Colt Brennan passed away yesterday. He was found unconscious in a rehab facility eleven years after suffering a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. It appears there may be some relation between those two things.
I can’t comment on Brennan personally, but I can give you the Wikipedia sparknotes. He attended Mater Dei High School, backing up Matt Leinart there before Leinart graduated. He was kicked off the team at Colorado, having been found guilty of trespassing into a female student’s dorm room, where he allegedly drunkenly exposed himself and fondled her. He transferred to Saddleback College, a junior college, and from there transferred to Hawaii, where he became a Heisman Trophy finalist and something of an icon for a certain segment of college football fandom. From there, it was a few years in the NFL, a few years in the CFL, a brief stint in the Arena Football League, and then evidently a troubled retirement, which ended yesterday in tragedy.
Again, I can’t comment on Brennan personally. It seems he was troubled. It seems he did at least one very bad thing. It’s hard to know what to say about his life based on just a Wikipedia catchup session on a guy whose name you haven’t seen in the news for a decade. But I suppose I can comment on what he meant to that certain sort of college football fan.
Colt Brennan’s peak coincided with my middle school years. We’d watch him play late at night on one of the basement TV’s. We’d play Boise State vs. Hawaii exhibition games in NCAA Football 07 and 08 on the PlayStation 2. He was one of those players everybody knew and everybody felt like nobody else knew—the kind of mid-major icon who would have been a Twitter sensation had Twitter then been a mainstream entity, and was a sensation nonetheless. I played NCAA Football. I read ESPN.com. I watched Colt Brennan. He was a system quarterback, sure, but he turned Hawaii into a national brand for those two years, and what more could you want in a mid-major college football darling?
Colt Brennan, for many of us, is representative of that particular slice of nostalgia. That’s part of what makes his death so sad. There’s the tragedy of it—any death is sad, anyone found unconscious in a rehab facility is sad—and there’s the personal sadness for those who did know him personally, but there’s also this nostalgia, and the emptiness it leaves behind, and the emptiness he leaves behind.
Condolences to those who grieve. May he rest in peace.
