UNC’s Fedora causes stir with CTE comment
CHARLOTTE, N.C. » North Carolina coach Larry Fedora said Wednesday he doesn’t believe it’s been proven that football causes the degenerative brain disease CTE and offered a passionate defense of a sport he believes is “under attack.”
Fedora, during interviews at Atlantic Coast Conference preseason media days, described the sport as an integral part of American culture and said it is “safer right now than it’s ever been,” though he acknowledged the risk of concussions in a sport featuring constant collisions.
It wasn’t clear who Fedora was referring to in saying the game was under attack, with the seventh-year Tar Heels coach noting, for example, “it’s more about people twisting data” to argue football is unsafe. He also said players should be educated on the risks of the game.
“I don’t think that the game of football, that it’s been proven that the game of football causes CTE,” Fedora said. “But that’s been put out there. We don’t really know yet.
“Are there the chances for concussions in the game of football? Yeah, we all have common sense, right? Yeah, there are. When you have two people running into each other or multiple people running into each other, there is a chance of a concussion. But again, I’m going to say, the game is safer than it’s ever been in the history of the game.”
North Carolina is home to a noted center researching sports-related brain injuries and Fedora’s comments caused a stir at the ACC event,. He returned nearly two hours later to speak with a handful of reporters.
“I’m not sure that anything is proven that football itself causes it,” he said. “Now we do know from what my understanding is that repeated blows to the head cause it. So I’m assuming that every sport that you have, football included, could be a problem with that, right? As long as you’ve got any kind of contact, you could have that. That does not diminish the fact that the game is still safer than it’s ever been in the history of the game because we continue to tweak the game to try to make it safer for our players.”
Fedora also clarified his earlier comments to say the game wasn’t under attack from rule tweaks to improve or promote safety.
“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” Fedora said. “How’s the game under attack? To me, it’s more about people twisting the data and the information out there to use for whatever their agenda is. Tweaking the game doesn’t mean that the game is under attack . ... ”