I think the reasoning on how people feel about Cam is more nuanced. He is out because of his health, I have little doubt that if he wasn’t injured he would be playing. So at the basest level the reason is his health.
The reason he’s losing people is that there is a sense that we’re being strung along. Cam has made a mistake and put himself in an almost lose-lose situation.
If he doesn’t play, we know that he was completely game planned around and is vacuuming up our practice time so we feel like that time was wasted. And it was. But it’s deeper, we feel that he could’ve been more forthcoming about his actual condition from the get go AND he could’ve been honest with the program at any point thus far and said hey I can’t be the guy right now.
If he does play and he doesn’t absolutely ball out he’s still going to get turned on because we’ve sacrificed everything for him only for him to take a step back. And you’d STILL get the sense that he wasn’t being forthcoming about his condition in this case because obviously the internal expectation within the team was that he’d return to form and we were willing to sacrifice conference wins for that possibility. To be clear I’ve never even contemplated that a single player I’ve ever watched play for Utah was worth more than the program, but that’s the implication we’re dealing with in Cam’s situation.
If you’re Cam knowing that in the last week or two even your most staunch supporters are turning the corner on you you’re out of time. You come play and ball out or you do what you should’ve more than a month ago and be honest. OR, and this is a very important or, you completely bow out of the situation knowing that you want to make a run at your dream, the NFL. Playing injured only threatens his dream.So if you’re Cam and you don’t think you’re going to turn it all around and make the scouts drool it’s probably better to not show your face at all.
There actually isn’t a scenario left where Cam wasn’t valuing his recovery and NFL shot over the Utah Utes, that’s a given at this point. And both of those are a very big deal, neither is a silly thing to want, but we’re a football program not a waiting room. There’s only a scenario left where he comes back and plays well enough for people to forgive him for it.
To be clear it’s Cam’s prerogative to value his health more than the Utah Utes. But he needs to be honest about it. And it was the responsibility of our coaches 10 months ago to say “alright Cam we want you back but we have to prepare with personnel we know are going to make the season. We will give you every resource we can for you to be that guy, but we have a responsibility to the program and that means covering our bases. Worst case we get you to the draft healthy.”
We know for certain that both Cam and the coaching staff failed to do this. Neither is forgivable at this point.
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