Greg Hansen: Being 'groggy' nothing new in football

Much like the latter-day Matt Scott, Krohn was an adventurous soul, a run-first type of QB with a mixture of talent and toughness that got him into the Canadian Football League and, later, into the old USFL.

"It's fun watching films and see plays you don't remember," Krohn says now. "Somehow I had the ability to run one or two plays off of instinct until I would take the snap and go the wrong way."

Thankfully, Krohn's football career ended without him being disabled; he is now chief operating officer of a Phoenix real estate conglomerate.

In the Pac-12 era, Krohn was the first Arizona quarterback helped off the turf with a potentially crippling injury. We've seen them year after year: Keith Smith, Dan White, Willie Tuitama, Brady Batten, George Malauulu, Mark Fulcher and now Scott.

"It's like Thomas Edison said: Mass times velocity can really mess you up," says Don Bowerman, a retired Tucson educator who was an Arizona running back from 1954 to 1956.

"If Matt Scott had come along in my era, 6-feet-3-inches, about 200 pounds, he would have been a tackle. Now he's one of the smaller guys out there. That tells you all you need to know about the violence and the potential for injury. They are bigger and faster. But there's nothing new about concussions in college football."

In a 1954 UA-Texas Tech game at Arizona Stadium, the UA's franchise player, tailback Art Luppino, the Cactus Comet, was punched in the face by Red Raiders' guard Arlen Wesley.

It was later revealed that a Texas Tech assistant coach had created a bounty, offering a suit of clothes to anyone who could knock the Cactus Comet from the game.

Today, living in Kerrville, Texas, Luppino cannot offer an accurate estimate of the number of concussions he suffered in his UA career. He knows that after spitting up two teeth and being treated in the locker room during that 1954 Texas Tech game, he returned to play the second half.

He says he never played another game, over two more seasons, without a concussion.

"Something about concussions that the general public fails to understand is that they become more and more easy to get after the first one," Luppino says. "That was my case, anyhow. Any sharp blow to the head or body and you are drifting around, no pain, just two beats behind everyone else, unable to protect yourself or even aware you should protect yourself."

And isn't that the worrisome issue with Matt Scott? In a football sense, can he be whole again?

It was ironic that when Scott was concussed at UCLA last week, Arizona senior center Kyle Quinn returned from a month of idleness; he had been sidelined by an ankle injury.

"I could've broken my leg in a lot of places," Quinn says. "The trainers just told me, 'Kyle, it's a serious injury.'"

Kyle Quinn is 6-3, 290 pounds. He knows the risks.

"I used to think it was a violent game, but not any more," he says. "As an offensive linemen, we love being physical. You can't stop and think about it too much."

From one Wildcat to the next, from Don Bowerman and Jim Krohn to Matt Scott and Kyle Quinn, the unspoken code is that you are vulnerable. About the only change is that medical treatment and awareness now err on the side of the athlete.

"When one of our guys would get a concussion, we'd say they got their 'bell rung,'" says Bowerman. "That wouldn't stop you from playing. Sometimes, the mark of toughness was how many scabs you had on your face."

Unthinkable today, Bowerman chose to play without a facemask. They were made available in 1954, but the quality of the single bar was such it would sometimes shatter and cause serious puncture wounds.

"I thought facemasks were dangerous and unsafe," says Bowerman. "In practice one day, our big lineman, John Mellekas, gave me a forearm to the nose. There was blood everywhere. Our trainer, Charlie Ott, yanked my nose back into place, stuffed it with cotton, and sent me back on the field. Shoot, When I broke my hand in seven places, the trainer said "you'll be OK.'"

Today, a football player is not judged to be OK until a team physician and a group of trainers apply their medical expertise to every situation. Even at that, it becomes polarizing fodder for news and social media outlets.

Luppino remembers some 1950s fans accusing him of "dogging it" when he got up slowly after a play.

"Shoot," he says, "I wasn't dogging it. I was groggy."

Now, almost 60 years later, groggy is still an unfortunate and familiar condition in college football.