Pushed to Play

Coaches routinely violate rules meant to protect injured athletes at football powerhouses

By Peter Robison Noah Buhayar Graphics by Jennah Haque

For Businessweek & The Big Take

December 6, 2024 at 11:00 AM EST

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At 17, Emeka Megwa was living a boy’s dream. Chicago-born and Texas-raised, the nationally touted running back stepped from a gangway into a seaplane on the shore of Seattle’s sparkling Lake Union three summers ago. A crew member in a white shirt with gold epaulets held the door. A coach talked in his ear as the plane flew over the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium, close enough for Megwa to see its green field and imagine the floodlights and the fans who’d one day be cheering for him.

When Megwa committed to play for the university not long after that seaplane tour, the CBS Sports HQ digital channel carried the announcement live. Sitting at a table with his mother and coach at his Texas high school in July 2021, the summer before his senior year, Megwa unzipped his warmup jacket and revealed a black polo with the UW logo. “Every school in the country wants this guy,” read the headline on one of the many YouTube highlight reels devoted to Megwa’s startling speed and power.

He chose the University of Washington—and not one of the 39 other big-time football schools that had recruited him—because of a promise. Earlier that summer, unknown to the fan sites, Megwa had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in an offseason practice. He says Washington’s coaches assured him the team would carefully manage his rehabilitation in coordination with doctors at the university hospital.

That commitment, according to a lawsuit Megwa later filed seeking damages for medical negligence, lasted about as long as the tenure of the head coach who recruited him—another few months. A new coaching staff pushed Megwa into drills that, he claims, led him to reinjure his knee. Once they learned he’d require additional surgery, the new staff—led by head coach Kalen DeBoer, who’s since moved on to lead one of the country’s marquee programs, the University of Alabama—told him he was no longer needed. (UW spokesperson Victor Balta says “the health and safety of student-athletes is of paramount importance to the University of Washington” and declined to comment further, citing “the ongoing litigation and the obligation to observe student privacy rights.”)

Watch: Paying Players Hasn’t Fixed College Sports

In its early potential, Megwa’s career seemed destined for the kind of storybook ending that keeps the college pipeline filled with hundreds of thousands of eager young athletes. And the opportunities appeared boundless when the National Collegiate Athletic Association, in the year Megwa committed to Washington, loosened restrictions on transfers between schools and allowed players to earn income through name, image and likeness (NIL) deals.

A year after being one of the most coveted young players in the country, though, Megwa’s value to the Huskies dropped. After he got hurt again, he says UW coaches told him, in the language of college football, to hit the transfer portal. That is, find another school, another football program. Increasingly, battered and broken players like Megwa are disappearing into the portal. Megwa is now at the University of Oklahoma, where he has a spot on the roster but not an athletic scholarship.

The major athletic conferences all have policies telling students that scholarships can’t be taken away for injury or poor performance, and the NCAA expanded that pledge to every Division I school in August as part of what it calls “core guarantees.” The conferences also promise to provide independent medical care for student-athletes. The rules, adopted in 2016, guarantee that medical officials, not coaches, determine when injured players return to the field.

In reality there’s no such guarantee in college football. Some of the most widely known programs in the country routinely violate the rules, according to interviews with more than 80 players, coaches and administrators as well as public records from dozens of universities in the major conferences.

A high-profile example came to light in May, when Scott Lynch, the former team doctor for Penn State’s football team, was awarded $5.25 million by a jury that found he’d been wrongfully terminated from the role for complaining about the coach’s interference with medical treatment. Testimony at the trial revealed that Penn State’s head coach, James Franklin, had inquired about taking away the roster spot of a player who’d tried to kill himself and pressured Lynch to keep the full extent of another athlete’s injury from him so he’d be more likely to play.

