I interact with a lot of college sports fans, writers and commentators on Twitter. This was one of the more interesting and thought-provoking tweets I received in my mentions on Monday when discussing athlete activism:
I think it's incredibly important that athletes use social media to share injustices in their programs, but everyone on a team tweeting back and forth at each other about what they think happened seems counterproductive. