College players no longer silent

For many college coaches, this has arguably been the most tense, nerveracking week of their careers.

As athletes have become more empowered to speak up in the wake of mass protests from coast- to- coast and less frightened about whom they might offend by discussing the racial inequality they have seen and experienced, it has been impossible to predict what’s around the corner.

Things that were supposed to be kept in- house, situations that the control freaks who run college programs might have thought they could handle in the past, were suddenly exposed.

A racially charged football practice incident from three years ago that left lingering resentment at Clemson suddenly resurfaced.

Florida State’s best football player

threatened a boycott because he did not think his new head coach’s statement about team dialogue was genuine.

A former Alabama gymnast went public about an assistant coach’s highly inappropriate joke.

Former Pittsburgh players went to social media airing grievances about coach Pat Narduzzi ranging from his use of the word “thugs” to allegedly instructing a player to cut his dreadlocks.

Who knows what secrets might be revealed next? What scars from the past are going to come to light?

But if you squint hard enough through the drama and upheaval of the past week, you can see the good that is going to come out of this. The necessary conversations that coaches and administrators are being forced to have. The confidence black athletes will gain to drive meaningful change on their campus.

In the end, the phonies are going to get exposed. But more important, those who are able to really hear their players are going to be in better position to actually mold the kind of leaders who they always claim playing a sport creates.

You can see the time for talk is over. This generation of college athletes, who have lived through the killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and so many more all of the way through George Floyd last week, wants action. And they’re willing to use their platform and their leverage to get it.

This is a good thing that is already generating positive outcomes for college athletes.

Missouri had more than 60 football players register to vote after marching from campus to the county courthouse to honor Floyd. Georgia Tech said it will not have any mandatory athletic activities this November on Election Day so that players don’t have to choose between going to practice and voting. America East men’s basketball coaches vowed to do the same, plus hold an antiracism event at every home game. And in perhaps the most uplifting development we’ve seen so far, Florida State players turned anger at new coach Mike Norvell into action.

Late Wednesday night, social media was abuzz when defensive tackle Marvin Wilson, arguably the Seminoles’ best player, disputed Norvell’s account to a member of the media about how much he had been in communication with players about Floyd’s death while in police custody.

While Norvell suggested he’d spoken with every player one- on- one, Wilson tweeted that the coach had actually sent a mass text and that the embellishment of that communication was an outrage.

“We will not be working out until further notice,” Wilson tweeted.

Scrambling to save his credibility with his new team, Norvell met with them Thursday morning. Shortly thereafter, Wilson released a passionate video on social media suggesting that fences had been mended and that everyone on the team would register to vote and be involved in charitable causes going forward related to educational opportunities for black kids.

Norvell, meanwhile, owned up to the mistake and said he was “proud of Marvin for utilizing his platform to express his reaction to my comments in an earlier interview.”

Coaches talk a lot about “teachable moments,” but it’s hard to imagine any more meaningful than that.

For coaches and players, there’s a lesson to be learned here. There are no more incidents that are guaranteed to stay “among family.” Information is leverage. And leverage is potentially explosive when it’s in the hands of an athlete who saw or experienced an injustice within their program.

Some critics will see this as the socalled cancel culture extending to college sports, where all squabbles are supposed to be taken care of behind the scenes. But that sort of misses the point.

You can imagine Clemson coach Dabo Swinney being enraged right now that an incident from three years ago suddenly got thrust into the spotlight this week when a former player criticized him for not doing enough to address special teams coach Danny Pearman’s use of a racial slur during a practice.

We actually don’t know how Swinney feels because he’s so far said absolutely nothing about it publicly. You know what else we haven’t seen? A whole bunch of Clemson players rushing to social media to defend Pearman, and yet there’s no indication that the school or Swinney plans to acknowledge that they mishandled the whole thing from the start.

Clemson was playing by the old rules: Do the minimum to patch it up, move on and hope nobody would ever speak of it again.

But it’s clear the incident – and the fact that Swinney never addressed it with the team – still resonates with the players involved, even after all this time. D. J. Greenlee, the player to whom the slur was directed, accepted Pearman’s apology but told The State newspaper that it “didn’t do the justice for ( Pearman) saying it.”

That’s exactly why there’s value in these incidents trickling out publicly.

The sooner coaches realize that the way they treat their players and the things they say in the heat of practice could go public if they cross the line, the less likely they are to do something as blatantly offensive and stupid as Pearman.

Swinney, meanwhile, likely never realized his response to this situation was wholly inadequate. Now he does, and perhaps that will inform better decision- making on issues around race.

If it doesn’t, whether it’s a two- time national champion like Swinney or a coach in his first year, the players now realize they have the power to call someone on the carpet and force change. Don’t be surprised when and how they use it.