UNC Football: Peculiar Larry Fedora presser highlights ACC Media Day

Enthusiastic sentiments on football, CTE and the U.S. military highlighted a colorful Larry Fedora presser at ACC Media Day

Well, that escalated quickly.

What started off as a typical ACC Media Day became much more when North Carolina head coach Larry Fedora took the podium.

Compared to the standard and primarily mundane coach speak that we hear at football media days around the country, Fedora’s presser was the physical equivalent of social media’s popular “hold my beer” meme.

Among the topics that Fedora spoke on Wednesday morning was Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (also known as the degenerative brain disease, CTE) and the importance of studying its relationship to football.

"“I don’t think it’s been proven that the game of football causes CTE,” Fedora told reporters. “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.”"

It’s a bit of a peculiar stance to take in 2018, what with the bevy of information based on thousands of hours of research that point to repeated head trauma as the leading cause of the disease.

It’s particularly odd when you take into consideration Fedora’s own admission of the game’s physical nature and players’ tendency to take shots to the head. And never mind the study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2017 that showed CTE in 110 of the 111 brains donated by former NFL players.

Throw in the fact that the University of North Carolina has a renowned brain injury research and prevention facility on campus that focuses much of its attention on sports-related afflictions, and Fedora’s message becomes all the more curious.

Fedora went to great lengths to defend the game, too, noting that football is under attack and as it goes, so too does the country.

"“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,” Fedora said. ‘And if it does, our country will go down, too.”"

Fedora then began talking about the United States military, and the many parallels between it and the game of football. He noted how a member of the military once told him that the country is as great as it is due to the amount of enlisted men that are former football players.

After his formal press conference, Fedora met with a handful of media members to clarify his previous statements. Essentially all he did, though, was double-down on the things he had said just a few minutes prior, claiming that football doesn’t cause CTE.

Now, I don’t know what any of that means. And neither do you. But it’s okay, because everyone at ACC Media Day was just as confused as you and I. We can only hope that whatever fired Fedora up at his press conference Wednesday morning will result in wins on the football field this fall.

Next: Tar Heels get commitment from Georgia wide receiver

If the team’s play this season is half as erratic as Fedora’s press conference was, another 3-9 season may be on the horizon.