• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, November 1, 2018

I have been closely following the events at the University of Maryland, where following the May death of a player from heatstroke, the head coach was investigated, reinstated, then fired about 24 hours later. It took public backlash for the school to see the error of its ways in keeping the coach on.

In 1971, Bill Arnold, one of my teammates at the University of North Carolina, died a week after suffering heatstroke. The same day he collapsed, I lost 11 pounds of water weight.

Following his death, the University investigated itself and found no reason to fire the coach, although a number of players, including me, argued that the macho culture of the football program led them to limit hydration under the idea that a little suffering in the late summer humidity made you more of a "man." This was a fatal idea.

The UNC football program defended itself by saying there was not enough evidence to prove that their negligence caused heatstroke, and that "you could have heatstroke shoveling snow." Bill Arnold was not shoveling snow.

No one got fired. Not the trainer, not any coaches, not the team doctor. Nobody.

Have times changed? Perhaps. Certainly the science and medicine around hydration have advanced exponentially -- but as you saw at Maryland, shit still happens. 

It wasn't like the kid dropped dead on the spot. He showed symptoms for an hour, symptoms that did not result in immediate, emergency care. That is criminal to me.

When I wrote a cover story for Sport Magazine some time after Arnold's death arguing that sports medicine was feeble and often compliant in the death of and/or serious injury to players, I was on the “Today” show opposite a sports doctor who dismissed my theorem by saying, ”More people get hurt skiing than playing football."

All this was way before it was revealed that football was not only a game of broken bones, torn ligaments and sprained ankles, its repeated blows to the head were setting the stage for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that causes way too many former NFL players to commit suicide or live out their lives in a brain-addled state. CTE is not a pro football problem. It can start in teenage years.

Much of the discussion about the situation at Maryland has to do with the University moving from the ACC to the Big Ten, chasing bigger paychecks — and if that helps create a culture that  lessoned the chances of the kid surviving heatstroke. Probably. College football is nothing if not about money.

College programs will talk about their new concussion protocols, experiments with sensors in helmets, staff nutritionists and "erring on the side of safety” — but at the end of the day, it is about the money. The more you win, the more you make, the higher the bowl bid, the bigger the payout. Rich alumni want their names on football facilities that produce winners, not 5-7 seasons.

While most college teams go out of their way to protect and nurse their starters, it is another story for the "scout teamers" who are less important and thus in many ways, expendable.

No one wants a kid to die on the football field.  But this has not happened for the last time.