If you follow college sports in general and Pac-12 sports in particular, you have probably seen the news by now: A group of Pac-12 athletes published a set of demands in the Players Tribune on Sunday, asking the conference for various protections, benefits, points of recognition, and more.
The members of the Pac-12 community, and plenty of people in the larger college sports industry, are curious about what this will mean for college sports, especially college football.
To start this specific discussion, I would like to direct your attention to this tweet from Barrett Sallee, a former colleague at College Football News who has become an excellent college football journalist for many outlets, currently CBS Sports:
Pac-12 players threaten to sit out 2020 season over safety, racial injustice concerns, per reporthttps://t.co/G9qFknGgh8
— Barrett Sallee (@BarrettSallee) August 1, 2020
My friend Barrett was merely doing his job, tweeting out the link to a news story. What I want to point out in this tweet is that it got “ratioed” (or alternatively, “ratio’d”), which means that the replies to the tweet greatly outnumbered the likes.
Read the replies to the tweet. You’ll find a lot of people dunking on the Pac-12 and/or Pac-12 athletes for being “woke.” Plenty of the responses to the news story amount to the following: “Well DUH, of course the Pac-12 was always going to be the conference where this kind of thing happened.”
First of all, may I remind anyone who thinks that way that a movement to unionize college athletes occurred not in the Pac-12, but at Northwestern.
The idea that one geographical area of the country is likely to be the source of a given protest is — if not ludicrous — certainly overplayed and unproductive. Why have such a geographically-focused mindset in the first place, but more than that, why limit the capacities and possibilities of activism to one part of the country?
Did any of us think Minneapolis was going to become such a centerpiece of American political protest in 2020? No. It became a hotbed of protest because something tragic and traumatic happened there. Certain places don’t have an extra or unique claim on activism; this is an organic thing. We shouldn’t get into the habit of shoehorning specific groups of people or regions of the country into narrow boxes.
There are progressives in red states. There are conservatives in blue states. There are poor whites, not just poor Blacks, in cities. There are poor Blacks, not just poor whites, in rural areas. There are people in New York who don’t like Andrew Cuomo, and there are people in Alabama who don’t like Donald Trump. They simply don’t represent a majority view or get a lot of media attention.
Any person can speak up. Any place can be the source of protest. Pac-12 athletes or any other athletes shouldn’t be pigeonholed, certainly not so reflexively.
This brings us to the main point about these Pac-12 athletes and their public statement.
The real story here isn’t about the Pac-12, or more precisely, what the Pac-12 will do. The big question is if athletes in other conferences are going to join the effort or not.
I am not recommending a course of action (though I have a private, personal view of the matter). I am merely saying — as a matter of cold, detached, political and situational analysis — that the impact of the Pac-12 athletes’ public statement depends largely on whether other athletes in other Power Five conferences (then the Group of Five) will add their voices.
If they do, and if they stay at it, we might see enough public pressure to change the equation in college sports.
If the Pac-12 athletes remain on their own, this push for more protections and benefits probably won’t gain the leverage the athletes seek.
Sunday’s big story started in the Pac-12. It can’t end there — at least if Pac-12 athletes want to get a decent portion of what they ultimately want.