Clint* says he suffered an undiagnosed concussion when he collapsed on the field during preseason training camp for a team in the Power Five, the elite level of college football. It was an incident that the tragic death of Jordan McNair at a practice at the University of Maryland. Clint was being treated by medical personnel and ended up spending the night in the hospital. Meanwhile, the head coach yelled, “Move the drill!” and sent the team to another side of the field.
“One of my friends told me to keep practicing and they didn’t know if I was dead or not,” Clint told us, adding: “[Head coach] never checked my well-being before, during or after.”
Perhaps the most striking thing about this story is the way it was dismissed by other sources we spoke to, including members of the coaching staff: “At this level of the game, those types of drills are common. We have multiple injuries per practice. They can’t just shut everything down if a player is out.”
Here’s the problem: Life-threatening injuries are standard procedure in college football. They’ve become so normalized that practices are considered impossible when practices are stopped to treat injured players.
Just a few days after the training camp collapse, Clint says his only conversation with his head coach was to check on his health. He says the head coach told him, “We need two weeks of work from you, and I need to know if you can handle it. If you can’t handle it, we’re going to have to move on [your backup].”
Clint understood this meant he couldn’t afford to take time off to recover – “the message had been sent” – and so he returned to the practice 10 days after the collapse.
But, he says, he had not fully recovered from the injury and did not tell coaches he was still suffering from the effects of his collapse and the earlier, undiagnosed concussion, for fear of losing his spot on the team.
“I returned to the practice field earlier than I should have, was not completely asymptomatic, and did what many other players before and after me have done, and put the clear signals my brain was sending me on the back burner and never missed another day.” Instead, he says, “I suffered from intermittent migraines for the entire 10 days or so leading up to the first game, couldn’t sleep, and had a decreased appetite.” Nevertheless, he started and played that entire game.
After the game, Clint, after consulting with several trusted coaches and team medical personnel, decided that the best and safest course of action would be to retire from the sport he loved. When informed of the decision, Clint says his head coach offered him the opportunity to talk to the team, which he accepted. However, he adds that the head coach also told him, “Don’t go into too much detail, we don’t want to scare any of the other players. There are a lot of concussions right now and we have a long season ahead of us.” Clint says he went along with the head coach’s determination, a decision he calls “my only regret.”
Clint’s experience is by no means exceptional. The dynamics he describes evoke college football conditions. In anonymous interviews** with former players for our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Gamemany athletes spoke about similar issues.
One player told us he was also discouraged from discussing the topic of head injuries with teammates because it could affect their desire to participate: “We had, I think it was six or seven offensive linemen that got concussions … I said, ‘Hey, I want everybody to come over to my house, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to watch this movie Concussion . We’re going to see what happens when you’re running back, we’re going to see where this can lead if you’re not careful.’ … But my head coach at the time got wind of it. And he said, ‘You’re not going to do that. You’re not going to get everybody involved and you’re not going to watch that movie.'”
Another player described a terrifying experience during training camp: “They weigh you every day before and after practice to make sure you don’t lose too much weight. I don’t think anyone looks at it because I lost 30 pounds in five days… On the sixth day, after two morning practices and lifting, I just felt my body getting cold… I went into the shower in the back and I was unconscious… I was told later that I basically had all the signs of possibly going into cardiac arrest… I had no pulse, so they started putting saline bags in me… I had thrown up so much that my esophagus had scar tissue and it was starting to close up a little bit… I missed that afternoon practice and I felt super guilty about it. You know, Stockholm syndrome, whatever you want to call it. The next morning I went for an endoscopy. All they found was a bunch of scar tissue. So the next day I practiced again… and I would still throw up a little bit here and there, but it eventually went away. It was crazy. There wasn’t really anyone looking out for my mental or physical well-being. I pushed myself so hard that I literally almost died.”
It’s no surprise that Clint agrees that his experience wasn’t unique. He told us that his head coach’s message was consistent. You play injured, you train injured, and availability is the most important skill. He was constantly complaining about the injured players who were inside for their rehab during practice. He wanted them outside during practice, but not standing around. He said multiple times that it shouldn’t be comfortable to injured. He felt that if being injured felt like a break from work, then more men would pretend to be injured.”
That comment was echoed by a former teammate, who added: “The only thing I would like to mention is [head coach’s] training. I remember one day in particular on the playing field at 5am. We were doing a training where several people ‘dropped out’ with full body cramps and exhaustion. The training room after the training had over eight people on drips, essentially convulsing from the full body cramps.”
Clint also noted that scholarship withdrawals were a consistent issue he noticed during his time with his head coach. He explained that, “The plan that was presented to a lot of us when we were recruited: come in, redshirt, and in your fifth year, once you get your academics sorted out, you can try to get accepted to graduate school. That was my five-year plan as well. For a lot of the players in my class, they were forced to graduate and leave when they had worked with academic supervisors for four years to plan their schedule so that their redshirt senior year [fifth year] they were going to graduate school. Several players in my class were told to leave, ruining their previous four years of planning.”
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His former teammate noted a similar phenomenon – and one noted repeatedly by players we interviewed for the book at programs in the US – regarding drug testing: “We also had body snatching. [Our head coach] started making it clear who he wanted to kick off the team, take away their scholarships to make room. People who had been on the team but hadn’t contributed. Every Wednesday they were drug testing six or seven people. And it was clear that they were using it to take away scholarships rather than to discourage smoking weed.”
The other former player also recognized himself in these memories: “Once you are in the team, it is common knowledge that all lines [head coach] says it’s important to get your degree, but that’s only for the parents during the recruiting process… He does tell recruits that he wants them all to graduate with a master’s degree, but it’s never really pushed and I can’t think of a single person who has actually done so.”
Clint, for his part, is still struggling with the physiological effects of his time in college football. “My psychologist and I both believe that the three to four weeks between my hospitalization and the first game [of the season] could have long-term effects that could last the rest of my life. I was essentially practicing and playing for almost a month in a permanent post-concussion state.”
Why is he sharing his story now?
“There is a shadow hanging over college football that needs to be illuminated for the benefit of all involved, not just the athletic departments that profit from the labor and health of the underprivileged population they ’employ.’”
Still, Clint himself is in a good place now. He says, “I ended up getting a world-class education and meeting the love of my life and the mother of my children at [college]. [My head coach] is just a footnote in my story.”
* Clint is a pseudonym. We have not named the university in question to protect the identities of those we spoke to, who fear reprisals.
**Former players we spoke with for The End of College Football were granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation and in accordance with academic research protocols and research ethics committee requirements.