Kevin Sumlin’s knuckle was something we were not prepared for (Photo)

Kevin Sumlin has the hand of a former football player and has the knuckle to prove it to you.

There are normal-looking knuckles, and there’s whatever Kevin Sumlin has going on for him.

The Arizona Wildcats head football coach just got spanked by Herm Edwards‘ Arizona State Sun Devils in the Territorial Cup to the tune of 70-7. Arizona State has won the fourth game in a row in this rivalry game, the first time this has happened since the 1970s. As Sumlin went to shake Edwards’ hand, they embraced for a hug and Sumlin’s freakishly mutated knuckle resurfaced.

Didn’t he have a ring on that finger at some point?

While Sumlin has cut his teeth as a bit of a quarterback whisperer as a college head coach, he did played linebacker for four years in the mid-1980s for the Purdue Boilermakers. The amount of football players with hands that will terrify you are endless. From Torry Holt to Ronnie Lott to Anthony Muñoz to Michael Strahan, gnarly digits are just part of the game of football apparently.

There are only four ways I can describe the busted ring-finger knuckle on Sumlin’s left hand, and I will do my best to convey all four things it reminds me of right now. . .

1. You take a drumstick from a turkey or a chicken, somehow shrink it down to the size of an adult human male’s ring finger, you stitch it on there with a bit of yarn and you got yourself a dang chicken finger!
2. If you were to take a gum ball, distill it down to its very essence and inject it into its purest form of sucrose right beneath that one knuckle right there, you wouldn’t be feeling for a quarter in your pants pocket the next time you’re about to leave a grocery store.
3. Remember in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry got all mad at his not-Aunt Marge and blew her up using involuntary anger magic. Basically that, but with a Power 5 football coach who just had more than 69 points scored on his team in a rivalry game to fall to 0-5 on the year.
4. If you were to get married, triple your body weight from the time you said, “I do” until right now and your doctor is about to tell you the wedding band has to go because if not, it’s the finger, this is what your digit would look like in the immediate aftermath after Doc sawed off that “one-size-fits-all” wedding band.

In truth, Sumlin probably rocks the gnarliest of knuckles as a point of pride. It is an ever-present remember that he is a football lifer. He may have jacked it up playing in the mud in West Lafayette, Indiana during the Ronald Reagan Administration, but it is still here with him some 35 years later for the whole world to see after losing to a rival at home by 63 points in the middle of a pandemic.

This is why you got to go with a hug because a fist bump may startle some people.

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