Let's face it, pitchers are pampered in Major League Baseball.
Every year, the words "pitch counts" and "innings limits" fly around as though they're the gospel truth, especially when the regular season begins to wind down and the postseason looms. One thing that seems to be constantly overlooked is the impact that too many carries in college football has on running backs that make it to the NFL.
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Some of these guys, who are young kids in college, are barreling through defenders all college football season long, being tackled and mauled, and not much is made of it. Yet if a pitcher (heaven forbid) throws over 100 pitches in a game (gasp), the sports world goes insane.
Take a look at the recent Matt Harvey situation with the Mets. His agent, Scott Boras, looking to protect the financial interests of his client in the future, claimed that Dr. James Andrews, who performed Harvey's Tommy John surgery, set a hard innings cap of 180.
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New York general manager Sandy Alderson intervened and got into a public pissing contest with the agent, until the doctor himself revealed that what Boras said was all hogwash and there was no hard cap.
Still, the Mets have skipped Harvey's turn in the rotation late in the season and even gave him a ridiculous half outing in the Subway Series, which predictably blew up spectacularly Sunday night against the Yankees. Even the Nationals protected Stephen Strasburg by shutting him down ahead of the 2013 playoffs. Washington lost the NLDS in five games that season, an outcome that likely wouldn't have happened with Strasburg available.
Though both of these teams have taken criticism for these moves, including Washington to this day, they are trying to look out for their young talent, which is more than can be said for college football. Take Darren McFadden, who was supposed to be an impact player in the NFL, but hasn't lived up to expectations. The running back's workload increased to ridiculous proportions at Arkansas.
In his first season with the team, he ran 176 times and he followed it up with 284 the next year. In 2007, McFadden was handed the ball 325 (!) times and finished with 1,830 yards and 16 touchdowns.
McFadden's gaudy projections didn't transfer over to the NFL and he has only played all 16 games of a season once, last year. The closest he came to his ridiculous 325-carry output was 223 in 2010. That's over one hundred less carries.
Though it's not as highly-publicized as pitch counts, running back carries in college should probably be reevaluated.
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