Speaking at a recent press conference, University of North Carolina football coach Larry Fedora said that the game of football is “under attack,” and will see major changes over the next decade.
Fedora noted that the game has been an integral part of American culture for generations, but the game is under so many pressures today that it may suffer tremendously over the next ten years, Fox News reported.
“I fear that the game will be pushed so far from what we know that we won’t recognize it ten years from now,” the former college football player said. “And if it does, our country will go down, too.”
Acknowledging that the debate over player injury worries is one of those pressures, Fedora insisted that the game is safer for players today than it has ever been. However, the coach admitted that football is a “violent sport” and claimed that people who get involved in the game “know those risks.”
Fedora also criticized those who say football is too dangerous. He accused critics of “twisting data and the information out there to use for whatever their agenda is,” and then said there is no proof football causes CTE.
Despite his criticism, Fedora said it was not necessarily a bad thing to “tweak” the game to make it safer for players. “You’re doing a great thing,” he said of such efforts.
Ultimately, though, Fedora exclaimed that football helps define America and said the game has “had a major impact on who we are as a country.”
Fedora, who earned his first head coaching job when he took over the Southern Mississippi program in 2007, also claimed that a three-star general once told him that football helps make the U.S. a better country.
“That’s easy. We’re the only football-playing nation in the world,” Fedora said the general told him. “He said most of all of our troops have grown up, have played the game at some point in their life at some level, and the lessons that they learned from that game is what makes us who we are.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.