After the Penn State verdict, Lynch wrote to the president of the university, Neeli Bendapudi. He asked if the school planned to report Franklin’s behavior to the NCAA and the Big Ten Conference because of the “unquestionable violations” of their bylaws on independent medical care. Lynch never heard back from Bendapudi but got a reply from a lawyer representing the university. The lawyer said that the testimony showed none of the doctor’s treatment decisions had actually been changed and that Penn State had already discussed the matter with the NCAA and the Big Ten—which planned no inquiries. The university health center is appealing the judgement. Penn State didn’t respond to a request for comment from either the school or the coach.

“Same old story: money,” Lynch says. “They have been taking advantage of kids for so long. And they’ve gotten away with it for so long, they think they’re immune.”

Moira Novak had managed athletic trainers at the University of Minnesota for almost two decades when P.J. Fleck was hired as the team’s head football coach in January 2017. He was her sixth head coach. As director of athletic medicine, she supervised 13 full-time trainers across two dozen varsity sports, including the head football trainer. That same month she was also formally designated the university’s athletics health-care administrator, a position every school was required to have as part of the new Big Ten rules on independent medical care. The person in that role, according to these rules, was to have “unchallengeable autonomous authority” on all medical management and return-to-play decisions.

Novak would soon learn that the unwritten rules still leave the head football coach in charge. Moving up from Western Michigan University to a Big Ten program that had enjoyed middling success, Fleck quickly put his stamp on his new team. He communicated through a large stock of aphorisms, among them “Row the boat,” for the persistence required to push through adversity, something he knew firsthand after the death of a newborn son in 2011. He built a reputation as an inspiring, heart-on-his sleeve mentor and published a motivational book. Others have described him as a controlling boss adept at self-promotion. Players were instructed to clap whenever he entered the room and, when asked how they were doing, to answer in one way: “Elite.”

Fleck wanted to bring along the head football trainer who’d worked for him at Western Michigan, Arno Rheinberger. Novak protested to one of her bosses, pointing out that the new rules made her the hiring authority in the department. She was told the athletics director, Mark Coyle, had already approved the coach’s plan. Rheinberger got a job as an assistant but, according to Novak, told people he’d soon have the top job.

Rheinberger was working the sidelines during the Golden Gophers’ 2017 spring game, an intra-squad scrimmage. During the game, Shannon Brooks, a star running back, was blindsided by a tackle. He left the field, reporting a headache and dizziness. Rheinberger told the player the team doctor would look at him after the game, as Novak later relayed to her superiors. The incumbent head football trainer, Kammy Powell, stepped in and took Brooks’s helmet. An evaluation determined he had a concussion.

Brooks says he remembers Powell checking him but doesn’t recall a conversation with Rheinberger, who’s since left the university. Rheinberger declined to comment. A university spokesperson, Jake Ricker, says “any issues or concerns that have been reported to us have been carefully examined, and some claims prove to be demonstrably false. As an example, claims related to care for the physical wellbeing of student-athletes are simply not true.”

That June, both Novak and Powell had their positions eliminated. (Powell didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Novak was reassigned to work in the recreation center. After hiring a lawyer, she negotiated a settlement, a copy of which Bloomberg Businessweek obtained through a public records request. While denying any wrongdoing, the university said in the agreement that “disputes have arisen” regarding her position. It agreed to pay Novak $110,000, plus just over $41,000 in severance and unused vacation benefits. The university also paid Novak’s legal fees of $20,000.

Once the check cleared, Novak wrote a 10-page letter to the university’s board of regents, saying “athletes are placed at significant risk” when rules meant to safeguard their health are broken. She told them about her objections to the new football trainer, as well as other concerns that she’d heard about from staff and had reported to her superiors: Female athletes had complained about aggressive massages from strength coaches that left them with bruises; coaches in multiple sports had pressured medical staff to disclose private information about players’ mental health; hockey players had been given non-narcotic painkillers through a prescription written by a university doctor who’d filled it in his wife’s name.

