Bryce Perkins Part II: Outlook At One Point Looked Pretty Bleak

The date Aug. 8, 2016, sends chills down the spine of every member of the Bruce and Lynette Perkins family out in Arizona.

That’s the day when youngest son, Bryce, went down during an Arizona State football practice, nearly ending in heartbreak.

Shawn Griswold, now Virginia’s director of football development and performance, was in the same role for the Sun Devils that day and described the scenario as the most freakish injury he’s ever witnessed.

“I was actually standing in the back of the end zone just by chance,” Griswold recalled Thursday. “Bryce pulled the ball and ran it and was just going forward when he got hit. I thought he had broken his collarbone.”

It was worse. Much worse as Perkins would later discover. He recalls the moment with perfect clarity.

“It was in training camp and I was running a zone read play from the 10-yard line,” Perkins said. “Dude was coming at me. Sometimes they hit the quarterback, sometimes they don’t.”

Perkins wasn’t sure, so he made what he said was a mistake in judgment.

“It was kind of my fault,” Perkins said. “I had my head down and [the defender] shouldered me and my neck snapped back and to the right. It really wasn’t that hard of a hit.”

Perkins and the team trainers thought it was a regular stinger at first. The entire right side of his body was numb. Still, he didn’t think it was that serious and drove himself to the hospital.

Doctors performed an MRI that revealed a two-level neck fracture, which was a horrifying reality to the family.

“[Doctors] wanted me to get surgery, but they said if I got it, I would never play football again,” Perkins said. “If I didn’t have surgery and waited, I could end up with worse problems affecting my future.”

Brother, Paul Perkins, a standout running back at UCLA, was in his training camp when Bryce was injured and his parents delayed the news because they didn’t want to worry him.

“I didn’t know the severity of it when it happened but once I found out it was kind of devastating to even understand the ramifications that he might not play football ever again,” Paul Perkins said.

When Bruce and Lynette heard their son’s prognosis the next morning and the attending doctor left the room, Bruce listened intently to Bryce’s opinion.

“[Bryce] said, look dad, I’m not having surgery,” Bruce remembered. “He said it with so much conviction, that I said, Ok, we’ll see how things progress.”

Bryce Perkins felt like if he wasn’t going to play with surgery that he might as well take a chance to see if he could heal.

“Thank God I did,” Perkins said. “By the fifth month of rehabbing, I started seeing healing. Doctors said it was a miracle, rare that we see these type of injuries heal properly.”

The rehab was intense but worked.

“That dude just worked his tail off to get where he is today,” Griswold said. “It was God’s will for him to keep on playing.

“It was pretty scary for a while,” said Paul Perkins, currently a running back for the New York Giants. “But it was such a blessing for him to come out on the other end and make a full recovery. To see where he’s at now is truly a testament. But that’s the kind of person Bryce is. He is always going to put his faith in himself and in God before anything that man says. He knows his body and was one of the examples of where he was proven right.”

Perkins missed the season and then some, but returned briefly to Arizona State, worked in spring practice in limited, no-contact, seven-on-seven drills. He was clearly behind the other quarterbacks and so he had to make a decision.

He decided to transfer to Arizona Western Community College, a junior college, and try to regain his form.

Playing for Coach Tom Minnick, Perkins led the Matadors to the 2017 national junior college championship game, losing to East Mississippi, 31-28. It was an eye-opening experience.

“It was fun but definitely hard on the mind,” Perkins said. “You have to be mentally strong. I played in the first six games with nothing to get excited about. You think, ‘wow, time is running down, when is it going to come?’

He was working hard on the field and hard in the classroom. He didn’t want to become one of those guys who performed well enough to attract more FBS-level offers from major schools but couldn’t qualify academically.

Once November rolled around, he suffered a concussion and missed a week and began to worry if he had enough games on film to present his case to interested coaches.

His mom stepped in and motivated him with a simple bracelet that read: FNAO. Failure is Not An Option. He wore that as a constant reminder that helped him through the next few weeks.

As his game sharpened and his arm got hot, so did the Matadors. Everything came together in a game against Snow College, which happened to be where Virginia coach Bronco Mendenhall played junior college football before matriculating to Oregon State.

“That was a fun game,” Perkins remembered. “It was cold, the stands were packed. Both teams went back and forth and it came down to a last-second field goal to win. It seemed like a movie ending.”

Snow head coach Paul Petersen, a former quarterback for Tom O’Brien at Boston College, was certainly convinced of Perkins’ ability after the contest.

“[Bryce] had a phenomenal game against us,” Petersen said. “In our game he had to show up and make some big plays. He did a great job with his feet, and he really made good decisions. He played lights out against us.”

Snow had scored to go up by a point with about four minutes to play but couldn’t deny Perkins’ Matadors the comeback win.

“Bryce ate up almost every second of that clock in that last drive to win it,” Petersen said. “There was a third-and-eight, we’re in good coverage, we have him hemmed up, he got out of the pocket somehow, was able to get seven yards on the next play to set up a fourth-and-one. They converted. He drove them all the way down for the win.”

One of the things that impressed Petersen was that Perkins knew where his playmakers were and got the ball to them.

“It was just good leadership ability,” the Snow coach said. “He carried that offense to that win.”

Pretty soon, some football coaches came knocking at the door hoping that Perkins could work that same magic for their programs.

COMING FRIDAY: On to Virginia. The Cavaliers are counting on Perkins to lead them to football’s Glory Land.