Erik Brady | USA TODAY

USA TODAY Sports

H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY Sports

Larry Fedora is the University of North Carolina’s football coach. Kevin Guskiewicz is UNC’s dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. One of them is a genius.

Hint: It’s not Fedora.

Fedora spoke at ACC media days Wednesday in Charlotte, where he questioned a link between football and CTE and suggested changes in college football could lead to the downfall of the nation.

“I fear that the game will get pushed so far to one extreme you won’t recognize the game 10 years from now,” Fedora said. “That’s what I worry about, and I do believe if it gets to that point that our country goes down, too.”

This sort of talk surprised Guskiewicz, founding director of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at North Carolina who has won a MacArthur Foundation award — informally known as a “genius grant” — for his seminal research on head injuries in sports.

Guskiewicz told USA TODAY Sports that the quotes Fedora offered Wednesday do not match up with the man he knows.

“I’ve not worked with a coach who cares more about the health and safety of their players than Larry Fedora,” Guskiewicz said. “When he got to Carolina, he reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I know North Carolina is one of the leading places in the country that does concussion research, and what can we do? I want to continue to keep this thing going.’ ”

Guskiewicz said Fedora allowed his players to be a part of a landmark joint research initiative by the NCAA and the Department of Defense that is designed to enhance the safety of athletes and service members.

“There are many coaches around the country who won’t touch this,” Guskiewicz said. “They won’t have their players participating in research studies. And when we were asked to be one of the major sites for this NCAA-Department of Defense grand alliance study, I had to go to Larry and say, ‘We’ve been asked to be a part of it and it could take a lot of time of our players.’ And he just said, ‘We have to figure this injury out.’ ”

Some of the research that Guskiewicz has done led the NFL to change its rules on kickoffs, leading to more touchbacks. This fall, in the Football Bowl Subdivision, a fair catch on a kickoff inside the 25-yard line will yield possession at the 25. “I think it’s a great rule,” Guskiewicz said. He declined to comment on Fedora’s apparent criticism of such rules.

“I wasn’t there in Charlotte,” Guskiewicz said, “but my guess is Larry was just trying to emphasize that this is an injury that there are still a lot of unknowns about.”

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College football spring games in 2018