At ACC Media Day on Wednesday, North Carolina head coach Larry Fedora’s media session was an absolute doozy, with Fedora repeatedly claiming that the decline of football would lead to the decline of the United States and that there was no evidence that CTE was linked to playing football.
First, here’s what Fedora said about football’s decline and the how “our game is under attack”.
Larry Fedora: “Our game is under attack … I fear that the game will be pushed so far from what we know that we won’t recognize it 10 years from now. And if it does, our country will go down too.” #ACCKickoff
— Josh Graham (@JoshGrahamShow) July 18, 2018
https://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/1019623324123566080
He also claimed a member of the military told him that the American military is so great because they grew up playing football.
UNC coach Larry Fedora says he once spoke with a general and asked him what makes the American military the best in the world.
The general’s answer, per Fedora, was simple: The United States is the only football-playing nation in the world. pic.twitter.com/eCRY40gIeD
— Matt Fortuna (@Matt_Fortuna) July 18, 2018
https://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/1019625554016964610
As mentioned above, Fedora also linked the potential decline of football in this country to the potential decline of the United States in general.
https://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/1019630862625837056
More from Larry Fedora on football and America (he did say that you shouldn’t be playing tackle football before middle school): pic.twitter.com/I0qt1zC3VC
— Matt Fortuna (@Matt_Fortuna) July 18, 2018
And then there’s the CTE stuff, with Fedora claiming that football was “safer than it’s ever been” and that he doesn’t believe it’s been proven that football causes CTE (which, well, it isn’t “football” that causes it, it’s the constant collisions that take place in football).
More from Larry Fedora: He doesn’t think it’s been proven that the game of football causes CTE, but that has been put out there as fact and has turned a lot of people off.
— Matt Fortuna (@Matt_Fortuna) July 18, 2018
https://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/1019629889035603968
Here’s Fedora’s full uh….series of comments about football being “under attack,” in which he also claims data is being “tweaked” to support the anti-football mindset.
"The things that we change year in and year out, in tweaking the game for player safety, all of those things I think are good for the game … The game is safer right now than it's ever been in the history of the game. That doesn't mean you're gonna eliminate all the injuries."
— Brendan Marks (@BrendanRMarks) July 18, 2018
A few minutes later, he gets back into it.
"I fear that the game will get pushed so far to one extreme that you won't recognize the game ten years from now. And I do believe that if it gets to that point, that our country goes down, too."
— Brendan Marks (@BrendanRMarks) July 18, 2018
These seem like the ramblings of a coach that went 3-9 last year and hasn’t won a bowl game since 2013. The CTE stuff, to me, is way more significant than Fedora’s whole “football is under attack” nonsense, because it could set the school (and perhaps Fedora personally) up for a lawsuit in the future if a player suffers a serious head injury.
