‘Play hurt, practice hurt’: How lifethreatening injuries became normalized in college football
Clint* says he was suffering from 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 foreshadowed the tragic death of Jordan McNair at a University of Maryland practice. Clint was attended to by medical staff and ultimately hospitalized overnight. Meanwhile, the head coach called out, “Move the drill!” and sent the team to continue on another side of the field.
“One of my friends told me they had to carry on with practice and they didn’t know if I was dead or not,”
Clint told us, adding: “[Head coach] never checked on my wellbeing before, during, or after.”
Perhaps the most notable part of this story is the way it was waved away by other sources we spoke to, including members of the coaching staff: “At this level in sports, that type of practice is common. We have multiple injuries a practice. They can’t just halt everything and everyone once a player goes down.”
This is precisely the problem: lifethreatening injuries are standard procedure in college football, normalized to the extent that training is seen as impossible if sessions are stopped to care for injured players.
Just days after the training campcollapse, Clint says he had his only conversation with his head coach checking in 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’re up to it. If you’re not up to it, we’ll have to move on with [your backup].”
Clint understood that to mean that he could not afford to take time off to recover – “the message was sent” – and so he returned to practice 10 days after the collapse.
But, he says, he had not actually recovered from the injury – and did not tell coaches he was still feeling the effects of his collapse and earlier undiagnosed concussion for fear of losing his place on the team.
“I returned to the practice field earlier than I should have, was not fully asymptomatic, and did as many other players before and since have done, and put the clear signs that my brain was sending me on the backburner and didn’t miss another day.” Instead, he says, “The entire 10 days or so build up to the first game, I was suffering from intermittent migraines, inability to sleep, and decreased appetite.” Nevertheless, he started and played that entire game.
After the game, in consultation with some trusted coaches and medical staff on the team, Clint 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 that his head coach offered him the chance to speak to the team, which he accepted. However, he adds 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’s a lot of concussion stuff out there right now, and we have a long season ahead of us.” Clint says that he agreed to the head coach’s stipulation, a decision he calls “the one regret I do have.”
Clint’s experience is hardly exceptional. The dynamics he describes evokeconditions across college football. In anonymous interviews** conducted with former players for our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an AllAmerican Game, many athletes spoke about similar issues.
One player told us that he too was dissuaded from bringing up the issue