The University of Minnesota hired a law firm to review the allegations. The firm in turn hired an outside consultant, the US Council for Athletes’ Health. The group was co-founded by James Borchers, a former Ohio State University team physician who’s now the Big Ten’s chief medical officer. The consultant interviewed athletic department staffers and produced a 34-page report in September 2018 that praised the university’s “commitment to build upon its most effective and impactful practices.” The report was filled with similarly anodyne language and anonymous interview comments lacking context. It concluded that “without question, across all focus groups, independent medical care is recognized as the standard of care that must be and is provided.” In some cases, it said, the department needed clearer policies and written protocols.

“I remember reading it and just being disappointed,” says Michael Hsu, a member of the board of regents at the time. When Novak sent her letter, he’d called her and they talked for five hours. He says the report made clear that no one else at the university was interested in a real conversation about what he calls “a culture of noncompliance” that endangers athletes. “Every time we don’t act on something, fix something, do something, terminate somebody, it just makes everybody more brazen,” Hsu says.

Ricker, the university spokesperson, says the report “further improved the athletics department’s ability to support the health, safety and wellbeing of all student-athletes.” He adds that this included “stronger oversight of athletic performance coaches,” the strength coaches Novak had singled out. Separately, Ricker says, a review by the university’s audit office found “strong controls and compliance across the board” in the football program.

The same fall the report landed, Jason Stahl, then an instructor at the university, was getting worried about some of the football players in his freshman writing courses. He taught outside the main liberal arts college in departments he calls “fake degree” mills, where the university steered lots of student-athletes. A dozen or so of the students in the courses each semester were football players. At first, they reflexively answered “Elite” when he asked how they were doing. The bravado didn’t match what he saw and heard as he got to know them better.

Expecting the young athletes to be self-assured, he was surprised that so many appeared listless and anxious. They seemed to physically deteriorate through the course of each season. Some came to class limping or red-faced. One was slurring his speech. Another stopped showing up regularly, then told Stahl he was having anxiety and problems with his throat. The player dropped his class. Stahl later overheard two of his teammates saying he’d left the university, with one of them adding that the injured player “definitely has a lawsuit because of what happened.”

Stahl first worked with one player to submit an anonymous complaint to the athletics department showing the team’s practices exceeded the NCAA-mandated hourly limit. Then, in 2019, he wrote a letter to the provost detailing all his interactions with the football players. Athletics director Coyle wrote back and said the US Council for Athletes’ Health, the consultant the school had hired, reviewed the university’s sports medicine team “and gave them high marks.”

The next year, Stahl was demoted from a leadership position in the College of Education and Human Development—a decision he views as retaliation for his whistleblowing. Ricker, the university spokesperson, denies that. “His concerns were thoroughly investigated at the time he brought them to the university’s attention,” he says. “There was no finding of any rule violations or misconduct.”

Stahl resigned from the university in July 2020 and resolved to go public with the stories he says the university refused to acknowledge. He started that October with a newsletter post on Substack called “The Disappeared.”

It was about the player who’d left the university, the one his teammates thought might have a lawsuit. His name was Grant Norton. Stahl tracked him down to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, where his family ran a boat business.

Norton, a star offensive tackle in high school, had arrived at the University of Minnesota in 2018 after turning down an offer from Nebraska, among other suitors. One fan site included him in a piece that said Fleck was “reeling in hyped recruits.” But in practices early that fall, he sustained what he now thinks may have been a concussion, and then started vomiting blood. Norton says he tried to keep participating, but woke up every morning racked with anxiety. After coming into camp at 6 feet 8 inches tall and 270 pounds, he lost 25 pounds within weeks. Strength coaches at first punished him for losing weight, having him do five-minute planks and other additional exercises. Trainers eventually sent him to a doctor who discovered a torn esophagus; he underwent surgery to sew it up.

