We still don't know the answer to that question, really, despite a press conference this afternoon in Iowa City to discuss the wave of Iowa players hospitalized Monday night with a serious muscle syndrome, rhabdomyolysis, that's frequently caused by overexertion in workouts. For an official Q&A, it was curiously short on officials: Head coach Kirk Ferentz , athletic director Gary Barta and team doctor Ned Amendola were all out of town, and no member of the strength and conditioning staff was made available for reporters. That left PR chief Paul Federici, and a parent of one of the hospitalized players, Biff Poggi (a longtime high school coach) to explain how a single, supervised workout could apparently fell a dozen college athletes in one swoop. We learned a little:• The number is now 13. A 13th player was admitted Tuesday night. All remain hospitalized "in safe and stable condition," and are reportedly responding well to treatment.
• There was adequate supervision for the workout. More than adequate, in fact: All five strength and conditioning coaches were on hand to oversee the proceedings. (And yet, somehow, none were available to answer questions. Busy guys.)
• Players thought it was the workout from hell. Among the many responses from players' Facebook accounts and the like floating around since last week:
• Senior cornerback Jordan Bernstine, on Thursday night: "Hands Down the hardest workout I’ve ever had in my life! I can’t move!"
• Freshman linebacker Jim Poggi, on Monday night: "in the hospital... turns out its bad news bears wen ur wizz is brown."
• Freshman linebacker Shane DiBona, also on Thursday night: "I had to squat 240 pounds 100 times and it was timed. I can't walk and I fell down the stairs … lifes great."
Jim Poggi also reportedly did 100 squats in 17 minutes, according to his father, and then pulled a sled 100 yards. Federici called the regimen "strenuous" and "ambitious," but well within the bounds of standard winter workout fare: "This is an anomaly. We just haven't seen this type of response before."
• Players returned to work after showing symptoms of extreme fatigue. From the sounds of it, at least a few guys were practically debilitated on Thursday night, but came back Friday for an upper body workout before taking the weekend off. It wasn't until Monday's workout, focused again on the lower body, that the situation deteriorated to the point that players complained and were sent to the hospital.
The good news: All players are reportedly recovering well from a potentially fatal affliction. No one is going to die, nor, it seems, suffer any significant longterm effects. The bad news: The absence of a single decision maker at the press conference – held more than 36 hours after the players were hospitalized – reeked of evasiveness. It fell to a parent to supply relevant details and defend the program.
In the longer run, today's response may be worse than the reality, especially if the stricken players back up the program. All told, a supervised workout that's been completed before with no apparent ill effects – assuming those things are true – isn't exactly a scandal that's going to rock the foundations of Kinnick Stadium, even if there are certain people who already want to make it into one. It's very possible, given the circumstances, that Iowa will eventually fire someone in charge last Thursday for either pushing or failing to keep players from going over the edge, or at least that it should fire someone. Outside of outrage by the victims themselves, though, or a damning new revelation of man's inhumanity to man inside the Hawkeye weight room, a purge probably will not be mandatory. Just please, for heaven's sake, don't let it happen again.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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