At a time when one of the hottest topics in Philly comes from quarterback Mike Vick’s tendency to get injured, Vick takes issue with his burgeoning reputation for getting bludgeoned.
“I don’t think I’m injury prone at all,” Vick said Sunday night, via Geoff Mosher of CSNPhilly.com. “It’s not something I’m going to worry about. I’m going out and play.”
The second part of that quote explains the first part. Is he injury prone? Hell yes. Can he afford to acknowledge that? Hell no.
The thinking in football is that guys who think about getting injured are more likely to get injured. And they’re more likely to not be as effective as they can be before they inevitably get injured.
“You know, even though I’ve had these injuries, and they’ve been minor, I’ll still go out and play the game and play it effectively without worrying about getting hit,” said Vick, who will take only 12 preseason snaps due to a pair of injuries. “Obviously, sometimes in the preseason you can tend to worry about that and your mind will get off that direction of trying to protect yourself. At the end of the day you’ve got to forget about it, go out there and play football, and that’s the only way you play and not get hurt.”
But Vick still doesn’t realize the difference between avoiding injury and avoiding unnecessary contact. Some players, like Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers, have the presence of mind to know when to hit the deck. Manning routinely does it in the pocket (something for which Jim Everett was routinely chastised) and Rodgers, an underrated running threat, knows when to slide, when to run out of bounds, and when to accelerate into open grass.
It’s not that Vick won’t. It’s that Vick can’t. And he won’t admit that he can’t.
He’s simply not wired to avoid contact. And with each incident of contact, the chance of injury increases.
So it’s not an issue of being injury prone. It’s an issue of being contact prone. And if Vick continues to be contact prone in 2012, he’ll be prone to having the team terminate his contract in 2013.