Buzz Bissinger: College Football Players Should Threaten to Boycott
The pandemic gives them an opportunity to demand what they deserve.
ByBuzz Bissinger
Mr. Bissinger is a journalist and the author of “Friday Night Lights.”
* NY Times, Aug. 25, 2020
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Dabo Swinney, Clemson Tigers head coach, with team members before a game
last year.
Dabo Swinney, Clemson Tigers head coach, with team members before a game
last year.Credit...Joshua S. Kelly/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
College football is a mess. It has been a mess for a century, with reams
of proposed reform in the wasteland of forgotten file cabinets. I was
part of the reform movement for a while, writing that college football
should be banned because it has nothing to do with academics. It
doesn’t. But it/is/interwoven into the social fabric of colleges and
universities. The games are pomp and pageantry and incredible
athleticism and tribal fan lunacy. So I eventually gave up on any
meaningful change in the sport.
Until the pandemic.
Out of catastrophe can come opportunity. With the season fundamentally
half-canceled by the decision of the major conferences of the Big 10 and
the Pac-12 not to play, now is the time to recalibrate the college
football industry and confront the issues that players, previously
shunted into silence, have brought up because of the repercussions of
Covid-19: not just obvious health issues but compensation issues and
racial issues and exploitation issues. None of this happens when the
status quo of the season ticks on year after year. No one listens.
There are those who think the effort to fix college football is malarkey
and sanctimony. It’s just sport. It’s just a game. “Game” implies
something fun and benign. College football is a huge industry. The five
major conferences bring in at least $4 billion in revenue annually.
Yet those who make the game, play the game, are the game, expose
themselves to possible brain injury and crippling arthritis and now the
pandemic, don’t receive a dime of revenue. The big programs make
millions off them — thetop 25 most valuable teams
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2019/09/12/college-football-most-valuable-clemson-texas-am/#5d7de04fa2e7>range
from roughly $27 million in profit at Clemson University to roughly $94
million at Texas A&M University, according to a 2019 study. Head
football coaches at Football Bowl Subdivision schools make an average of
$2.7 million.Dabo Swinney
<https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/football/coach>of Clemson
University, $9.3 million, Nick Saban of the University of Alabama, $8.9
million, Jim Harbaugh of the University of Michigan, $7.5 million.
Everybody except the players. It is a system of serfdom unlike any not
just in sports but in corporate America.
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The N.C.A.A., perhaps the worst umbrella organization in history and
dedicated to protecting the college football industry, keeps using the
transparent fallback that players are compensated by the scholarships
they receive as well as other ancillaries like trainers and tutoring. So
what? The true value of a scholarship varies wildly, and it is no
substitute for the money players generate.
The National College Players Association and Drexel University’s sport
management department did a study showing that major college football
and basketball players generated as much as $1.5 million each beyond the
value of their scholarship. And this is from a few years ago.
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The problem with this calculation is determining the exact amount,
leading to endless disputes over revenue and profit and loss and the
wholesale price of a hot dog. A simpler and quicker method would be to
tie annual player compensation in the Football Bowl Subdivision schools
to the salary of the head coach. As an example, let’s use Mr. Swinney’s
$9.3 million a year at Clemson. Divide that by the number of players on
scholarship, limited to 85 by the N.C.A.A., and you come up with an
individual share of $109,412. Taking the average F.B.S. salary of $2.7
million, the player share would be $31,765. Since coaches’ salaries
generally reflect the size of a program, the smaller it is the less a
player makes. If a school thinks a player share is too much, lower the
salary. There would be no exceptions for programs crying that they lose
money. If that is true, drop football.
Compensation issues are only part of the college football mess. Because
of the George Floyd killing and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter
movement, players are now talking about racial inequities. Thirty years
ago I wrote the book “Friday Night Lights” about high school football in
Odessa, Texas. I saw unflinching racism both shockingly overt and
subtler: a double standard of expectation for Black football players
versus white football players; the attitude that white players perform
well because they work hard and Black players perform well because they
are naturally gifted and often don’t work hard enough. Have these issues
changed? A report commissionedby the University of Iowa
<https://now.uiowa.edu/2020/07/iowa-football-program-review-complete>in
June and released last month found entrenched bullying and racial bias
in the football program. Colorado State Universitystopped its football
program
<https://www.coloradoan.com/story/sports/csu/football/2020/08/07/colorado-state-suspends-csu-football-activities-after-racism-abuse-allegations/3324789001/>this
month after allegations of racism and verbal abuse.
Then there is the lack of hiring of Black head coaches. Out of 130
Football Bowl Subdivision schools,14 of the head football coaches
<https://www.nfl.com/news/maryland-s-michael-locksley-forms-group-for-minority-football-coaches>are
Black. It is a disgrace at universities that are on the defensive
because of the issues raised by Black Lives Matter and are preaching
diversity and yet have done nothing in this arena despite years of
criticism. Just do it.
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This month 13 players from the Pac-12 came outwith a list of demands
<https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/pac-12-players-covid-19-statement-football-season>before
the conference season was canceled: player-approved measures to address
not just Covid-19 but “serious injury, abuse and death”; 50 percent of
profit-sharing conference revenues for every sport to be evenly
distributed among participants; 2 percent of conference revenue to be
set aside for financial aid for low-income Black students and community
initiatives. Their voices are strong and have gotten attention.**Another
players’ group, We Want to Play, has members across all Power 5
conferences andhas raised issues
similar<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/sports/ncaafootball/coronavirus-college-football-players.html>to
those of the Pac-12 group, including the creation of a college football
players’ association.
The Big 10 and the Pac-12 may be out, but the Atlantic Coast Conference
and the Southeastern Conference and the Big 12 arestill planning to go
ahead
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/sports/ncaafootball/big-12-sec-acc-season.html>.
It is not surprising, since many of the states advocating to play are
the same states that find wearing protective masks optional, college
football a sacred American right. Football is not like other sports. It
is blood, snot, sweat and spit, bodily meals the virus craves. How can
these schools even be contemplating the risk when several medical
advisers to the N.C.A.A. said it was ill advised? Some coaches have
suggested that football players alone should return to campus, which
provides additional evidence that they are viewed more like employees
than traditional students and should be compensated.
The pandemic has provided a window. The absence of a normal college
football season gives players a chance they will never have again. The
13 Pac-12 players said they spoke on behalf of dozens of others who
raised similar concerns. They threatened to boycott over the virus, and
they should continue to threaten boycott over the other vital issues
they raised. You don’t need a union for that. You need more voices from
every conference and every team to build national unity and fortitude.
You can play football without a coach. You can play it without fans or
cheerleaders or mascots. But as far as I know, you can’t play without
players.
Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights.” His forthcoming
book, “The Mosquito Bowl,” will focus on a group of football-playing
Marines and World War II.
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