ESPN- Maryland offensive lineman Jordan McNair showed signs of extreme exhaustion, had difficulty standing upright while running a set of 110-yard sprints and was found to have a body temperature of 106 degrees at a local hospital before he died of heatstroke suffered during a football workout, multiple sources told ESPN.
The 19-year-old from Randallstown, Maryland, collapsed during an outdoor Terrapins workout on May 29. He died two weeks later. No cause of death has been officially released, but ESPN has learned of an official heatstroke conclusion and new details about what happened to McNair based upon interviews with multiple sources in and close to the Terrapins program, as well as two witnesses to the workout. Current Maryland players describe a culture of fear and intimidation within the football program in the run-up to offensive lineman Jordan McNair's death. McNair's death, and whether university coaches and officials followed proper protocols after he became distressed, are being investigated by Dr. Rod Walters, a university-hired, former longtime collegiate athletic trainer. Walters' report is expected to be released Sept. 15. McNair's parents have hired the Baltimore law firm of Murphy, Falcon & Murphy to investigate as well. The May 29 workout, which was organized and led by the Maryland strength and conditioning staff, began at 4:15 p.m. ET. McNair and other linemen were near the end of their sprint set when McNair started having obvious difficulties, according to multiple sources. McNair family attorney Billy Murphy told ESPN on Thursday that McNair had a seizure at about 5 p.m., following a sprint. Maryland athletic director Damon Evans has said previously that the team gathered for a scheduled, supervised workout around 4:15 p.m. at its outdoor practice fields. The strength and conditioning staff, led by Rick Court, supervised the workout. Certified athletic trainers were present. It was about 80 degrees when the workouts began, and after a warm-up, the players were told to run 10 110-yard sprints. Evans has said that McNair completed the entire workout before falling ill. He said trainers noticed that McNair was having some trouble recovering and began "providing necessary care." But multiple witnesses at the workout told ESPN that McNair had physical difficulty before the workout ended and needed two teammates to help him complete the 10th sprint. "There's no way he finished on his own," one of the players at the workout told ESPN. "There were multiple people that said, 'Wow, Jordan looks f---ed up, he doesn't look all right,'" the player said. "We knew he was really exhausted, but we didn't know he was in danger of his life. But that doesn't mean that a medical professional shouldn't know to put him in an ice tub." Multiple sources said that after the 10th sprint finished, Wes Robinson, Maryland's longtime head football trainer, yelled, "Drag his ass across the field!" A second player at the workout told ESPN: "Jordan was obviously not in control of his body. He was flopping all around. There were two trainers on either side of him bearing a lot of weight. They interlocked their legs with his in order to keep him standing." Maryland officials have said McNair "was talking to our trainers throughout" and that after the completion of the workout, the trainers "began supporting an active recovery and providing care." Multiple sources estimated that trainers walked McNair around for about 80 yards after he started showing distress. "They tried to walk him for a while after he collapsed," the second player who spoke to ESPN said. "His head, he barely had control over it. His head was limp to the point where it was back. They were walking him across the field to get him up and moving, I guess. But then they basically took him over to position drills, which took a long time. I didn't see them bring him in, but it was a while." The first player who spoke to ESPN said: "It was a good [distance] for a guy in his state to be walking, and it was away from the athletic training building, away from any resource that he probably needed at the time. Probably 100 percent the opposite way." Maryland officials said trainers walked with McNair as part of their active recovery efforts before he was taken by a motorized cart to the athletic training room in the football team house for "further observation and continued treatment." Maryland players are required to receive a medical clearance at the start of the practice season, and all players participating in the May 29 workout had previously received medical clearances from team physicians to participate in football activities, according to the university. That heatstroke might have been the cause of McNair's death was first raised by his family on a personal website. His parents, Tonya Wilson and Martin McNair, declined comment for this story. According to the Mayo Clinic, heatstroke can occur when a body temperature rises to 104 degrees or higher. It requires emergency treatment and "the damage worsens the longer treatment is delayed, increasing risk of serious complications or death." ----------- Not that any amount of retrospection is going to bring solace to a family that lost their 19 year old son to college football conditioning drills, but it probably shouldn't have taken us this long to realize that a teenage kid with enough athletic ability to earn himself a free education at a reputable university didn't simply fall victim to working out on a hot day. Sadly, we probably only accepted that as an explanation for what took the life of Jordan McNair because Maryland isn't what anyone would consider "good" at football and therefore they couldn't possibly be one of the universities that prioritized success in it above basic human decency, but such is the state of a broken institution. I really don't want to let D.J. Durkin and the rest of the Terrapins' staff that has been belatedly placed on administrative leave off the hook by viewing these particularly unforgivable incidents through a panoramic lens over the landscape of the Power 5. However, the fact that this story is far more jarring than it is surprising is pretty telling of the type of toxicity we've come to accept as an occupational hazard of a sport that is amateur in power structure only. In no world, other than the one in which college football unabashedly operates under the damn near religious premise that winning is to be done at any and all costs, could the line between endurance-based exercise and authority-based exhaustion become as blurry as the vision of the kid whose life was cut insanely short by the ambiguity. The one workplace in which the entirety of the labor force gets no financial return on their physical and emotional investment is the same one in which the higher-ups are most ruthless in reinforcing their leverage. I suppose attaching the job security of unsupervised disciplinarians to the performance of student-athletes whose only recourse is to be massive inconvenienced by transferring was bound to lead to pseudo-dictatorships. Still, it couldn't be more damning of the nationwide culture in which Maryland football operates that one of their players was forced to run himself into an early grave before they were viewed as abnormal enough to be noteworthy. Even as someone who loves nothing more than plastering his ass to the couch throughout the entirety of a September Saturday, I can say that the finished product isn't anywhere near worthy of the shady business practices that go into its manufacturing. In a "if you love something, let it go..." type of way, I think I'd be fine with firing college football as a collective into the sun and hoping it re-enters the atmosphere having been incinerated free of it's dangerously corrupt and shamelessly exploitative aura. If only that option were anywhere near as profitable as it would be beneficial to the standing of sports in society then it might actually be on the table.
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