This CU regent hates the game of football
She doesn’t hate Colorado football coach Mel Tucker. She doesn’t hate athletic director Rick George. She doesn’t hate CU Buffs players.
CU regent Linda Shoemaker hates the game.
“There are people that say that it’s going to be all my fault if the team has a losing season,” Shoemaker recently told The Post. “It’s all my fault because they need to feel the support, all the way up and down the system (from) everyone at the school, everyone in the stands, everyone in the athletic department. I just think it’s funny.”
She can laugh at some of the emails she gets. She can laugh at the idea that one grandmother has the power to somehow bring the CU football program, decades of tradition and millions of dollars of infrastructure, to its knees.
What she can’t laugh about is Rashaan Salaam or Drew Wahlroos, former CU football stars who took their own lives while they were still relatively young. What she can’t laugh about is Bob Carmichael, an exCU football player, sharing horror stories of life after football.
“Every six months we’d go to coffee and I would listen to him and I just started doing the research,” Shoemaker explained. “I’m always tilting at windmills. Always wanting to change things. Whenever I see problems, I want to fix it.”
She makes no apologies for being anti-football, or anti-how-the-game-hasevolved. She makes no apologies for being one of the primary reasons the Board of Regents meeting in Boulder on Thursday will include a panel on health and wellness in intercollegiate athletics — specifically, the effects of concussions, and what CU and the Pac-12 conference have been pursuing to mitigate those risks. A panel that includes George and Dr. Eric McCarty, CU’s head team physician.
“The first thing to notice was is (that) it’s only one hour,” said Shoemaker, a CU alum who took on football safety — and the football machine — as one of her pet projects after her six-year term began in 2015. “And the second thing to notice is (that) it’s all employees of the university or of the athletic department, it’s all people who think CU is doing a great job and there are no serious problems here. But I think, on the other hand, it’ll be interesting. Everybody on the board will learn something. But it is very one-sided. I asked for (Bob) Carmichael to be on the panel. They said, ‘No,’ they weren’t going to have any outsiders. So it’s a dog-and-pony show.”
She makes no bones about wanting to hear more from the Pac-12’s StudentAthlete Health and WellBeing Concussion Coordinating Unit, which CU was tapped to lead in 2017. Or for being wary of what repeated head blows are doing to young minds. Or being one of only two regents not to approve Tucker’s contract when it was put up for a vote last December.
“I don’t know what the solution is — I really don’t know because I don’t see that the Pac-12 or the NCAA are going to make changes anytime soon that are going to be substantive,” Shoemaker said. “If somehow football could be separated from the academic enterprise, I would feel better.”
She admits it’s a bit like fighting jazz in New Orleans or dissing soul in Memphis. Football is woven into the culture in Colorado, a center of civic pride from the Broncos on down.
“But people who know me, my friends who love me, are going to love me anyway, even if they think I’m crazy on this particular issue,” Shoemaker said. “Most people are either, ‘They don’t care about football,’ or, ‘They love football.’ I’m a real outlier.”
She’s also a grandmother who loves her family. Even if they sometimes think she’s crazy for being antifootball.
“I have a brand-new grandson in Denver and his parents love football, and they’re going to take him to the CU-Nebraska game,” she laughed. “And I’m going to be there. I will be there. But I just can’t support it with my conscience anymore.”