It’s Time to Start Turning Up the Heat on Demanding, Tough-Guy Coaches

So football’s fourth training casualty in 10 days, a neat kid from Ontario expiring on a muggy Friday in Chicago, isn’t related to heatstroke.

So, officially, 22-year-old Rashidi Wheeler dies of bronchial asthma.

So every drawling, belt-hitching football coach in gol’danged America sighs and says, you see, it ain’t us..

So they’re all wrong. Because it is them.

And it’s time we stop shuffling around their culpability for the sake of protecting this cherished notion of football’s tough-guy culture.

When that culture turns deadly, we must hold accountable its keepers.

“Why do we need to practice in the heat?” asked Rob Huizenga, Raider team doctor from 1983-90. “It is ludicrous. It is nonsensical. It’s like some fraternity thing. It’s hazing.”

Maybe there indeed was no heatstroke in those 80-degree temperatures Friday at Northwestern University, where Rashidi Wheeler was a starting safety participating in a preseason conditioning test.

But by requiring that drill at that time, Coach Randy Walker’s brains must have been fried.

Just two days after Minnesota Viking lineman Korey Stringer dies of heatstroke complications in similar Midwest conditions, you’re going to ask a bunch of students to run 18 sprints from 40 to 100 yards in a total of 10 minutes?

“I read about that drill and thought, how does that sort of conditioning help you win football games?” said Huizenga, now a Westside private physician who has long been outspoken in his criticism of football’s medical compromises. “I couldn’t believe it.”

It was a drill so difficult, teammate Jason Wright admitted he never saw Wheeler collapse because Wright himself had already passed out.

In a startling account given to Times staffer Lance Pugmire, Wright said, “ . . . I collapsed and fell unconscious too. I got up, threw up and was as happy as I’ve ever been that I passed. Then I heard someone say, ‘Rashidi lost his pulse.’ ”

It was a brave act for a teammate to publicly acknowledge both the pain and pressure that leads to these sorts of deaths.

For his indiscretion, Jason Wright will probably spend the next week running laps.

That’s how football coaches punish. That’s how football coaches control.

Conditioning is their currency. It supposedly makes their players tougher. It supposedly brings their players together.

What cannot be argued is that this type of conditioning also kills.

According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research in North Carolina, there have been 103 heat-related football deaths in high school and college since 1960.

Many recent stories cite this statistic to illustrate how, considering the thousands of places where football is played, heatstroke is really not a problem.

Few of the stories have mentioned a companion statistic.

Between 1931 and 1959, there were just five similar deaths.

Since Bear Bryant drove off most of his Texas A&M; team during that legendary 1954 training camp in Junction, Texas, several changes have occurred.

The players have gotten bigger. The climate has gotten warmer.

But the coaches have not adjusted.

Everyone still wants to be Bear Bryant in a world where nobody wears those kinds of hats.

If conditioning-nut Walker would authorize that sort of test in that sort of heat on the same day as Korey Stringer’s memorial service . . . will coaches ever adjust?

The Northwestern players, of course, said the 82-degree temperatures weren’t so bad. Compared to what? Are we so enamored of the idea of tough guys sweating it out that we think 82 degrees in humid Illinois isn’t so bad?

One of my favorite lines is the quote from Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern defensive backs coach and a former player, when asked about their training methods.

“I would think about the triathlete that goes and does 26 miles of this and 18 miles of that, and we weren’t even close to something like that today,” he said.

Of course not. Because triathletes aren’t stupid enough to hold their conditioning drills in the middle of a Chicago afternoon in the middle of summer.

I’m no triathlete, but I do jog around the Rose Bowl. On cool summer mornings there, it is crowded. During the heat of noon, it is empty. My neighbors aren’t stupid either.

My other favorite line comes from Rob Glass, Florida strength coach, in the wake of last week’s heatstroke-related death of freshman running back Eraste Autin.

It was a death that occurred during one of those “voluntary” workouts before the start of the real workouts. Institutional hazing, indeed.

“The situation makes some people question things,” Glass said. “But believe me, if we didn’t do any preparation and all they did was hit the field Aug. 8, we would be asking for a lot more problems.”

Who says they have to hit the field Aug. 8? And if so, why can’t they hit that field at night?

“The only possible reason for ever practicing in even mild heat is if you have to play in heat,” said Huizenga. “So my question is, why are so many September games scheduled during the day? What possible reason can they have?”

Incidentally, 26 hours after Autin died, his teammates were back on the same field, in similar 88-degree heat, doing the same drills that killed him.

Which would seem to make Glass not a strength coach, but a weakness coach.

Later, Florida boss Steve Spurrier flew to Louisiana to speak at Autin’s funeral.

Maybe that’s why we never blame the coaches. Maybe because they give such good eulogies.

In a plane crash, the victims sue those in charge. Yet in a heat-related football death, the victims hug them.

Something is wrong here. Something needs fixing.

Maybe with lawsuits. Maybe with Congress. Maybe simply with the common sense and courage of a coach unafraid to be different.

Some might say we are making an awfully big deal over four training camp deaths in a sport that has been banging heads in hot temperatures forever.

But if this were auto racing, there would be an outcry for rules changes. If this were boxing, the sport would be history.

Something is wrong here.

A Minnesota pro dies of heatstroke complications while training for a team that plays its home games in an air-conditioned dome.

A Northwestern kid dies on a hot day shortly after using his asthma inhaler.

A Florida kid dies of heatstroke complications on the campus where they invented Gatorade.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.