Central Florida head football coach George O’Leary is a pretty good coach. He’s not a great coach, but he’s good enough to keep getting hired places. Unfortunately for O’Leary, it seems the only time we hear about him is when he’s doing something wrong. Like say that time he was hired as the new head coach at Notre Dame, but then had to resign the position once the school found out he was lying on his resume (the folks at Notre Dame became suspicious after he claimed to have painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). The last time there was anything in the news on O’Leary, it was due to the death of Ereck Plancher, who died when he collapsed after conditioning drills back in March.

O’Leary took some heat then for possibly working his players too hard in practice, and now more players are coming forward saying that George was too rough on them in practice as well. Take former UCF defensive end DaQuwan McNealy, who quit the team after O’Leary damn near killed him.

From the ORLANDO SENTINEL:

McNealy said his football career ended during an offseason workout session 20 months ago, with O’Leary standing over him just inches away, barking orders for him to do reps on a leg-press machine.

“I never did this much weight before,” McNealy remembered telling O’Leary. But McNealy said O’Leary told him to try to press the weight anyway.

So McNealy, then an 18-year-old redshirt freshman, sat down on the machine, his back angled toward the ground. He recalls O’Leary above him, yelling, “Push the weight! Push the weight!”

McNealy tried — and then blacked out. The weight crashed down and pushed McNealy’s knees into his chest. “I heard guys saying that they saw me turn blue,” McNealy said. “They said they heard the air just go out of me.”

The next thing McNealy knew, he was on a bench with George holding his hand awaiting an ambulance to take him to the hospital. The damage this incident caused?

McNealy spent the next four days at a hospital, and he said doctors eventually diagnosed him with high blood pressure, a leaking heart valve and vasovagal syncope, a condition that causes fainting.

Of course, not every one of O’Leary’s players think his tough approach is necessarily a bad thing. Ken Celaj was an offensive lineman at Georgia Tech for four years under O’Leary, and he recalls a time his coach got rough with him.

One of Celaj’s last practices isn’t a fond memory. Just before Georgia Tech left Atlanta for the 1997 Carquest Bowl at then-Pro Player Stadium, Celaj wasn’t practicing well.

“I had a bad back,” Celaj said. “He put me in the middle of a circle, and he had people just come at me. You know, boom!”

Celaj remembers what he was thinking as 10 guys took turns slamming into him: “If that makes you feel better, if you could sleep better at night knowing that you did that, Coach, if that’s going to make me a better player, then the hell with it. Bring it on.”

Of course, despite that one day in practice, Celaj still thinks O’Leary is a great coach and that he shouldn’t lose his job for it, even saying “If there was a war, that’s the person that I would want to lead me in my war.”

Well, that’s great except for the fact that college football games aren’t a war. They’re football games. I don’t know whether or not O’Leary really is too hard on his players in practice, or if some of those players were just soft and couldn’t take it. What I do know is that if I were O’Leary and I had a player drop dead in front of me during a practice, I might start reconsidering how I do things.