Race issues the real battle for colleges
College football may or may not return this fall. If it does, it will surely look and feel different as schools grapple with testing, quarantining, the changing nature of dealing with the coronavirus and whether to allow fans (and, if so, how many).
Already, as campuses have opened their facilities for workouts, some players are testing positive for COVID-19, including at Alabama, Mississippi State, Florida and Houston, where all workout activities were suspended late last week when six athletes tested positive.
At some point, though, as the pandemic eases, with our public health system getting a handle on the outbreak and perhaps a vaccine, the games — and the fans — will return.
Even if that doesn't happen until 2021, the coronavirus won’t ultimately change the nature of college football: how teams are built, how they communicate, how they play.
Oh, folks might side-eye one another in the concession line or wash their hands a few extra times — and they will think differently about how they move in space in a mass of bodies — but that will eventually subside, and the virus and how we think about it will recede into history.
Another threat, however, one that’s been with us so much longer, could change the nature of college football far more fundamentally: racism.
In fact, it already is changing it, from Iowa City to Clemson to Austin to Tallahassee, as mostly Black players speak out about the injustices, inequity and demeaning language they’ve lived with inside their programs.
Empowered by nationwide protests and the sense that this is our chance to finally talk about racism, players are taking to social media to call out their coaches.
And so, what would’ve been unheard of even a year ago — players admonishing a coach publicly — is forcing the mostly white staffs of several programs to step back and consider whether the culture they’ve built inside their programs was too centered on being white, and whether they treated their white players and Black players the same.
Turns out they have not. This shouldn’t be surprising. It’s just what too many players have been forced to live with.
Well, no more.
You could see that two weeks ago when a Florida State defensive lineman, Marvin Wilson, tweeted that new coach Mike Norvell lied about talking with every player on the team about George
Floyd and protests that began after he was killed by a Minneapolis policeman.
The future NFL draft pick not only disputed the words of his coach but also declared he and his teammates would cease workouts until a team meeting could be held to address Norvell’s false statement.
It worked. The team got together. Players spoke from the heart. The coach apologized.
That pattern played out similarly at Iowa, after several dozen former and current Hawkeyes — most of them African-American — took to Twitter to expose unjust experiences and accuse strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle of racial insensitivity.
Within 24 hours, Doyle was put on administrative leave. Within a week, head coach Kirk Ferentz was standing at a podium on a practice field in Iowa City with a few of his Black players, addressing the issue in front of reporters.
The players were encouraged to speak freely. They did. So did the head coach, admitting he hadn’t considered what it was like to be Black inside his program.
“Some of our Black athletes were feeling that they can’t be themselves in our culture,” Ferentz told reporters. “And to that end, we must be more inclusive and more aware.”
The coaching staff canceled workouts to concentrate on meeting and talking about the day-to-day insensitivities they saw. Several players said the gatherings changed the entire feeling inside the program.
“There’s definitely a whole entire morale change,” said junior running back Ivory Kelly-Martin. “There’s a whole entire change to how it was then and how it is now.”
He’s talking about a matter of weeks. That’s how fast we are moving. That’s how fast some programs are responding.
The speed is building its own momentum, freeing players to express the pain they feel, toward not just their coaches but also their schools.
Consider Austin, Texas, where several Black players took to social media to let the Texas coaching staff and administration know they would no longer help visiting recruits or partake in alumni events until the school got rid of its spirit song — “The Eyes of Texas” — and renamed buildings named after Confederate icons or racist figures.
If NASCAR can ban the Confederate flag, Texas can change its spirit song and rename buildings. At this point, everything is on the table. And should be.
Because what began as a protest to eradicate police brutality has turned into a national movement for true equality, and no layer of society is free from examination.
Right now, college football is under a lens. When it finally returns, don’t expect it to look the same.