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College football is in a state of chaos. On Sunday, press reports indicated that the university presidents overseeing NCAA programs with large sums of money were prepared to cancel the fall season – or at least hopefully postpone it until the spring – over concerns about COVID-19. On Sunday night, team leaders from a number of those programs, including several players campaigning for college athletes to have greater work rights, called for the season to play out as planned. On Monday, a number of Republican politicians responded to the call, culminating in:
WTF? Has Team MAGA decided that it now supports a predominantly Black labor movement?
Not really, and to understand why, it helps to divide stakeholders into three groups – the schools, the players, and the politicians – and to examine their incentives separately.
1. The schools. Big football programs make big money: Ohio’s athletics department, for example, generated $ 210 million in revenue in the 2018-1919 fiscal year, most of it from football. None of that revenue goes directly to players; instead it is used to fund so-called sports without income and to pay enormous coaching and administrative salaries that are inflated and unnecessary exactly because the players do not receive a cut. If there is no football season, there is no money to keep these athletic divisions on the floor – that is why, until a few days ago, the leaders of the so-called Power 5 athletics conferences all rushed in front of a season, to the point of sanctioning practices and proposing proven safer schemes involving exclusively regional games. (Michigan and Washington, for example, had canceled the game that they would play on September 5)
But the test and security protocols that individual conferences put in place (or claimed to deploy) over the summer were not enough to prevent a number of programs from having coronavirus outbreaks, while players participated in (relatively) low intensity, not -contact conditioning. With teams on the verge of starting full-contact practices, incidents such as an Indiana offensive lineman’s ambulance trip drew attention to the potentially disastrous short- and long-term safety and liability effects of playing through a pandemic. The result: a sort of stamp within a few days of cancellation, culminating in Sunday’s reports that the season would be called.
2. The players. There are literally thousands of Division I footballers, who have varying personal incentives and attitudes towards risk. But in the image above, you can see a set of principles that a broad group of athletes, from backups to Heisman runners like Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence (whose tweet Donald Trump shared) and Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields, have agreed to. The players, as a whole, have been training all summer under pain-in-the-ass health constraints and, more broadly, their entire lives oriented around leagues from fall to Saturday. Many of them aspire to play in the NFL, but need more opportunities to prove themselves to pro scouts. Many also play for programs that to have successful prevention of viral transmission during summer practices; a proof of concept (type) exists. (You can see the reasoning: Will you stop us from playing just because Rutgers can not get his shit together?) They want the season to happen, but only under a strictly enforced safety regime that themselves have a say in creating and approving, and they want anyone who chooses to participate because of health care to be eligible. The language that Lawrence and other players shared about launching a college players’ association has the potential to revolutionize the sport – and professionalize it, in ways that Group 1 (the schools) and Group 3 (the politicians) would certainly not approve of. .
3. The politician. This is simple. Judge-politicians and pundits want a college football season for the same reason they reopened restaurants and schools: to give the impression that the United States is returning to ‘normal’ life because the pandemic is under control, and to avoid costly closures and cancellations should backstop with federal spending. It is an item of belief for this group that only liberal hysterics worry about being infected or killed by the coronavirus; anyone who raises such concerns is therefore an enemy, even if that person is an essential political college administrator whose concerns are for the most part financial. The right-wing support for players is situational, and will be denied as soon as the call returns to compensation.
The presidents and conference commissioners who play college football are in a pickle. Their players ask them to help them make money, but only if they are recognized as equal partners. IN number of coaches with high profile– who demonstrably work for the managers but make much more money than they do – have made it clear that, if it their, the games would take place. Donald Trump has burst Kool-Aid Man-style into the room.
What will they do? Recognizing that players are different from “ordinary” students, they bring them into the planning process and try to put COVID-safe footballs on every Power 5 campus. (It still may not work, but the next cancellation would have more legitimacy.) They were able to keep the line and cancel everything at the moment, allowing their increasingly autonomy-conscious players a full semester off to continue organizing. They could divide across lines of political geography, with the cancellation of the West and Midwest and the South trying to play, a movement that could trigger defections and insurgents that would end the NCAA as we know it. But what is clear, very suddenly, is that they cannot unilaterally continue to make decisions with the expectation that the players will be too busy to lift weights, and be intimidated by cultural attitudes towards ‘straight’ athletes, to get there something to do.
