WP: Prehistoric college football coaches are killing players

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Heatstroke didn’t kill Jordan McNair, the berserk excesses of coach DJ Durkin and his staff did. No amount of “honoring” McNair can pretty up that fact. The investigation into what Maryland did wrong after McNair collapsed is misplaced. It’s what came first — the deranged college coaching mentality that drove McNair to the staggering point — that requires full inquiry, and no one should be allowed to forget it.

An NFL player hasn’t died from heat exertion in 17 years. That’s the full measure of the crude, knuckle-dragging stupidity at work here. You know how many kids NCAA football coaches have killed with conditioning drills in that same period? Twenty-seven. I say “kill,” because that’s what it is, when tyrants force captive young men to run themselves to death, out of their own outdated fears of weakness. Why is the NCAA tolerating this kill rate, which is unmatched at any other level of football?

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University of Oklahoma trainer Scott Anderson has a term for this idiotic and outmoded brand of collegiate workout: “irrational intensity.”

Anderson wrote a 2017 academic paper entitled, “NCAA Football Off-Season Training: Unanswered Prayers,” that documents the stunning kill rate in the college game.

“Collegiate football’s dirty little secret is that we are killing our players — not in competition, almost never in practice, and rarely because of trauma — but primarily because of non-traumatic causes in the off-season alleged to performance enhance,” he wrote.

Anderson cites the example of a player who died from exertion-induced asthma, after being forced to run 2,160 yards of serial sprints in just 12 minutes, with a 1:1 work-to-rest ratio. You know what the work-to-rest ratio in an actual football game is? Somewhere between 1:8 and 1:10. Even in a hurry-up offense, it’s 1:4.

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...there is no NCAA rule restricting conditioning workouts or mandating independent medical care and monitoring for student-athletes. Maryland’s president Wallace Loh declined to implement just such a proposal. So, McNair was left to lurch and pant into the hands of athletic department employees who answer not to a medical center but to a hopped-up, impatient-for-success head coach. If McNair had independent care, someone would have taken his temperature, and iced him down, and he would be alive. Instead what he got was a trainer screaming, “Drag his arse across the field!”

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