“I took a helmet to the chest and was feeling immense pain and was unable to raise my arms,” a former player in one of the top college-football conferences — the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Big Ten, the Big 12, and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) — called the Power Four, told us. The player has asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. “One of the assistant trainers took me to a primary-care doctor, who said he suspected that I cracked my sternum and that I shouldn’t practice.”
But when the player got to practice, the head trainer decided to ignore that advice. “He said I would start practice with full contact and ‘see how I feel,’ which essentially means I’m just going to have a full-contact practice, because you can’t be the guy to pull yourself out … I actually have what looks like a dent in my chest to this day due to this injury.”
That experience aligns with an apparent trend across college football. At Pennsylvania State University, a recent successful lawsuit over the termination of the former medical director of athletics alleged that medical staff were pressured to rush injured players back into action. Likewise, at the University of Washington, a running back was reportedly pressured to return quickly from a serious knee injury.
Those abuses are covered in a recent article by Bloomberg Businessweek, which also focuses on troubling dynamics at the University of Minnesota. When Moira Novak, UM’s athletics health-care administrator (a Big Ten-mandated position required to have “unchallengeable autonomous authority”), objected to hiring decisions, she was soon relieved of the position. In response, she hired a lawyer and negotiated a settlement with a significant payout. Soon after, she wrote a 10-page letter to the university’s Board of Regents in which she shared a range of troubling allegations: “Female athletes had complained about aggressive massages from strength coaches that left them with bruises; coaches in multiple sports had pressured medical staff to disclose private information about players’ mental health; hockey players had been given non-narcotic painkillers through a prescription written by a university doctor who’d filled it in his wife’s name.” The university hired a law firm to conduct an investigation, which ostensibly exonerated it.
The higher you get, the more money that’s at stake. So knowing the difference between pain and injury is a moot point.
The Minnesota Reformer also found that Novak had charged the university with allowing Richard Pitino, a former basketball coach, and P.J. Fleck, the current football coach, “to handpick the head athletic trainers for their respective sports, bypassing her authority as the hiring manager.” Other allegations Novak made, the Reformer notes, include that “a strength coach, who is still employed by the athletic department, routinely performed a nonevidence-based technique called ‘activation’ in which he massaged athletes’ bodies, causing athletes to cry and scream in pain and bruising. Some female athletes reported feeling pressured to submit to the treatment, and one reported bruises on the inside of her thigh after treatment, according to Novak.” This coach also allegedly “recommended a student use a banned supplement to treat migraines,” “advised against wearing sunscreen,” “sent emails telling athletes to ice their testicles,” “advised male students when to masturbate to best enhance their athletic performance,” and “had athletes run up and down the steps around the 3M Arena at Mariucci with snorkels in their mouths and clips on their noses to limit oxygen intake.” Another coach at Minnesota reportedly “conspired with an athlete to withhold information about a concussion; that player later fainted while boarding a plane and had to be transported to a hospital.”
Around the time of the investigation at Minnesota, Bloomberg reports, a star freshman offensive lineman named Grant Norton enrolled at the university. Norton suffered an injury during practice that made him start “vomiting blood.” He kept practicing, riddled with anxiety. In a few weeks he lost 25 pounds, for which “strength coaches at first punished him,” requiring him to “do five-minute planks and other additional exercises.” Eventually he was referred to a doctor who diagnosed him with a torn esophagus, for which he had surgery.
Reportedly, when he went to Fleck “to seek time to rest and recover,” he was granted only four days off. Norton told a therapist in the athletics department that “he’d never felt so alone and depressed.” When he next talked to Fleck, the coach disclosed information that had only been shared with the therapist. Fleck suggested that Norton might want to head to a “smaller school,” but Norton said he was done with football. The coach “told him not to say anything bad about Minnesota.”
While conducting research on college football, we heard many similar stories from former players. The former Power Four player told us that, three or four days after he’d suffered a concussion, coaches “would ask me if I still had a headache.” When he said he did, “they became visibly frustrated with me. They would say things like, ‘Well you can’t just sit out forever, you’re going to have to come back eventually.’”
That player also told us about a coaching maxim that cropped up in a number of our interviews, too: “It’s more of a pain thing than a structural thing.” “What they meant by this,” the player explained, “was that playing with the injury wouldn’t do any real damage to you, that it would just hurt. So if you weren’t comfortable playing with this injury, you weren’t tough, so to speak.” Another player told us, “The higher you get, the more money that’s at stake. So knowing the difference between pain and injury is a moot point.”
Another player said that coaches would imply that injured players were “nursing injuries” in order to collect scholarship money without providing anything in return: “In so many words: ‘You’re milking the system.’”
Players described a culture in which playing through injuries was celebrated by coaches. That’s especially troubling when it comes to head injuries, which can cause serious lasting damage including chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease caused by repeated trauma to the head. In fact, the chances of contracting CTE doubles every two and a half years or so that athletes play football. Shockingly, coaches all too often send concussed players back on the field prematurely. The former Power Four player told us, “One of my roommates got a concussion one game and practiced the next Wednesday, making it impossible for him to have passed concussion protocol in that time, and he was still complaining to me about his headaches as he was practicing.”
Another player we spoke to said he learned that one of his position teammates was involved in contact practices every day for four weeks, even though they are limited by a rule to three such practices a week. He didn’t know what to do, so he called the university’s compliance department and pretended to be the player’s concerned father. The compliance officer said she would help. But “that afternoon … we go into our position groups and our coach comes up to us and goes, ‘Which one of you fucking pussies complained to your dad? Which one of you bitches said this was too hard and said that your head hurt?’ So obviously that told me that this compliance officer, the lady that I turned to for help, had called the coaches.”
No one ever intervened. Dangerous violations of the rules continued. “Nobody came. Nothing changed.”
Some of the testimony quoted here is drawn from the authors’ The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).
