Matt Campbell comments on Illinois football lawsuit involving Iowa State tight ends coach

AMES — Iowa State tight ends coach Alex Golesh was accused in a lawsuit filed Friday by a former Illinois football player who was allegedly forced to return early from injuries, according to a report from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Former offensive lineman Anthony Durkin filed suit against the university, a former athletic director and former head coach Tim Beckman for pushing him to come back prematurely from injuries, eventually leading to a loss of his scholarship.

According to the Sun-Times report, three team doctors, Beckman and Golesh — who was an Illini assistant from 2012-15 — and the athletic director were negligent in not ensuring Durkin's safety with early 2013 through November 2015 as the time period. The suit seeks an excess of $250,000 in damages.

Beckman was fired from Illinois in August 2015 for his 'efforts to deter injury reporting influence medical decisions that pressured players to avoid or postpone medical treatment and continue playing despite injuries,' the Sun-Times reported. Golesh was not charged with any wrongdoing at the time.

'To be honest with you, any of that information is not new information to my knowledge,' ISU coach Matt Campbell said. 'All I mean by that is when we hired Coach Golesh, all of those situations had been vetted by the University of Illinois. Their entire staff, all of the team doctors, everybody had been vetted in a thorough investigation. So to me none of this is new information.

'We had detailed everything before hiring Coach Golesh, and certainly not with him, but the situation that had gone on there prior to the year before. We wanted to make sure that, hey, we were doing the right thing and everybody was cleared there.

'Our information back from the University of Illinois was they would have never kept him on staff and he would not have been retained there had he been involved in any investigation or any issues there. So that's what I know and obviously we'll see, but that's what I know from that situation.'

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