College football was not made for its black players, so why not chisel away at what is there?
The work they are doing — pushing back against a college football system designed to exploit their talent and labor — is not new, but today, the tools are a cell phone and a social media account.
Sure, along the way they’ve gotten a little integration as a treat, but it did not come without its malicious challenges. From Jack Trice, to Ozzie Simmons, to Johnny Bright, to Ernie Davis, racism still held them back even though they did not play at schools in the deep south. In 1969, the Black 14 at Wyoming were kicked off the team and out of school for suggesting that they would wear a black armband in protest of BYU’s racism against them the year before. A Black quarterback, Jaren Hall, wouldn’t start for the Cougars until 2019.
College football was not made for Black players in the makeup of the men who lead them. A major college football head coach is often the highest paid state employee if his school is public. Even if it’s not, he’s likely the most front-facing person of his university. Not just athletics, mind you. I mean the whole school. The system is there to churn players out in four-year intervals while the coaches remain for decades shaping the fabric of the sport. The culture of the leadership can opt to remain the same because it has laurels to rest on. Players are only around for a flash in the pan.
If the 2020 season kicks off, there will be 14 Black head coaches out of 128 FBS programs. According to NCAA research, Black players make up roughly half of all football players. That racial makeup is part of the reason why so many of the sport’s leaders are so ill-equipped to handle this. Coaches are important paternal figures for many football players, but many simply do not have the tools to meet the moment in this year of profound social upheaval when their players need them the most. Instead, they play catch up to varying degrees like Mike Norvell and Dabo Swinney and Kirk Ferentz and Mike Leach. The onus is placed on the players to force change to a system they didn’t build and can’t really control.
They have no union to represent them and no agents. Their most direct course of action is usually a tweet, which is its own commentary on how they must make their voices heard.
But make no mistake: they are making their voices heard.
The disconnect between the players and their leaders leads to imbalances like Chubba Hubbard tweeting about his coach, Mike Gundy, in a far right wing propaganda network (One America News) T-shirt. He was retweeted by teammates as well as former Cowboys.
I will not stand for this.. This is completely insensitive to everything going on in society, and it’s unacceptable. I will not be doing anything with Oklahoma State until things CHANGE. https://t.co/psxPn4Khoq
— Chuba Hubbard (@Hubbard_RMN) June 15, 2020
Hubbard apologized publicly for the crime of calling out his coach via Twitter. Gundy meanwhile had the space to be profoundly ignorant about what OAN is in public for the second time. This follows an incident in April in which he said “They just report the news. There’s no commentary. There’s no opinions on this. There’s no left. There’s no right.”
Hubbard made it clear that this will not be the end of it.
— Chuba Hubbard (@Hubbard_RMN) June 16, 2020
And all of this occurred the week the president that network panders to plans to host a rally near the site of an infamous race massacre an hour away from Stillwater. It was originally scheduled on Juneteenth, a day many Black people celebrate the final nominal emancipation from formal slavery.
College football is not made for Black players in the iconography at so many of its programs either. At Texas, the fight song has a racist history. At Texas A&M, a statue of a confederate general stands not too far from Kyle Field. I didn’t know about either until football players (among others) took to social media. The song and statue were not created with Black athletes in mind. In fact, they were devised decades before Black people could enroll at either campus, much less play on a football field. They are vestiges of evil couched as symbols of heritage, but it begs the question what heritage is being glorified and whether it needs to be glorified at all.
The sport is synonymous with tradition. Sul Ross, the namesake of the statue at A&M, served as president in 1890, 19 years after the school was founded. William Prather, the man credited who provided the words “The eyes of Texas” to the school became a regent in 1887, six years after the school was established at its current home in Austin. Both men were there at or near the beginning of their schools existence, but they are not here now. They helped build the institutions, but their legacies don’t keep them going. That is left to those who are there now.
The traditions they built and the things that they stood for are antithetical to those who remain. This is not just about an offensive statue on a campus or a song after a home game; this is tasking Black athletes with the maintenance of structures antithetical to their very existence as free people.
Athletes at both schools have said enough is enough. Their under-compensated labor is now their universities’ most visible enterprise, and at too many institutions, it’s used to prop up bygone and racist traditions.
When you’re served something that isn’t made for you, you don’t simply swallow it down; you send it back. Black college athletes are pushing back against the profoundly broken system in which they’ve been operating. Who can blame them? Who can question them?
Some seek to leave communities and the world better than they found them; others avoid change by clinging to the way things are. College football was not made for its Black players, so they’re trying to remake it.
Richard Johnson is a freelance writer from Gainesville, Florida. He is currently based out of Brooklyn.
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