Gazette-Times reporter

A bye week allows football players extra time to rest up and heal bumps and bruises.

For Oregon State head athletic trainer Barney Graff and his staff, the work doesn’t slow, but the bye week does make the job easier. The Beavers have the weekend off before starting preparation for the Arizona State game.

“We’ve played seven games now and just by the nature of the sport, some players are going to be banged up,” Graff said. “They’ve got bruises, they’ve got different problems.”

Graff and the OSU football coaches are able to identify players who need to step away from contact or stay off their legs for a few days.

“So when we get into game week next week, they’re at a better state of health than if we kept pounding, pounding, pounding,” Graff said.

There’s plenty of preventative maintenance going on in the training room every day to keep the players on the field for practice and games. The basics include getting the players taped up properly and making sure they have the right padding for practice.

Some injuries happen despite the measures taken, but Graff is on constant lookout for ways to cut down the possibility of torn ligaments or broken bones. One such measure has been special knee braces for the offensive linemen, who often find themselves in pile-ups with players falling on or rolling up against their legs.

A few years ago, Graff noticed that most Pacific-10 Conference schools had their linemen fitted with a new style of brace that the Beavers were not using.

“You turn on your TV if you have a chance to watch a game and you see college teams all across the county, their offensive linemen are wearing them,” Graff said. “But the thing that really hit home is when we were bringing recruits in and the parents would ask, ‘If my boy comes here to play offensive line for the Beavers, are you going to put him in those knee braces?’ So that’s when I really looked into it.”

Graff contacted the other Pac-10 trainers and most in the Big 12 and asked them how many of their offensive linemen had been sidelined with knee injuries.

“Our time-loss knee injuries were something like two-and-a-half times higher than the schools that had the knee braces,” he said.

Graff took the data, put together a report and brought it to the OSU coaching staff and administration. Soon, the Beavers had their new braces. Graff said the move has saved several players from major injury.

“There was a play in Saturday’s game up at Washington where one of our players took a hit on the lateral side of his knee and on film it look really bad,” Graff said. “It happened early in the game and the guy didn’t say anything to me until Sunday, when he says, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come watch this film.’ ”

Sharing information with other trainers is a common practice throughout the country. The Pac-10 team physicians and athletic medicine staff members get together every year in May and go through issues that have popped up through the past 12 months.

They also contact each other during a season if a question needs to be answered or a problem solved. Sometimes a rule winds up getting changed or added through the actions of a trainer.

“(Last year) I sent a short note in that as an athletic trainer I was in favor of the NFL’s horsecollar rule to trickle down to the college level because we had a few times last year where one of our ball carriers was running down the field and he was getting yanked down by the back of his shoulder pads,” Graff said. “I know what the game of football is all about, but at the same time, I don’t see one of our guys get hurt when it could be avoided.”

A survey went out to trainers throughout the country and the majority agreed. The play is now a penalty.

“We’ve seen that applied a few times,” Graff said. “In the USC game, our player was tackled by the horsecollar and it was a 15-yard penalty.”

The Beavers know to come to Graff or his staff for even the smallest problems and whether or not the injury happened during a game, practice or elsewhere.

“We let the players know at the first team meeting of the year that regardless of what the problem is, whether it happened on the football field or in the weight room or maybe something happened while they were playing basketball over at Dixon. Or they have a bye week and somebody might roll an ankle if they’re out hunting or step wrong on a river bank while they’re fishing,” Graff said.

“We want them to come in and let us know so that we can number one, help them get the appropriate care and direct them where they need to go and then we’re informed and we can help that player as best we can and keep people informed of what is going on with that guy.”