Carson Wentz exemplifies North Dakota spirit
North Dakotans are no strangers to the unrivaled success of the NDSU Bison football team. The perennial national champions are legendary in college football ranks. One of the first Bison players to crack the highest echelons of the NFL was Carson Wentz, drafted with the second pick in the first round of the 2016 NFL draft by the Philadelphia Eagles.
The next year, the former Bismarck Century Patriots quarterback led the Eagles through a storybook winning season en route to the Super Bowl. He was injured late that year and had to watch his team win the World Championship from the sidelines, but everyone knew that he had led the team there.
In the years since, he has bounced around with other teams, sometimes as a starter, sometimes as a backup. This year, he became the first player in NFL history to start for six different teams in six consecutive seasons.
That opportunity also brought him home, to neighboring Minnesota, where he joined his favorite childhood team, the Minnesota Vikings, just before the regular season began.
Brought onboard as the backup, he quickly learned the playbook and became familiar with his teammates. That role didn’t last long, as an injury to the team’s young starter, JJ McCarthy, forced him into the starting role.
Traveling to Europe for two consecutive games, the team lost the first—a close game played in Dublin, Ireland—to the Pittsburgh Steelers, but in his second start, Wentz hit his stride, bringing the Vikings back from a deficit late in the game, as he marched them down the field, completing every pass on an impressive scoring drive to eke out a victory over the Cleveland Browns in London.
In that game, Wentz was injured but he continued to start for the team, going 2-3, overall, as its starting quarterback. That run came to an end in a disappointing Thursday night blowout loss to the Los Angeles Chargers in which the entire team came off the rails. A notable failure was that of the battered offensive line which simply could not protect their quarterback and Wentz spent much of the game flat on his back, often writhing in pain.
It wasn’t until days later, when it was announced that he would be placed on injured reserve status and undergo season ending surgery that the full scope of the injury he’d suffered weeks before and the extent to which he’d soldiered on, through excruciating pain, to help the team became known. His injuries were extensive—a shoulder dislocated and damaged so severely that not only was his labrum torn, but the socket was also fractured. Yet, he played three more games in that condition.
Social media and sports media have exploded with commentary about the issue since. Some have criticized Wentz’s performance but most have focused on the injury and his playing through it for so long. Some have criticized the team for allowing him to continue to play while so seriously injured but Wentz has said that he wanted to continue. A man of deep Christian faith, loyalty, and grit, it exemplifies his character.
That spirit — that commitment to team and teammates, that willingness to endure pain and struggle in order to do his best, to help his team — exemplifies the best of North Dakotans.
It’s not a rare trait among those in the Roughrider State. In fact, it was memorialized by one of North Dakota’s favorite sons, although he was not originally from the state.
Theodore Roosevelt, who said he would never have become President of the United States if it had not been for the time he spent in North Dakota, said it best in words that now exemplify Carson Wentz:
