A former BYU football player is suing BYU, the Western Athletic Conference and the NCAA for $5 million in damages for “their reckless disregard for the health and safety of generations of BYU student-athletes.”

Larry Carr — a star linebacker who was a member of BYU’s WAC-champion 1974 team that played in the Fiesta Bowl — and his attorneys allege that the school knew the dangers posed to players participating in games after suffering concussions.

According to the federal lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Colorado, BYU, the WAC and NCAA “kept their players and the public in the dark about an epidemic that was slowly killing their players.”

The case could turn into a class-action lawsuit for players who played at BYU from 1952 to 2010 or 1962 to 1999. The WAC was created in 1962 and BYU left the WAC for the Mountain West Conference in 1999. It wasn’t until 2010 that BYU, the NCAA and the WAC adopted protocols to diagnose concussions and guidelines to determine whether or not a player could return to play after suffering a concussion.

The suit contends that Carr absorbed “2,000 to 3,000 violent hits to his head during hitting drills, practice and games. Carr played at a time and at a position where he was taught and encouraged to hit the offensive player as hard as possible and to always lead with his head.”

According to the suit, due to the repeated blows to his head during his BYU career, Carr has struggled with anxiety and was diagnosed with significant brain damage.

The suit outlines that medical studies “have firmly established that repetitive and violent impacts to the head can cause concussions with a heightened risk of long-term traumatic brain injuries (or TBIs), including memory loss, dementia, depression, CTE, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other related symptoms.”

The law firm representing Carr, Edelson PC, has filed other lawsuits against the NCAA and other universities and athletic conferences on behalf of former student-athletes in connection with concussion-related issues.

Contacted Friday, BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins told the Deseret News, “We just became aware of this lawsuit this afternoon and do not have a statement at this point in time.”