MORGANTOWN — People who play football are not all the same.

As he tries to step off the curb while going down the street, the average individual twists his ankle and reaches for his cell phone, sometimes phoning 911 and then a lawyer. Viewing it as the worst thing that has ever occurred, he rapidly finds out how much insurance will pay and how much sick leave he has remaining.

Football players are much better at handling disasters than average people are. Take, for example, 6-foot-1, 218-pound Florida linebacker Trey Lathan of West Virginia, whose season ended before September had even reached October.

Lathan had shown himself to be a special kind of player four games into his redshirt freshman year, having just accounted for eight tackles in each of two consecutive games against Pitt and Texas Tech and was off and running against Houston before his football world went haywire.

While trying to make a tackle, Lathan went down to the ground with a leg injury and knew right away that this was not good.

“I felt it. Then, I looked at my leg and it was just dangling over, so I already knew it was over,” he said.

As he related what many of us would consider to be a pretty horrible event, there was no longer any fear in his voice. He realized that in football, things do happen, sometimes bad things. He had witnessed it happen to his childhood buddy, WVU running back CJ Donaldson Jr., when he suffered an ankle break the year before.

Lanthan understood what he was dealing with because he had previously experienced a broken foot earlier in his career.

His first interview since coming back this year was rather matter-of-fact: “I fractured my tibia and my fibula.” “They essentially broke in half.”

He said it as if it was just all in a day’s work.

He might as well have been saying, “Yeah, we had our pregame meal, we started playing and I was doing OK, except that the two bones in my lower leg were snapped in half.

He didn’t even sound like there was anything special about the surgery he underwent.

“They put a rod in there and four screws,” he said, making it sound as routine as a plumber coming in and fixing a leaky drain.

This is not to downplay the emotion of the moment on the field. Players kneeled as Lathan was attended to and everyone in the stadium knew it was a serious injury.

He was loaded into an ambulance and taken away with a trainer and his mother to the hospital, but