Texas Football: Sam Ehlinger dealing with pre-spring camp injury

A key injury to follow moving forward is something that rising senior Texas football quarterback Sam Ehlinger is currently dealing with.

Likely the most important player that the Texas football program needs to remain healthy throughout the year, including the bulk of the offseason, is to-be senior star quarterback Sam Ehlinger. Head coach Tom Herman is returning a lot of talent and production on both sides of the ball, but there’s no single player that’s more crucial to this team’s success than their signal caller.

With the Texas Longhorns football program fast approaching the beginning of spring camp, they need to get as healthy as possible on both sides of the ball. Texas had just too much turnover all over the coaching staff to not get on the same page with the roster set for the 2020 season. They need to get in a good rhythm in spring camp.

It would be a big setback if a rising senior leader like Ehlinger would have to miss valuable scrimmage time and practice reps during spring ball. But that might be something that could happen, especially given his track record with injuries since the beginning of his high school football career.

According to a report from Horns247, Ehlinger is “working through an injury” ahead of the start of spring camp. The particular nature of the injury is some strained rib cartilege, and it doesn’t appear to be too serious for the time being. This injury apparently stems back to the end of the 2019 college football season, which isn’t all that surprising.

Ehlinger likes to run into opposing defenders head first, and he takes a lot of hits year in and year out. There are few returning quarterbacks in the Big 12 that have taken even close to the amount of hits that Ehlinger did over the course of his three year college career.

This report shows that Ehlinger isn’t expected to miss any major time during spring drills and the Orange-White Game next month. He is missing some time during winter conditioning, trying to recover for spring camp. But that might be it.

What this could mean is even more of an emphasis on the two quarterbacks that Texas signed in the 2020 recruiting class that enrolled early, Hudson Card and Ja’Quinden Jackson. Along with to-be redshirt sophomore quarterback Casey Thompson, the next three quarterbacks on the roster now for the Longhorns need to be ready no matter what in the wake of a possible Ehlinger injury at some point this year.