MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Kyle Bosch flashed a big Midwestern smile and made a crack about denying media credentials to any reporter who thinks the Big 12 doesn’t measure up to other Power 5 leagues.
His mood Friday was much improved from the last time we saw him April 15.
Two plays away from finishing up his first-team cameo during West Virginia’s spring game, Bosch found himself flat-backed on the turf with trainers and coaches huddling.
He pounded his fist and grimaced as the knee brace came unsnapped. The agony pulsing inside his left leg only slightly worse than the uncertainty surrounding his senior season.
“I hear a pop and something was hurting in my lower leg, so I’m thinking it’s a knee or the ankle,” he said. “It was one of those things like, ‘Is this really happening? You can’t be serious. At least let me go out against Oklahoma or something that matters — not the frigging spring game.”
Bosch limped off the field without assistance, signifying only that the leg wasn’t broken. The health of his tendons and ligaments were another matter.
“I was stepping but since my ankle was misfiring, my knee was buckling. So I was horrified,” he said.
What did the All-Big 12 guard contemplate on the sideline? He thought back to former Michigan teammate Jake Butt, a prized tight end who tore his ACL three months earlier in the Orange Bowl. Several NFL personnel sources projected Butt as a second- or third-round pick before the knee injury, dropped him into the fifth.
Bosch stewed and fretted on the bench, and learned he would have to wait two days for the tell-tale MRI.
He tried to distract himself by attending the West Virginia-TCU baseball game just hours after the injury, but there was no squashing the doubt as to whether his senior season might have evaporated before it began.
No doubt the West Virginia staff worried too, fearful of losing a 26-game starter and the most irreplaceable piece on next fall’s offensive line.
The MRI eventually showed no damage, and head coach Dana Holgorsen announced the good news April 18.
“Thank God it was just a high-ankle sprain and it’s all healed up now,” Bosch said. “So I’m just doing prehab instead of rehab on the ankle. Everything’s going well.
“It’s one of those things that when it happened it was a lot scarier than the result.”