[jwplayer WN1qUCzS-XNcErKyb]
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Some things about the Big Ten’s postponement of the 2020 college football season still aren’t sitting right with some of the players in the conference.
Michigan junior defensive end Aidan Hutchinson has been quite outspoken — as has his father, Chris Hutchinson — about wanting to play and having desired a voice in the matter, which is something that commissioner Kevin Warren and the Big Ten presidents and chancellors didn’t give its athletic constituents.
Made all the worse, Warren’s son, Powers, is a tight end at Mississippi State — an SEC team that’s still intending to move forward with the fall season.
Hutchinson slammed Warren last week in an interview with ESPN’s Marty Smith, to which, the Big Ten commissioner (essentially) replied in a discussion with The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach.
“As a family, we’ve had many difficult discussions regarding this issue,” Warren said. “But the decisions we make in the Big Ten Conference we have to look at from a macro level. We need to focus on what’s right for our nearly 10,000 student-athletes at 14 institutions.”
For Hutchinson, that response continues to be rife with hypocrisy.
Given that Warren was able to sit down and have a ‘difficult discussion’ and still allow his son to play in another league is something that continues to not sit right with the Michigan legacy.
“It does bother me a lot,” Hutchinson said. “I think it’s very unfair. I heard his rebuttal in terms of that statement and I heard that he got to sit down with his son and have a really hard conversation with him about it.
“I wish I could have had that same conversation with my parents. But he made that decision for me. I think it’s a little unfair that his family got to talk about it and my family – I couldn’t even ask them because he made that decision for me.”
[lawrence-related id=27566,27563,27560]
Of course, it wasn’t Warren’s decision to cancel the SEC — he has control only over the Big Ten, and Powers is his own man. But, no matter how you slice it, given the lack of transparency that went into the conference’s decision to effectively cancel the fall season, it’s not a good look.
And that’s something that will continue to weigh on the promising edge defender’s mind as he sits home this fall on Saturdays.
[vertical-gallery id=27515]