Southern California running back Vavae Malepeai finds a hole against the UCLA defense.
Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press
So: college football?
Is it happening? Are we doing this? Who knows!
Two weeks ago, I wrote that college football felt like a September wedding to which I’d yet to get a tuxedo.
Now it feels like I’m in the tuxedo, driving to the church—with no idea if it’s open, or if anyone’s going to be inside.
Thank goodness the tuxedo is a rental.
Here it is, the first week of August, and though there are start dates and plans on plans on plans—and hopes upon hopes upon hopes—we can’t get a hard confirm on whether or not college football is going to happen this fall.
Maybe! But also maybe not!
College football isn’t alone in its nebulousness, of course. We still don’t have a grip on this pandemic, so virtually every element of ordinary life is TBD.
Nobody knows what’s going to shake out this autumn at college, much less college football. Universities have strategies for sparse classrooms and half-empty dorms, but that’s all these ideas are right now: strategies.
We’re citizens of an edgy nation, living day-to-day, bickering about masks instead of buckling down to bring our communities back. In the absence of a unified response, routines we took for granted remain very much in flux.
Kids going to school? Or virtual school?
Head to the office? Or work from home?
(That’s if you’re lucky to have a job at all.)
Baseball? Could be kaput soon.
Conventions? Gonna be weird.
Elections? ELECTIONS?!
Now college athletes are speaking out, which was inevitable. On Sunday, word arrived—via a letter published in the Players’ Tribune—that a bunch of Pac-12 football players will decline to participate if the conference doesn’t address their concerns about the coronavirus and overarching inequalities in their sport.
“We believe a football season under these conditions would be reckless and put us at needless risk. We will not play until there is real change that is acceptable to us,” the players said in a statement.
This isn’t an idle ask from the fringes: This group of Pac-12 players is said to number in the hundreds. Their talent is very much necessary. The season is due to begin in weeks.
This was bound to happen. Players in big-time college sports have long looked at those billion-dollar TV contracts, prime time games, bowl playoffs, charter planes, millionaire coaches, ADs and other assorted personnel (strength coaches making half a million bucks!) and realized that their sport had bloomed into a free-market economy in which everyone was taking a cut of the free market except for one party: the talent on the field.
And not only were the players banned from financially participating, they were punished if they did.
It was a Capitalism for Some, hypocrisy that mostly everyone went along with, because it had been that way forever, and it stacked the deck nicely for the adults in charge. The players got valuable scholarships, fancy locker rooms and a chance to live out their athletic dreams, and, if they were really, really good, they could prep for the pros. And as the money got bigger and bigger, we were told that without the revenue from big-time college football, the whole thing could fall apart, including all those nonrevenue sports.
But in a pandemic, when many college students are being asked to stay home, and college football players are being told to come in and take a risk because there’s money to be made, hypocrisy and imbalance of power are all a little too much. The old bromides about college sports being about tradition and tailgating—for dear alma mater!—really fade when young unpaid men are ramping up to play a contact sport in a contagion before no fans, because it’s, well, very necessary business.
The jig is up. The players have leverage, and they know it. And that’s what this letter is, nothing more or less. There are some asks that are impractical moonshots (splitting revenue with the players in money-making sports; dramatic reductions in executive pay) but there are also very realistic asks about liability, eligibility and being involved in health safety protocols.
There are also requests that the conference step up its commitment to racial justice, including dedicating a portion of revenue to help Black students on campus.
Do not make the mistake of assuming that this movement is limited to West Coasters of the Pac-12. Players around the country are noticing what’s going on. Trevor Lawrence, the Clemson quarterback expected to be the No. 1 pick in next year’s NFL draft, has already shown support for elements of the effort on Twitter.
Is this a crisis? Nah. Colleges should realize that the players are doing them a favor. With the fate of a season in the balance—with real questions if this can be pulled off—here’s a chance to give athletes a seat at the table, and to have a transparent dialogue about the business of these games. It’s something that should have happened long ago.
Are there peculiarities about college sports and higher education that make these questions complicated? Yes. Is there a chance that changes to the revenue distribution in big-time athletics has the chance to be enormously disruptive to other sports on campus? Absolutely. It could get very messy.
But those are hurdles, not excuses.
A pandemic has laid bare the fact that athletes in these sports provide enormous value. I still have no idea if college football will kick off—there’s still a chance that university presidents and public-health officials will intervene and ask what on earth are we doing here? But the athletes on the field have power, too. This won’t happen without them.
Share Your Thoughts
Do you think players deserve more of a say in the restart of college sports? Join the discussion.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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