Norton went to Fleck to seek time to rest and recover; he got four days off. During his time away he also talked to a therapist in the athletics department and revealed that he’d never felt so alone and depressed. The next time he saw Fleck, Norton says, the coach seemed to know things that he’d confided only to the therapist. The coach asked if he wanted to leave for a smaller school. “I was like, ‘No, I’m done, I don’t need anything from you,’” he says. Fleck, as Norton recalls it, told him not to say anything bad about Minnesota. He returned home to Missouri.

University of Minnesota spokesperson Ricker says it employs doctors, therapists and trainers who “provide fully rounded and superior care for our student-athletes, beyond the influence of any coach and team staff members.” He says Fleck, the head coach, “has an extensive record of advocating for the importance of student-athlete mental health, including publicly discussing his own past struggles with mental health.”

Stahl went on to start, in 2021, a nonprofit group called the College Football Players Association; Hsu was an adviser. He remembers thinking that his story about Norton, particularly after a local TV news station reported on it, would outrage people. It didn’t. Minnesota fans shrugged. In social media posts, many simply said college football isn’t for everyone.

The ball was 35 yards from the end zone when Megwa took the handoff. It was fall 2020, and he was in his junior year at Nolan Catholic High School in Fort Worth, Texas, the heartland of a football-crazed state. Megwa was just 16 but already stood 6 feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds. Quiet and intense, he was one of the best athletes K.J. Williams, then the school’s head strength coach, had ever worked with. And one of the smartest. “He’s an intellect that looks like Tarzan,” Williams says with a laugh.

Megwa took the ball and headed left, then cut back right, speeding past a tackler who snatched at his helmet and jersey to try to pull him down. Megwa dragged the tackler 5 yards and then sprinted into the end zone, yelling, “Feed me!” That play, against Prestonwood Christian Academy, remains Williams’ favorite memory of Megwa. He scored four touchdowns, three of them in the fourth quarter, as Nolan Catholic erased a 14-point deficit to win 42-28. Over three seasons, Megwa rushed for more than 3,000 yards and earned all-state and district MVP honors.

He’d grown up in a little ranch house at the edge of a park in the south suburbs of Chicago, where his father worked in the cargo office for American Airlines and his mother pursued a nursing degree. When Megwa was in third grade, his father transferred to the airline’s hub in the Dallas-Fort Worth area; his mother rose to become director of nursing at a care facility. The third of five siblings—and the eldest son—Megwa propelled the middle-class family into heady realms of possibility. Calls and texts came in daily from coaches across the country. He spent most of the next year weighing his options.

Gabe Nelson, a University of Washington running back at the time Megwa was recruited, remembers the chiseled teenager from Texas turning heads when coaches led him around the athletic facilities. “There was a buzz, like, ‘Who’s this guy?’” Nelson says. One recruiting service had rated Megwa the country’s No. 15 athlete. “Even when he first got here, he was really fit, and he was strong, and he was big,” says Rich Newton, another former running back for the Huskies. “I was excited to see what he could do.”

Megwa hadn’t been due to graduate from high school until 2022. But he already had the necessary credits, and his recovery would keep him out for the fall football season, so he decided to enroll at the university early and start classes in September 2021. UW Medical Center, rated one of the country’s top hospitals, is across the street from Husky Stadium. The UW Sports Medicine Center at Husky Stadium, as the name suggests, is even closer: It’s tucked beneath the south stands, part of a $280 million renovation finished in 2013.

Albert Gee, a team physician and UW associate professor, supervised his care and predicted a 9- to 12-month recovery. This meant he might begin “full activities including full speed football” by around the next April or July, according to notes cited in Megwa’s suit—still well in time for the 2022 season.

Nelson, his fellow running back, was also dealing with an injury. A walk-on, he practiced on what’s known as the scout team, playing against the starters to prepare them for games. Toward the end of the 2021 season, Nelson’s hip started bothering him. The team’s medical staff examined him and didn’t find anything seriously wrong. The trainers treated him with ice, heat and electrical stimulation. At least 10 times, Nelson says, he was prescribed meloxicam, an anti-inflammatory.

