At the end of last college football season, Notre Dame linebacker Jaylon Smith suffered a serious knee injury in the Fiesta Bowl, dropping him from a Top 5 pick to the second round and costing him millions of dollars. Yet Smith has no regrets.
After Stanford running back Christian McCaffrey and LSU running back Leonard Fournette announced that they will skip their bowl games to prepare for the NFL draft, many cited Smith’s injury as the reason that McCaffrey and Fournette are making wise decisions. But Smith said on Monday that he would play in the Fiesta Bowl again, just to compete one more time with his teammates, even knowing how much it cost him.
“Honestly,” Smith wrote on Twitter. “With Everything I’ve been through, If I could go back to Jan. 1st I’d play again.”
Honestly. With Everything I've been through, If I could go back to Jan. 1st I'd play again. #ClearEyeView
— Jaylon Smith (@thejaylonsmith) December 20, 2016
That may seem hard to understand for some, but it’s also an attitude that a lot of football players have: They want to do everything they can to help their team win, even if they suffer personally for it. That Smith has that attitude is certainly welcomed in Dallas, where the Cowboys have Smith under contract and are hoping he’ll begin playing for them next year, once that knee injury finally heals.