USA TODAY International Edition
BERRY: PLAYER SAFETY ALWAYS FIRST
In February, 33 years after attending his first American Football Coaches Association convention, Todd Berry was named the organization’s executive director. Berry, who played at Tulsa and coached at Illinois State, Army and Louisiana- Monroe, spoke to USA TODAY Sports’ George Schroeder about the state of college football and the AFCA’s priorities related to it. The interview is edited for length.
Q: What do you think are the most pressing issues facing coaches and the game of college football?
A: There are certainly an awful lot of things that football as a whole, and not just college football, needs to address. Our group was founded to keep the players safe. And so we help fund studies. I’m talking about financially, we help fund them. We don’t just lend our support, we fund medical studies in relation to all the things that are potentially threatening to our players because we want to continue to make our game as safe as we possibly can. Quite honestly that’s always been a concern.
I think that certainly recruiting has changed at the collegiate level pretty dramatically and is maybe headed in a bad direction. And I think as coaches we recognize those things. There’s a reason for that 800- page rule book. It’s because since we’ve been playing this game and the NCAA has been involved with it, there’s been reasons for all of those ( rules). And certainly some of them are antiquated, but there’s also some that maybe appear to be antiquated but are there to make sure that everybody plays a fair game.
Q: The issue of concussions has been at the forefront of concern over the last few years. You hear dire predictions that football won’t be what we know it to be now in 25 years, or people won’t allow their sons to play. Where are you on the danger?
A: I don’t think there’s any question that there’s some danger involved. We’re intelligent people. We recognize that this game is — that there are going to be some collisions at times. The thing we want to do as coaches is do the best thing that we can to protect the game but also keep our players safe.
We’re actively involved in these studies. We’re going to address it with technique, we’re going to continue to address it with equipment, we’re going to continue to address it with studies, and if there’s something that is showing a propensity to create more head trauma, then we want to find ways to eliminate them from the game.
Q: Specifically in terms of kickoffs, what thoughts would you have on how or whether to change them?
A: I’m not saying anything that needs to be written in concrete, but there seems to be some appearance that there might be more head trauma in the kickoff play than in any other play in college football. And while again we’re trying to collect all the data, and we’re assisting our trainers in making sure all the data is collected, you’re hearing some coaches actively talk about changing the kickoff.
While I don’t see the kickoff necessarily going away, if we can make some adjustments to the kickoff to allow the play to become a much safer play, as the coaches did years ago when they didn’t allow players to block below the waist in kicking situations — which was tremendously dangerous in terms of the number of knee injuries that were created — it was the coaches that encouraged those rulings, to say this is not a safe way to do these things.
I don’t know what the time frame is. I know that it needs to be sooner rather than later. We’re all recognizing that.
Q: Do you have concern or an opinion on the proliferation, especially among the Power Five programs, of analyst positions — these guys in the polo shirts who aren’t actually in coaching positions?
A: I do have some concerns. I think that it’s given a lot of individuals that would love to get into our game opportunities to get in there. But we also recognize that certainly over the last few years that when some of our staffs are approaching a hundred different people now, the one thing we do have in our profession in relation to the other NCAA sports is that we have the least number of actual coaches per player of any sport out there. That’s something that we probably need to look at.
Do we need to add another coach to make sure that our players are getting the proper techniques and treatments and all those other kinds of things, enough eyeballs on them in practice?
But we are concerned about the explosion of these other positions. Right now quite honestly it’s going to be somewhat difficult to head it off. And it does give some of our institutions a much stronger position than some of our others.
We want young people to have the opportunity to be exposed to the game. If it becomes too expensive — we don’t want universities, as UAB did last year, to drop the game because it becomes too expensive for them to compete. And obviously that’s the risk whenever you’re not addressing this proliferation of these positions.
Q: We see players who have been dismissed from one program leave for a different school fairly often. They go for a fresh start somewhere. How much responsibility does a coach from the school the player is leaving have to share the reasons the player got into trouble with the new school? And what responsibility does the coach at the new school have to ask?
A: It’s hard to get every answer to every question. But I know that every time I’ve looked to get a transfer, I wanted to know why they were leaving a program. If they were suspended, I wanted to know what were the reasons why. Were they missing weightlifting, and part of that being that they just weren’t happy at the place and they were in a difficult spot — they might have lost a loved one or something like that and just been in a difficult spot at that time? Or was it something greater?
And if it is greater, then it is the coach’s responsibility to alert the other coach to a problem.
Q: We’re heading into the third season with the College Football Playoff. Do you think the Playoff has been good for the game? Is it possible that the focus on the Playoff puts more of an all- or- nothing burden on coaches?
A: Not all of our coaches are in full support of the Playoff, and we need to give it some more time. But I’m a big proponent of it because I think that almost all of our coaches and all of our players are that competitive. We were the only NCAA sport that did not settle it on the field. And so I think it was significant that we take the step.
And I think it’s really good for the game. It’s good for our young people. And quite honestly, so much of what we do as individuals is about winning. You don’t win at all costs and winning isn’t everything, but that desire and that opportunity is one of the things that has made our country.
One of our concerns as coaches is that we’re not impacting that week of finals with bowl games and so on, and that we’re not drawing this sport out into the next semester in any form or fashion. You’ll see us be very, very resistant as a group that our season doesn’t get any longer than what it is for our student- athletes. We think that’s important for our student- athletes as a group. Regardless of the financial considerations that are out there, that’s something that we’re pretty adamant about.