ASU prof: Cancel college football for 2020
Jackson says pause good to examine sports’ role
Arizona State professor Victoria Jackson believes there should be no college football in 2020-21, and not just because of the coronavirus risks for players and staff.
Jackson, the NCAA 10,000-meter track champion when she competed for ASU from 2004-06, believes the confluence of social rights protests, college athletes rights issues and the COVID-19 pandemic are an opportunity to examine football’s position and role.
“We should take advantage of this moment to think about the place of college football on our campuses and what higher education’s relationship with the game should be going forward,” Jackson said.
Jackson first proposed the idea of canceling football for a year in an op-ed published in the Boston Globe. She since has discussed the topic on various national outlets including in a podcast with ESPN’s Sarah Spain, who was a track teammate with Jackson at Lake Forest (Illinois) High School in the late 1990s.
Unlike the Ivy League, which voted Wednesday to cancel all fall sports including football for health concerns, Jackson’s arguments are more centered on what she wrote is “a rotten model that takes advantage of young Black men and their talents.
“The myth is that college sports represent the American Dream. But the reality is that college sports are part of the American tragedy being protested in our streets.”
Jackson said her op-ed evolved from her work at ASU — she is a sports historian and clinical assistant professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies — over the past five years and what she sees as a “rush to get back to business as usual and using the pandemic as justification for we’ve just got to get sports back. Let’s put NIL (name, image, likeness reform) on the back burner to the point where it inevitably goes away.
“This athletes rights movement had been building such momentum and also the antitrust challenge to the whole enterprise. To see all of that potentially go away because of the coronavirus pandemic, I was concerned that was what was unfolding and needed a thought piece to point that out and also present it to university presidents that we do need this massive intervention for all of these reasons piling on us.”
The NCAA is seeking federal NIL legislation to supersede numerous such state athlete compensation laws scheduled to go into effect as soon as 2021.
High-profile football and men’s basketball players are likely to benefit most from the ability to make money from their name, image and likeness.
Last week, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee met with NCAA and college athletic officials, including SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, about NIL legislation and whether the NCAA should receive antitrust protection from NIL lawsuits such as one recently filed with ASU swimmer Grant House as a lead plaintiff.
In her op-ed, Jackson argued that “schools should halt their quest for an antitrust exemption from Congress. This would entrench business as usual.
Instead, they should own up to the fact that they have allowed college sports to creep too far away from the academic mission and should take on the responsibility to fix it.”
She then goes into the money made and subsequently spent in college athletics (football in particular) and how “labor costs for the players on the field — the majority of whom are Black — have remained artificially low, capped at scholarships.
“College sports means calling something educational — when often it is not — in order not to classify athletes as employees so that their compensation can be artificially restricted. This is what is amateur about college sports.”
Jackson, 38, understands the economic repercussions of no football on sports such as hers that depend on football revenue for their existence. Stanford became the latest Power 5 school to cut sports, announcing Wednesday that it will eliminate 11 including wrestling, men’s rowing and men’s volleyball after the 2020-21 school year.
“The financial model supporting 36 varsity sports is not sustainable,” Stanford
athletics said in explaining its decision, tied to a projected $12-million athletic deficit for fiscal year 2021.
ASU has 24 varsity sports (combining swimming and diving), with total operating revenue in 2018-19 of $105 million. Football brought in $43 million during the 2019 fiscal year.
“When you’re saying cancel a season, that’s pretty harsh,” Jackson said. “A lot of people I care about work in college sports. The reality of what a cancellation could mean is job losses. But when you take a step back and think about it structurally and also historically, the responsible thing to do at this point is to have an intervention because too many people have been hurt by this system over the years.”
She hasn’t discussed her plan with ASU Vice President for Athletics Ray Anderson and football coach Herm Edwards, whom she doesn’t expect to be on her side.
They might, though, be willing to entertain her idea of spinning off football from the rest of the athletic department and privatizing it so, as she wrote, “players in a dangerous sport might finally get paid compensation and unionized labor rights.”
Jackson appreciates the academic freedom at ASU, home to the Global Sport Institute, that allows for open dialogue on issues as sensitive as cancelling a football season.
ASU athletics recently formed WE 22, a group of Black coaches and administrators committed to helping Sun Devil Black athletes navigate their college careers.
“This place is excellent because it’s inclusive, not because it’s exclusive,” she said. “That’s not just a shiny statement. It’s an everyday lived experience at the university and that goes to athletics too. We’ve had open conversations about race going on for a very long time. I take pride in doing this work at ASU.”