Barber: Bryce Love risking a lot by returning to Stanford

Bryce Love is sacrificing so that all of us may prosper. Thank you, Bryce Love.

But was returning to Stanford for one more season really a good idea? Should we celebrate Love carrying the ball for the Cardinal when they open the 2018 season against San Diego State on Friday night?

I remember when I rooted for every good college athlete to remain in school as long as possible. Give us another season as an NCAA star before getting buried in the talent heap of the NFL. Spend another year on a leafy college campus before entering the grind of professional sports.

How naïve I was. How blinkered. Now I see the NCAA for what it is: the most exploitative sports organization in America. It uses football and basketball players to sustain an empire, an empire of packed bleachers and wall-to-wall television and licensed hats and shirts. Everyone gets a piece, except for the athletes - unless you count the free classes, room and board (trifling compensation compared to the multimillion-dollar contracts of the coaches) that the best players receive as tokens of the NCAA’s gratitude.

Now, when it’s reported that a college junior is weighing whether to come back for one more season at the U or enter the NFL draft, my reaction is the same: Go! Get out! Cast off your shackles and make some money!

Bryce Love decided otherwise. He surprised most everyone and chose to play at Stanford as a senior.

“More than the game, I love the bonds that I’ve formed with my teammates, my brothers - it’s what makes football so pure,” Love wrote in a first-person essay that appears in the current edition of Sports Illustrated. He added: “I couldn’t leave without trying one more time to achieve everything that my teammates and I have dreamed of: getting to another Rose Bowl, winning the Pac-12 North and the conference championship.”

More than any other college football player, Love has good reasons to play as a senior.

He has a chance to win the Heisman Trophy; he was second to Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield last year, and is on the short list of favorites for 2018. And Stanford has a shot at the Pac-12 title; Washington is the only school in the conference placed higher in preseason rankings.

On a conference call Tuesday, I asked Love if his decision would have been different had the Cardinal beaten USC in the 2017 Pac-12 championship game (they lost 31-28), or if he had won the Heisman.

“I mean, that’s a tough question,” he said. “Obviously, would have been different talks and all of that. But I was pretty confident in what I wanted to do, as a unit. Sadly, we weren’t able to win the Pac-12, weren’t able to win the bowl game (against TCU). But at the end of the day, it was a tough decision. And I’m happy with the decision.”

Love also has some things to work on. He led all Power 5 conference running backs in rushing yards (2,1128), yards per carry (8.1) and 100-yard games (12) in 2017, despite a compromised ankle that kept him at less than 100 percent for most of the season. But he wasn’t much of a factor in the Stanford passing game. That’s a team and individual goal in 2018.

More fundamentally, Love has options than lie far beyond most football players. He plans to graduate with a degree in human biology in December, and is intent on becoming a pediatrician. “Something else I’ve dreamed of ever since my doctor cured me of pneumonia when I was little,” Love wrote in the SI piece.

Though every player has the potential to find a satisfying second career after football, the reality is that most will never have earning power that comes close to what they make in the NFL. Maximizing their years in the league isn’t just sensible, it’s imperative.

Love is a different case, though. It’s clear from the medical track he has undertaken at Stanford that he could skip the NFL entirely and enter a life that is not only personally rewarding, but financially lucrative.

So Love had really good reasons to spend another autumn on The Farm. Anyway, it’s his life. He’s done pretty well with it so far, and I wouldn’t presume to lecture him.

But it’s fair to worry about the kid.

No one knows exactly where Love would have gone in the NFL draft. He stated in SI that he was “projected to be a top-30 pick.” That was the high end of what I saw. Despite his explosive speed and impressive production, some scouts had Love pegged as a second- or third-round selection, mostly because of his size. He was about 5-foot-10, 196 pounds. He may be a little heavier now.

Let’s say Love would have gone in the middle of the second round. That would have slotted him at right around $3 million in signing bonus and rookie salary. That’s a lot of cash, even for a future doctor. It was a gamble to walk away from that - especially when you consider that the average career of an NFL running back is 2.57 years, according to data from the NFL Players Association.

Love carried the ball 263 times as a junior. He might hit 300 as a senior. Heavy wear and tear on a maybe-200-pounder.

Bryce Love is uniquely positioned to accomplish two things that most of us can only dream about: Playing football at the highest level, and helping to save lives (or at least improve them) as a physician. He framed his decision to return to Stanford as a quest to do both. I want him to do both. I hope he’s great at both.

But coming back for his senior season doesn’t further that cause, it puts the cause at risk (risk that is only partially offset by the insurance policy Love has taken out). Even if Love gets his degree in December, he’ll need years of medical school before he can practice pediatrics. So why not delay those last two or three classes until his NFL career is done?

In the end, who benefits most from Love’s return? His teammates. Stanford University. The Pac-12 Conference and the NCAA. And football fans like us.

I don’t really get it, but thank you, Bryce. Be safe out there.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at (707) 521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.