It was a miserable season. Expected to compete for the conference championship, the team instead stumbled to a 4-8 record. As the losses mounted, then-head coach Jimmy Lake shoved a player during a game. The ugly-looking incident was caught on camera, and the school fired him, while still agreeing to pay a $9.9 million contract buyout. DeBoer, then coaching at Fresno State, replaced him on Nov. 29.

When Nelson went home to a Seattle suburb over Christmas break, his hip was still bothering him. He visited his trainer from high school, who told him he had a tear in his labrum, the cartilage that acts like a seal between the ball and socket parts of the hip. Bone was rubbing on bone, which explained why it hurt so badly. He told the team’s trainers about the diagnosis after the holidays, and it didn’t go well, Nelson says. He remembers that they mostly seemed upset that he’d seen someone on his own. But they agreed to send him for an MRI, and the test in February 2022 confirmed the tear.

DeBoer was already reshaping the team, bringing in a new coaching staff and using the loosened transfer rules to lure highly regarded players such as Michael Penix Jr., a quarterback from Indiana University. The new running backs coach, Lee Marks, came with DeBoer from Fresno State and saw his salary almost double, to about $400,000. Like many other highly paid assistants, Marks had a just-results demeanor. Nelson remembers him telling the players that he didn’t want to hear about their families—he didn’t want to say anything too personal when he got upset.

Marks also told them that DeBoer would be bringing in some new running backs. Two transferred to UW that year—Wayne Taulapapa, from the University of Virginia, and Will Nixon, a University of Nebraska receiver who’d switch to running back.

Megwa was still rehabbing his knee. “I do not see a rush to get him back anytime soon,” his doctor, Gee, wrote after a Jan. 13, 2022, exam cited in the suit. “Obviously the target is for him to be 100% by fall camp.”

But as the team began winter workouts, his coaches saw things differently. They pushed him to participate fully: running with changes of direction, bending and pushing off his tender left knee.

No one has yet figured out how to speed up the typical 9- to 12-month recovery time from an ACL injury, says T.O. Souryal, an orthopedic surgeon in Dallas who was team physician for the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks for two decades and has performed thousands of knee surgeries. He has seen reinjuries even at eight months. “By far the most common failure is coming back too early,” he says.

One of two knee ligaments that cross in front of each other—hence the Latin word “cruciate”—the ACL stabilizes the joint by preventing the tibia from rotating too far forward when an athlete plants or pivots. An ACL repair is performed by taking a graft from another tendon in the knee or from the hamstring, or even a cadaver, and creating a new ligament. Lacking nerves and blood, the new ligament must gain strength and reintegrate into the body. “We have absolutely no control over that,” Souryal says. “There’s not a shot, there’s not a supplement, there’s not a pill that will make the graft mature any quicker.”

That knowledge informs what he tells his own patients during their recovery. Immediately after surgery, they can walk without crutches. “They’re even able to run,” he says, “but what they can’t do is cut and pivot, because that’s what leaves the ACL graft most susceptible to injury.”

Universities in the major conferences provide what they say are guaranteed four-year scholarships, even if players suffer an injury or don’t perform as expected. It’s an open secret that coaches find various ways around that promise.

Roster spots are a precious commodity in college football, because of the NCAA rule limiting Division I teams to 85 full-ride scholarships. Megwa’s force-out (the phenomenon is also known as a push-out) is standard stuff. Technically a coach can only suggest that a scholarship player leave, but it’s a suggestion a young man is unlikely to resist, particularly if he still has ambitions as a football player. There’s almost no chance he’ll get playing time under a coach who’s told him to hit the portal.

Coaches also use medical retirements, awarded to players deemed to have career-ending injuries, as a workaround. Medically retired players still receive athletic aid but don’t count toward the cap. Fourteen years ago, Nick Saban, the title-winning former Alabama coach, was accused by several former players of oversigning recruits and then forcing those he didn’t want—even healthy ones—into medical retirements. (The school said at the time that the decisions were made independently and prioritized student health.)

