Last June, Rashod Bateman got sick.
The Golden Gophers wideout wasn’t just under the weather. His body ached. He struggled to yank himself out of bed. Asthmatic since childhood, he was forced to use his inhaler for the first time in his life to try to breathe. Doctors had no answers for him, even with a positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
Head spinning from it all, he chose to opt out of the 2020 season. Around that time, NCAA programs were furiously debating the merits of playing football during a pandemic, and Bateman felt like he made the right call. He talked to his mom. He talked to his head coach, P.J. Fleck, and for a minute, everything started to feel somewhat normal.
Then the FBS machine kicked into gear. Conferences began to patch their schedules together. Bateman felt a responsibility to his teammates and opted back in. Again, life took on a familiar rhythm for a few months until there was a COVID-19 outbreak within the Minnesota football team in the fall. Not wanting to contract the virus a second time, still fearful of the sickness that knocked him out over the summer, he opted out again before the Gophers’ final two games.
“Kids all across the country were placed in tough positions to make tough decisions at an early age,” Bateman said. “It kind of has affected my career with me opting out. People questioning me. It was tough. And with social injustice, things like that, 2020 was a mess, man. That’s all I could say about that.”
While he did receive plenty of support, he also had to traverse constant feelings of remorse, fear and guilt.
“It was one time in my life where I had to be selfish about my life and my career,” he said. “I didn’t know how to feel about it. I feel like I let Minnesota down. I feel like I let my teammates down and I have to deal with that forever, just because of how the whole year was, you know?”
During the draft evaluation process, scouts, executives and members of the media often throw around heady terms like , and —the kinds of concepts that take a willing human being a lifetime to round out and fully understand—and apply them to what happens in and around the football field with a bunch of teenagers and young adults. But in 2021, players like Bateman are redefining platitudes that were once banal and ultimately meaningless.
What does confidence mean to him now? To teams now? What does maturity mean when talking about a 20-year-old medically compromised football player trying to make a decision that will affect the rest of his life and the lives of hundreds of people in his immediate orbit? What if that shouldn’t be considered a weakness, but a strength, to question the eager flow of people willing to host a season in the middle of the pandemic?
What if that decision helps teams learn more of the good about Bateman, a player with confidence by the kegful and enough raw talent to upend the 2021 receiver rankings that seem to have cemented into a consensus?
“It’s just, the first big decision I ever had to make in my life was going to Minnesota,” he said. “But 2020, making these decisions, it made me a man. You gotta man up and deal with these things. Life is going to throw some hoops and circles at you, and you have to juggle it all. Everyone was juggling, juggling, juggling. And it prepared me for where I’m at now and where I’m going to go.”
