The torrent of tweets from former Illinois offensive lineman Simon Cvijanovic on Sunday were enough to make any reasonable person squirm. They described a coaching staff that mishandled players’ injuries, demanded they play through them and berated those who didn’t.
Taken together, Cvijanovic’s allegations read like something from a bad football script, where a tyrannical coaching ogre with his cleats planted in the 1950s treats dedicated, hard-working players like captured spies in a prisoner-of-war camp before finally getting his whistle ripped off his chest and his, uh, clipboard handed to him.
A movie reviewer might be inclined to say the screenwriter took liberties with a plot that couldn’t happen today, only the Illinois senior says it did.