COMMENTARY Fedora’s mentality is as dangerous as concussions
It’s easy to isolate Larry Fedora and lampoon the North Carolina coach for his outrageous mindlessness during his nowinfamous comments about the future of football. You can call him foolish, callous or truculent. You can call him misinformed or primitive in his thinking. You can call him selfish. Just don’t consider him an outlier. The Fedora mentality remains too prevalent in the sport, especially among coaches.
While you’re demanding that this coach put on his thinking Fedora next time, remember that there are plenty of influential football figures who also think the game is under attack because of increased safety measures. Like Fedora, they also attempt to minimize the dangers of the degenerative brain disease CTE and possess an overinflated sense of football’s importance in American society.
“Our game is under attack,” Fedora said Wednesday during ACC media days, amid a rant in which he questioned studies about football’s role in causing CTE. “I fear that the game will get pushed so far to one extreme you won’t recognize the game 10 years from now. That’s what I worry about, and I do believe if it gets to that point that our country goes down, too.”
The whole country, huh? “There will be decline of our country, there’s no doubt,” Fedora said. “There’s no doubt in my mind. …”
If football disappeared tomorrow, it would be missed for a while, but then we’d find something else in the toy bin. Many sports and activities teach us about teamwork, discipline, strategy, loyalty, commitment and all those good things that football offers. No game will ever be irreplaceable. It is a diversion, not a religion.
Fedora had said that we’re still in a period of evolving science about CTE and how exactly football, or any contact sport, can mitigate the risks. It would have been fine if Fedora had said he’s torn between teaching the game the way he learned it and living in a new world that is more aware about all the risks involved with playing football.
There’s nothing wrong with being confused, or even a little skeptical, about how to react to all the information as science tries to make more exact conclusions.
But it’s unproductive for Fedora to turn into the oversimplified meathead to combat the equally reactionary other side.
“I don’t think it’s been proven that the game of football causes CTE,” Fedora said. “We don’t really know that. Are there chances for concussions? Of course. There are collisions. But the game is safer than it’s ever been.”
It’s a false narrative to say flatly that playing football will damage your brain. It depends on many factors, including the player and how he competes and how much contact to the head he absorbs and how the medical staff treats him. But it’s naïve to ignore some compelling research, including the Boston University 2017 report that studied the brains of 111 deceased former NFL players and found that 110 of them had evidence of CTE.
That study didn’t answer every question, obviously. We still have no idea how common CTE is, in general. But it doesn’t mean that all assumptions about a game in which players bang heads frequently can be discarded. Common sense demands that the issue be treated seriously. If Fedora wants to be a CTE truther, he risks looking like an even bigger idiot years from now, when the science becomes definitive.
You know you’ve wandered too far out on the ledge when Lane Kiffin can use your remarks to turn into the voice of reason. Kiffin, Mr. Footin-Mouth, disagreed with Fedora on Thursday during Conference USA media days.
“What’s the most important thing?” asked Kiffin, now the Florida Atlantic coach. “Longterm health? Or how the game looks?”
Games evolve and survive. Baseball looks vastly different from era to era. The NBA isn’t a very physical or defensiveminded league right now, but it is thriving. Football has become a game of space and speed instead of brute strength, and guess what? The sport is still America’s passion despite its efforts to ruin itself.
Fedora and all the masked Fedoras out there can adapt to a modified game. Change won’t ruin football, but there is one thing that could kill it: if people start considering it barbaric. It’s time to start valuing human beings rather than manipulating them.