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Strength Coaches in College Football Have Become Strongmen

Maryland player’s death the latest to draw scrutiny to offseason workouts; ‘We are killing our players’

By Brian Costa,Rachel Bachman, and Andrew Beaton
Aug. 17, 2018

The faces of America’s college football programs are its head coaches, many of whom are paid millions of dollars and wield enormous power within universities. But the authority figure that players see most while at school is one that most fans wouldn’t even recognize.

Strength and conditioning coaches have evolved from handy helpers in the gym to overlords of a season outside the season: off-season workouts. It is their domain—in weight rooms shielded even from the view of head coaches—that is increasingly under scrutiny after a series of player deaths and hospitalizations following grueling workouts.

These coaches have become among the most highly-paid and influential on staffs. During the winter and summer months when NCAA rules keep head coaches and their assistants at a distance, players effectively report to the strength and conditioning coach. Those broad powers, coupled with the dangerous episodes, have raised questions about whether the coaches are sufficiently regulated.

“These guys become their own little fiefdoms,” said Rick Neuheisel, a former head coach at UCLA, Colorado and Washington.

Maryland head coach DJ Durkin was placed on administrative leave last weekend following the June death of 19-year-old offensive lineman Jordan McNair, who struggled to recover from an off-season workout. Maryland president Wallace Loh said athletic trainers made mistakes that day.

Strength and conditioning coach Rick Court, who was tasked with overseeing such workouts and named in an ESPN report alleging a culture of harsh and humiliating treatment, resigned.

Court did not respond to a request for comment made to a representative.

The influence of strength and conditioning coaches is a byproduct of NCAA rules. In 1991, the NCAA enacted limits on official practice time for athletes but exempted strength coaches from those limits. While football coaches are barred from coaching players through large parts of the off-season, strength coaches can guide players through “voluntary” workouts year-round.

As programs flush with cash have expanded their workout facilities, so too have they enhanced the pay and prominence of these coaches. In 2017, 42 football strength coaches earned $200,000 per year or more and nine earned $400,000 per year or more, according to a USA Today database.

They have been hailed in media reports as gurus essential to a team’s success. Days before this year’s national title game, Alabama strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran took the team’s second-place trophy from the 2017 title game and slammed it on the locker room floor, smashing it to pieces.

“You’re with them probably like 75-80% of the time,” said Treyous Jarrells, a Colorado State running back in 2014-15. “If you’re in the sports facilities, you’re going to be around the strength coach or the staff.”

That dynamic has become more pronounced as players who once went home for the summer more often stay on campus to meet rising academic standards. Recent rules changes also allow incoming freshmen to join summer off-season workouts.

“They get indoctrinated into this ‘head coach of the off-season’ society, and then the strength coach basically hands the team over to the head coach,” Neuheisel said.

The rise of strength gurus has coincided with a series of incidents in recent years in which college football players have been hospitalized and in some cases died after intense workouts.

In 2011, 13 players at Iowa suffered from rhabdomyolysis, a condition in which muscle fibers break down and their contents are released into the bloodstream, potentially causing kidney damage.

A report commissioned by the university recommended that the workout that resulted in the hospitalizations—which included back squats with heavy weights—no longer be used. In 2016, Iowa paid $15,000 to settle a related lawsuit brought by one of the players.

But the team’s strength and conditioning coach at the time, Chris Doyle, suffered little consequence. Months later, he was named the team’s assistant coach of the year. Now, Doyle is the highest-paid college football strength coach in the country, earning an annual salary of $725,000. Through an Iowa spokesman, Doyle declined to comment.

Scott Anderson, the head athletic trainer at Oklahoma since 1996, wrote in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Athletic Training that off-season workout regimens are seriously endangering players. He cited 33 NCAA football players who died while training between 2000 and 2016.

Only 18% of those deaths stemmed from trauma such as an on-field collision, Anderson found. In a famously violent sport, violence isn’t the leading cause of death.

“Collegiate football’s dirty little secret is that we are killing our players,” Anderson wrote, “not in competition, almost never in practice, and rarely because of trauma—but primarily because of non-traumatic causes in off-season sessions alleged to enhance performance.” He added, “In conditioning, no other sport kills as does football.”

Strength coaches are held accountable for results, from how much players weigh to how well they play. “There’s a lot of pressure that is placed on those strength coaches by the enterprise we’ve created that rewards extraordinary on-the-field success,” said Todd Turner, a former athletic director at four Division I schools.

Since 2015 the NCAA has required strength coaches to earn and maintain a certification through a nationally accredited program, but those certification programs vary widely in rigor.

Speaking in 2017, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said the two main national strength and conditioning organizations don’t have “tremendously strong certification processes.”

When Oregon suspended strength and conditioning coach Irele Oderinde following the hospitalization of three players in 2017, his primary certification was a 21-hour course from the U.S. Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association. A spokesman at Florida State, where Oderinde now coaches, said he has earned other certifications and is “projected” to become certified by the Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association in May 2019.

The NCAA has taken some measures to better protect athletes. After a Rice player collapsed during a conditioning workout and died—which was later linked to sickle cell trait—the NCAA in 2010 began requiring schools to test for the inherited blood condition.

The rule did not prevent the 2014 death of a University of California player who had sickle cell trait. The player, Ted Agu, died after a drill outside the team’s stadium during which players had to repeatedly run up and down a hill. The school admitted liability for his death and paid Agu’s family $4.75 million.

Bridgette Lloyd follows such cases from her home in Houston. The death of her son, Dale, at Rice in 2006 prompted the family to sue the NCAA, resulting in the settlement that led to sickle cell testing. Dale Lloyd would have turned 31 next week.

“We cry like the day we lost our son,” she said. “You cry for the families, you cry for the young men. There is so much potential in them that they didn’t get to realize.”