Star players have shared message: We want to play

Five years ago this month, a push to unionize college football players ended in defeat.

Then on Monday, with the coronavirus pandemic raging so widely that the fall sports seasons had become imperiled, college football’s stars mounted a ferocious public campaign to salvage the games — and to assert power in a multibillion-dollar industry that has always relied on their talents and often sought to silence their voices.

Whether the effort, an abrupt merger of two campaigns that sprouted from the chaos of the pandemic and the evolving plans of college administrators, will succeed is far from clear.

In messages on Twitter, the players, including Justin Fields of Ohio State, Najee Harris of Alabama and Trevor Lawrence of Clemson, pointedly declared: “We all want to play football this season.” They urged college football to adopt universal health guidelines; said that players should be allowed to opt out, as some already have; and declared that they wanted to use their “voices to establish open communication and trust between players and officials.”

Later Monday, President Donald Trump joined the debate when he retweeted Lawrence and said, “The student-athletes have been working too hard for their season to be canceled. #WeWantToPlay.”

None of the Power Five conferences have abandoned plans for football season, although all of them have cautioned for months that games were no sure bet.

But the sweeping display from players amounted to a merger of movements within college sports — some players had warned that they would not take the field this fall unless schools took greater steps to ensure their safety — and it opened another front in the protracted debate over the rights of unpaid student-athletes, an issue that has come under scrutiny on Capitol Hill and in America’s statehouses in recent months.

Lawrence, Clemson’s quarterback who played in last season’s national championship game and whose season is scheduled to begin Sept. 12 at Wake Forest, spent much of the weekend laying the groundwork for a campaign to play despite the pandemic.

“We are more likely to get the virus in everyday life than playing football,” Lawrence said in a series of posts on Twitter. “Having a season also incentivizes players being safe and taking all of the right precautions to try to avoid contracting covid because the season/ teammates safety is on the line. Without the season, as we’ve seen already, people will not social distance or wear masks and take the proper precautions.”

Some health experts and sports executives are deeply skeptical of those arguments, and some players have been, too. Last week, Connecticut, an independent in football, canceled its season, and its players said in a statement that they had “many health concerns and not enough is known about the potential long-term effects of contracting COVID-19.”

The most powerful conferences in college sports — the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac12 and the Southeastern — have all announced revised plans to play but cautioned that they could still cancel the season.

The Big Ten is scheduled to be the first league to open conference play, with a game between Ohio State and Illinois planned for Sept. 3. But the league said Saturday that its teams would not proceed to practice with pads, and it acknowledged “many questions regarding how this impacts schedules, as well as the feasibility of proceeding forward with the season at all.”