Before the rules on transfers changed in 2021, the NCAA required football players to sit out a year after changing teams. Now they can play for their new school without losing a year. That benefits players who want to leave; the best of them now have significant leverage and earning power. But it also makes it easier for coaches to show players the door.

From 2014 to 2021, top-tier teams had set aside about three scholarships a year for players who were medically retired or ineligible for other reasons. By 2023 the figure had declined to the equivalent of about 1½ scholarships. The numbers are buried deep in required annual financial disclosures from Division I schools to the NCAA. Businessweek obtained the records for 52 schools in college football’s dominant conferences from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database at Syracuse University, which requests the reports annually under public records law.

Megwa, who’d started running and weightlifting in the winter workouts, felt the first pain that January, according to his suit. He reported it to trainers, and they gave him new sneakers. On Feb. 1, 2022, the suit says, coaches had Megwa do a lateral shuffling drill; he felt a sharp pain in the incision point on his left knee. After a “quick on-field evaluation,” Megwa claims, UW staffers determined the ligament was stable—but didn’t send him to the doctor.

“I am a bit surprised that the team physician at Washington did not intervene and say, ‘Hey, this guy cannot do lateral shuffling, the graft isn’t ready yet,’” says Souryal, the knee surgeon, who didn’t have any knowledge of the case other than the details provided in the suit. “My suspicion is he wasn’t aware” of the drill. Gee didn’t respond to messages seeking comment. A spokesperson for DeBoer at Alabama declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Throughout February, the suit says, Megwa reported pain and swelling in the knee to trainers and coaches; they persuaded him to take painkillers. Megwa told them he didn’t want to “push it sooner than he should,” according to the suit. Again without consulting the doctor, the suit says, the trainers told him to keep participating in drills. One coach, it claims, attacked his manhood in an expletive-laced tirade.

By March, Megwa couldn’t run. He met with Gee that month and had an MRI that confirmed his fears about being pushed back into practice too soon: He’d suffered another ACL tear, with additional medial and lateral meniscus tears. A coach called Megwa into his office, the suit says, and delivered the message: Since he couldn’t play, he should hit the portal.

His exit struck some teammates as cruel. “He hadn’t played a single down,” says Newton, his former teammate. “I felt like he should have at least got a chance before they decided to do what they did.”

The fan sites that had built up Megwa as a savior just a few years earlier hardly seemed to notice his departure. They’d moved on to expecting great things from different teenagers. “UW Class of ’21 Basically Was a Dud, Providing No Starters, Just 6 Survivors,” a Sports Illustrated report concluded in December 2023 about its recruits that year. But Penix and the rest of the team DeBoer had assembled were in the midst of an undefeated regular season. The glorious year, the Huskies’ best in a generation, ended in January with a loss to Michigan in the national championship game. DeBoer parlayed that appearance into the Alabama job, where he replaced the famed Saban and doubled his annual salary to $10 million.

Ahigh-concept limited series might be filmed, if it hasn’t been already, at a sleek training center called Exos in Gulf Breeze, Florida. In the months before the NFL draft in the spring, 40 or so of the top prospects live in a condominium complex on Pensacola Beach, paid for by their agents, and undergo intensive training to get their bodies in the best possible shape. They do high jumps and 40-yard dashes. They work with nutritionists, conditioning experts, trainers, position coaches. But one of the most important parts of the Exos pitch is that they’ll finally have access to doctors who treat them with their own, and not the team’s, best interests in mind. “As your collegiate career comes to an end, there will be injuries—large, small, or even undetected—that you’ll finally have the chance to properly rehab,” Exos says on its website.

