UNC has led before on player safety. It could again.
Football killed Bill Arnold. In 1971, the sophomore was competing to start at left guard for UNC when he collapsed during practice on a humid Labor Day in Chapel Hill. He died 15 days later of complications from heat stroke.
The death of Arnold, 20, led to changes that made playing football safer in hot weather, although the recent death of Maryland’s Jordan McNair under similar circumstances shows there is still work to be done.
Carolina was a national leader in making those changes in the 1970s. Now there’s a new frontier for player safety, and that’s keeping their brains safe. UNC is well positioned to make the game safer in that aspect too.
Arnold’s death devastated the UNC community, said Bill Cobey, who was Carolina’s athletic director from 1976 to ‘80. In fall of ‘71, Cobey had just become assistant athletic director after serving as an academic counselor. He knew Arnold and was involved in his recruiting.
The death of a player caused UNC to question the way football players practiced and were exposed to risk. “As a result of Billy’s death, the method of operation or protocols were changed,” Cobey told me. “That’s when the doctors were given more authority.”
The UNC chancellor mandated that a physician be on the field for all football drills, a practice that continues today. After an injury, the decision about the athlete’s return to play would be made by a physician, not the coach and trainer, as was prior practice, Cobey said. UNC created a Division of Sports Medicine to care for varsity and intramural athletes.
Players were given more breaks and more water. UNC coach Bill Dooley’s policy had been to not give water breaks during game weeks if the practice was less than two hours, The News & Observer reported in a 2006 article by Robbi Pickeral. Arnold collapsed without a water break during a workout of 1 hour, 45 minutes.
“Before that, the culture — not just as Carolina but everywhere — was you didn’t have many breaks,” Cobey said.
Eight high school and college football players died in 1970 from heat stroke, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at UNC. That was the most football deaths from heat stroke, reflecting the drill sergeant approach taken by coaches of that era.
“The numbers (of heat stroke deaths) have been reduced but there shouldn’t be any” with what is known today, said Fred Mueller, the UNC exercise and sports science professor who tracked the number for years.
Arnold’s death was front-page news in The N&O. In a recent front-page story, The N&O’s Andrew Carter told the story of former UNC lineman Tommy Hatton, who quit the sport after his fourth concussion. Carter wrote of “a prominent university whose opposing interests accentuate the conflict between the violence of football and the scientific quest to understand the carnage unseen.”
Near Kenan Stadium is the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center, where researchers attempt to figure out what football does to the brain. Carolina has used small sensors in helmets that measure the force of hits; that data has led to rule changes in the NFL and NCAA.
UNC coach Larry Fedora drew scrutiny recently when he said it hadn’t been proven that football causes CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to head trauma. That might be true but there is significant and growing evidence of a link between the two.
Cobey is proud of the steps UNC took to make players safer, and he believes UNC will use its brain research the same way. He acknowledges college football has a powerful constituency, and even if the science becomes more definitive, there would be resistance to fundamentally changing the sport. Yet his experience after Bill Arnold’s death makes him believe that change is possible.
This story was originally published August 18, 2018 at 8:35 AM.