Ever play the quarterback middle-name game? No? OK, this will be your debut. It consists of just two questions, so it won’t take long.
Answer: John Constantine Unitas and Daniel Constantine Marino, two of the best classic drop-back quarterbacks ever to play the game.
Answer: Keegan.
I can’t wait to meet him to compare family trees to see if we might be related. I know we already have at least one thing in common, that being an apparent aversion to spring and summer conditioning workouts.
Berglund blew off spring football. He has not attended summer conditioning workouts with teammates who have confronted triple-digit heat and suffocating humidity, brothers in sweat bonded for life by mutual respect.
Brock Keegan Berglund — sort of has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? — has found himself in a legal pickle. Some KU football enthusiasts will try to use it as a convenient excuse for Berglund not wanting the starting quarterback job badly enough to compete for it. They want to believe Berglund is the Buzz Lightyear of the real world, poised to elevate the KU football program to infinity and beyond.
Not so fast. The alleged third-degree assault didn’t take place until April 9, the date of KU’s sixth of 15 spring football practices. The frustrating point for Berglund: Had he stayed in Lawrence to participate in spring football, he wouldn’t need to fight in court to preserve his good name.
It’s easy to see where dealing with misdemeanor allegations might require Berglund to be in Colorado every now and then, but missing all the summer conditioning workouts? He apparently flew in for team pictures and again later to sign scholarship papers, but didn’t join teammates in the Summer-from-the-Sahara runs.
Oh well, a football program can’t turn on one young man, although Todd Reesing, when healthy, certainly made a huge difference. He graduated a semester early from high school so that he could get a head start. He eventually beat out his friend Kerry Meier and then turned him into his favorite target. The rest is record-book history.
That was then. This is now: Berglund remains on the KU football roster, leaving head coach Turner Gill with an interesting decision. Gill’s attraction to coaching football seems to be more about helping teenage boys grow into confident men than about gaining acclaim for winning.
Still, he wants to win and win big, as he stated at the news conference held to announce his hiring.
“I’m not coming here to use it as a stepping stone to a football dynasty, but rather to create a football dynasty here at KU,” Gill said then.
Starting with a last-place Big 12 finish and a consensus pick for last, is it possible to build a dynasty by letting a player at the most important position continue to stand by the river, one toe in the water, while the rest of the players swim upstream to improve themselves?