Brett Kindle, an orthopedist who treats players at Exos, says he’s been surprised by the injuries that college teams—and sometimes the players themselves, in the single-minded drive for playing time—have let linger. “They’ve been playing through stuff that it’s like, man …” Kindle says. One player, he recalls, had a finger locked in a bent position because he’d kept playing rather than sit out a few months for surgery. By the time Kindle saw him, it couldn’t be fixed. Other times athletes come in with knee or ankle sprains their college teams had diagnosed as low grade—but when he does the imaging himself, they’re moderate or severe.

In the NFL, the collective bargaining agreement with players guarantees they can seek a second medical opinion, paid for by the team, on injuries. College athletes get no such protections. “These collegiate athletes almost are timid in trying to be advocates for themselves,” Kindle says.

Administrators and coaches have huge incentives to turn a blind eye to players’ health. As TV money has poured into college football, it’s helped drive athletic revenue—and in turn boosted salaries, fueled construction of lavish facilities and subsidized nonrevenue sports such as lacrosse and swimming.

The University of Washington is typical of the trajectory among major programs. The year after Megwa was forced out of the football program, the school’s athletic revenue totaled $151.6 million, a more than 50% increase from a decade earlier, according to the Knight-Newhouse database. Much of that was driven by football, where spending also ballooned as coaching salaries outstripped increases in player scholarships.

The NCAA’s $2.8 billion settlement of an antitrust lawsuit, granted preliminary court approval in October, will allow athletes to share directly in some of the revenue for the first time starting next year. But the settlement is silent on their working conditions. Charlie Baker, the NCAA’s president, told an annual convention of athletic directors in June that the organization has already moved on to its next goal: persuading Congress to award an exemption that would head off efforts to reclassify students as employees with the right to collectively bargain.

The coaches—from Franklin at Penn State to Fleck at Minnesota to DeBoer at Alabama—are all still thriving. At universities that loudly proclaim their commitment to diversity goals, it’s striking that the players are largely non-White. One 2018 study found that Black men comprised 55% of the football teams in the major conferences, but just 2.4% of the undergraduate student enrollment.

Brooks, the Minnesota running back who suffered a concussion in Fleck’s first spring game, struggled in the years that followed. He had three ACL surgeries, and his mother died. In December 2019, he stepped in front of a moving train. At the last moment, he changed his mind; the train hit him, but he survived. Fleck and his wife visited Brooks in the hospital. Brooks is now playing for the Arizona Rattlers, a pro indoor team, and he’s since talked frequently about that moment to help others in distress. “Football played a big part,” he says. “I was letting all of that weigh on me, on top of my mom and all the injuries.”

Megwa sat out the entire 2022 season at Oklahoma and got into one game last year, a blowout of Texas Christian University in which he had one carry for 6 yards. “It felt like a big relief,” he says. “As long as I can remember, I played ball. I just wanted to be out there.”

In February he filed his suit in King County Superior Court against the University of Washington, alleging that his treatment left him worse off—facing pain, suffering, anxiety, humiliation and emotional distress in addition to further medical expenses. Megwa’s health insurer—his parents’—was billed tens of thousands of dollars, and the family paid a share through copays and deductibles, says Andrew Ackley, his attorney. A judge has set a 2026 trial date.

Ackley says he took the case because Megwa, far from the arrogant-jock stereotypes, struck him as “the nicest kid in the world.” But he also sees the suit as one more challenge of an NCAA model that refuses to treat athletes as employees. Washington state’s workers’ compensation program, like those in other states, expressly forbids student-athletes from putting in claims. Students don’t have lifelong access to a workers’ compensation program like employees in virtually any other business, Ackley says. Athletes like Megwa “are pretty much on their own.”

Still an Oklahoma Sooner, with three more years of eligibility after this season, Megwa hasn’t given up on his pro dreams. He even got a taste of NIL fame, appearing in an Instagram post for a local car-window tinting company. (He got a free tint, not cash.) But so far this year, Megwa hasn’t seen the field.