Bryan Stork won a BCS title, Super Bowl before he was 25. So why is he coaching 2 years later?

Bryan Stork was the best center in the country in 2014.

It was then, with him snapping footballs to Jameis Winston, Florida State won the national championship. Thirteen months later, he was a rookie with the New England Patriots, celebrating a Super Bowl win.

He was only the fifth player to win the college football national championship and Super Bowl in back-to-back seasons, and it seemed obvious that Stork was well on his way to a long, and lucrative, NFL career.

That was 2 ½ years ago. Stork has trimmed down from the 310 pounds he carried in 2015, his final professional season. The reddish facial hair he grew during his time in Tallahassee that helped him to look like he belonged among the Patriots’ offensive lineman is mostly gone.

And, instead of preparing for another NFL season, the 26-year-old Stork is in Hattiesburg, where he’s a graduate assistant coach helping the Southern Miss football team.

His career is another one cut short by head injuries and the risk of potential trauma due to playing football. Even if Stork is not ready to admit it quite that plainly.

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“Listen, I’m not a doctor,” he said. “I don’t research those things. I’ve been through those things and I had to make the best decision for myself. And every player, at some point, will have to make that decision.”

That’s about as much as he’s willing to address what led him to this point. Instead, he is trying to concentrate on the reality of his present. Stork recently joined the Southern Miss coaching staff. He assists Golden Eagle offensive line coach Erik Losey, who was a graduate assistant himself for two years at Florida State when Stork was the Rimington Trophy winner and an all-ACC player.

“He coaches like that coach that wants you to be better,” Southern Miss right tackle Ty Pollard said. “He’s not just going to stand there and let you mess up. He’s the O-line coach when the O-line coach ain’t lookin’.”

Stork was considered — as recently as 2015 — to be among the brightest up-and-comers at the center position. However, injuries — specifically those to the head and neck — plagued him throughout his career. Prior to the 2016 season, Stork suffered his fourth concussion in as many years, dating back to his senior season with the Seminoles.

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That’s when the Patriots attempted to trade him to the Washington Redskins, but a failed physical reportedly derailed the transaction and Stork was released by the Patriots. He announced his retirement in March, via Twitter, by Kenny Rogers song. Stork knew it was time to fold.

“I just felt like it was the right time to walk away,” Stork said. “Just for a better life. For my future family. Kids, things like that.”

Stork is far from alone. In 2015, San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland retired at the tender age of 24. Considered by many to be the first domino in the rash of early retirements due to long-term well-being concerns in recent years, Borland has been outspoken with regard to his reasoning.

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“I just honestly want to do what’s best for my health,” he told ESPN’s “Outside The Lines” after recording 107 tackles as a rookie in 2015. “From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

There have been others like him. Following the 2016 season alone, 13 players under the age of 30 retired from the NFL.

Most recently, Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel (a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at MIT) made headlines when he retired last month at 26. His decision to prematurely end a promising playing career came the same week a study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) — a degenerative disease linked to frequent and repetitive blows to the head — was found in the brains of 110 out of 111 deceased NFL players that had been donated for research purposes.

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“I worry about everything,” said Southern Miss coach Jay Hopson, who has spent 25 years in the game and was a teammate of Ole Miss’ Chucky Mullins when he was paralyzed in a 1989 game. “I worry about CTE. I worry about (severe neck injuries). You worry about everything as a coach. I consider myself and all the coaches in the (American Football Coaches’ Association) professionals in this field. We want to be safe. You’re trying to teach the safest way to play the game — proper tackling and all that.”

But he acknowledges the fine line that’s also involved with coaching football.

“It’s a combat sport,” he said. “It’s a tackle sport and always will be. So I don’t have that magic jelly bean answer for eliminating (neck) and head injuries. The bottom line is you try to do your best to teach it fundamentally the best you can. That’s all you can do."

Southern Miss trainer Todd McCall has been with the school since 2003, and he remembers from his playing days when a concussion test was literally asking the player how many fingers he was holding up.

“Later, it was based off symptoms,” McCall said. “You couldn’t do anything until your symptoms were gone.”

“I know I got dinged once (at Western Kentucky),” Losey said, “and on the sideline, my concussion test was the old sobriety test: tip your head back, touch your nose and see if you kept your balance.”

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Things have changed: Every player now submits to a battery of baseline tests administered by McCall at the start of the season.

“Then, if they’re concussed, every day they’ll come in and see me,” he said. “I’ll do a symptom check on them, and that’s all 20-some odd symptoms. And we’ll score those zero to six, six being terrible and zero being fine. When they’re totally asymptomatic, I’ll give them an impact test again to see what their mind’s doing as far as recall. If that’s fine, I can start progressively exerting them and I’ll ramp it up over five days.

“On the fifth day, if they’ve passed everything, I’ll get with the doctors and chat about it and we’ll be able to cut them loose for contact on the sixth day.”

Not everyone returns to the field, though. Southern Miss doctors told Jordan Greene in 2013 that, after four concussions (two in college, two in high school), he’d risk his quality of life if he continued to play.

“I don’t know, man. It was a weird place to be,” said Greene, now an offensive line coach at Lexington (Kentucky) Catholic High School. “It’s still weird.”

Stork knows the feeling. Yet he also understands he can use what he’s learned to possibly help make a difference for the next guy hoping to fulfill his dreams in the NFL.

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His desire to begin a career in coaching reached a fever pitch in the spring. After obtaining his real estate license, Stork found himself itching to get close to the game again.

“I didn’t enjoy what I was doing,” said Stork, who was also coaching part time at St. Edwards High School in Vero Beach, Florida. “It was just tough. I’d be sitting there when I’m supposed to be doing real estate stuff and I’m going over plays and going over the script for the day. So I was like, ‘All right, I need to be in football.'”

He reached out to Losey, who helped him land in Hattiesburg.

Despite Stork’s brief tenure so far at Southern Miss, Losey likes what he’s seen.

“He brings great experience to our room,” Losey said. “The guys can relate to him because they’re striving to be him. It’s been exciting to see how they flock around him. And he’s no stranger to work so he’s been great.”

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Golden Eagle center Devin Farrior, a redshirt senior, said Stork’s impact on the position group was immediate.

“It’s ridiculous how much stuff (Losey and Stork) know,” he said. “And it has helped having (Stork), a guy that came from the NFL and knows everything that we need to know.”

Stork can now concentrate on passing his knowledge along to other NFL hopefuls, and he’s at peace with that.

“Obviously, we all want to play 10 years, but it doesn’t always work out like that,” Stork said. “But I’m very blessed the way things did work out. It was hard at first because you want to keep playing. But you know what, since I can’t play no more, I want to be part of these guys and help them be better players.”

While he’s neither bitter nor frustrated, Stork isn’t interested in serving as a cautionary tale.

“I just coach what I know,” he said. “And I do what Losey knows. Football’s football. It’s a collision sport. It is what it is. But we’re going to do our best to give them the best technique and form as offensive linemen.

"That’s all we can do.”