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Football is, indeed, under attack: Larry Fedora, he’s right

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larry fedoraLost in the furor over UNC football coach Larry Fedora saying the game is “under attack” is that, yeah, he’s right, football is under attack.

Crazy as it sounds, Fedora is right, too, when he says “the game will be pushed so far from what we know that we won’t recognize it in 10 years.”

Now, the nonsense about the military and the country suffering as a result is, well, I’ve already used the word nonsense, so that about sums that up.

But, yeah, football is under attack. That much is obvious.

Remember when boxing was big-time? Seems like an eternity ago now that the heavyweight champion of the world was also a cultural icon. You’d be hard-pressed to name the heavyweight champ now, and no, it’s not Mike Tyson, and hasn’t been for more than 20 years.

Boxing went down before we knew about CTE, which we didn’t need, because we saw what boxing did to Muhammad Ali, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, spending the last decades of his life in near-silence due to the repeated blows to his head.

It used to be that all we cared about with football was damage to knees, to the legs in general. The image that you couldn’t get out of your head was the great Earl Campbell, the Tyler Rose, barely able to walk after leaving the game, having fought through so many gang tackles at Texas and in the NFL.

As Fedora conceded in his remarks at the ACC Kickoff yesterday, when he started playing football, the head was considered a weapon.

“You were going to stick your head into everything,” he said, but now we know better, kind of like how doctors used to use leeches to help sick patients, and now we don’t do that, and we’re also a lot smarter about hydration, when we used to give players one water break, and emasculate players who needed more.

“I’m going to tell you, the game right now, the game is safer than it’s ever been in the history of the game. It is. I mean, it really is,” Fedora said, and he’s right, but in being right about how safe the game is, you have to concede, it might not be enough.

Players are bigger, faster, and ever-evolving to become more of both. Even if we’d legislate contact completely out of the game, any incidental contact in a flag-football setting between a 6’2”, 220-pound wide receiver running a 4.3 40 and a 6’4”, 250-pound linebacker running a 4.5 over the middle on a pass play would be enough to break bodies and scramble brains.

All the teaching guys not to lead with their heads in the world is not going to do more than mitigate the violent collisions that happen hundreds of times a game on Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays.

At least we’re getting smarter about limiting hitting in practice situations, though the old-schoolers bemoan even that wise move, saying it hurts the quality of the game.

Where I have to break with Fedora is where he echoes the Neanderthals in talking about the inherent risks in playing football.

“There are risks involved in the game, and everybody that plays the game understands those risks,” Fedora said. “It’s not like they’re going into it not knowing that something could happen. And so they have to personally have to weigh those risks versus the rewards.”

Thing is about risks and rewards, if it was just something that impacted the guys playing, that’s one thing. But the costs associated with CTE, with knees and backs and shoulders that don’t work, end up being borne by the rest of us, starting with immediate families, who struggle with loved ones whose brains are deteriorating and bodies are failing, then society as a whole, in terms of bottom-line costs associated with their healthcare.

That’s why we owe it to players from peewee all the way to the Pro Bowl to want to make the game safer, and if you want to define that as the game being under attack, well, then, so be it.

Column by Chris Graham

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