The silver lining on the news that Drew Crawford was done for the year with a shoulder injury is that Teddy Greenstein and Inside NU report that Northwestern highly believes Drew Crawford will be allowed to play for a fifth season.
My initial worry was that he had played too much time - ten games - to make the 30 percent cutoff for a medical hardship redshirt. Greenstein said that an NU official told him that they had obviously looked into it, and that if Crawford had played one more game, he would have been ineligible. NU grad and Twitterer Eric Mayo found the relevant by-laws and it appears indeed that in a scenario where NU plays no more than the one postseason game they are guaranteed, 30 percent of that year would be 9.6 percent. That can be rounded up to ten, and thus, Crawford will be able to play.
That's good news from all. First off, for Drew: I would've hated to see him end his career this way like Kevin Coble did, and I assume he dreams of playing on the next level, and at this rate, that wasn't going to happen. Secondly, for the team: he's a good player, and they'll get him and JerShon Cobb back. It would've been a fireable offense for Bill Carmody to waste Drew's senior year for ten games when he knew there was a preexisting shoulder injury, so he should be pretty happy too.
We'll talk more about what this means for this year, for Bill Carmody, and for next year later. For now, whew.