.
But he believes these last 3˝ years have all passed as they have for some reason.
"I'm just waiting to find out what that reason's for," he said.
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7438 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.
Most Commented news