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Media days are supposed to be boring, with coaches going through the motions about various offseason good vibes and such. Larry Fedora, however, is here to spice things up, and by spice things up, I mean fire off a bunch of ill-considered remarks about football, brain injuries, and the United damned States of fine-ass America, dammit.
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.”
— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) July 18, 2018
UNC coach Larry Fedora says he once spoke with a general and asked him what makes the American military the best in the world.
— Matt Fortuna (@Matt_Fortuna) July 18, 2018
The general’s answer, per Fedora, was simple: The United States is the only football-playing nation in the world. pic.twitter.com/eCRY40gIeD
Hey man, they play football in Canada too, y’know. While you’re too busy going full InfoWars over here. At any rate, this is the single dumbest thing I have heard in at least an hour. Football is a fine sport, but it is always evolving, and it is never going to stop changing. There was a time when prominent football men thought the forward pass was an awful thing only used by wimps.
If you want to conflate legitimate concerns about the health of people playing the sport with an attack on its existence, that’s your dumb-ass business, I suppose.
Fedora has doubled down on the decline of football impacting the state of the United States: “I think it would be the decline of our country, yes.”
— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) July 18, 2018
You know, we’re living in a society!
Larry Fedora: “I don’t think it’s been proven that the game of football causes CTE. We don’t really know that. Are there chances for concussions? Of course. There are collisions. But the game is safer than it’s ever been.”
— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) July 18, 2018
Fedora has been embarrassingly careless with his own players’ head injuries before, so we shouldn’t be surprised that this is how he feels. It’s this blockhead meat sandwich of a mentality that established the whole macho football-is-a-war-we’re-soldiers-and-nothing-hurts shit that he’s circling around in the first place. It’s destructive and it’s nonsense, and if you’re Bryn Renner, it’s probably dangerous, too.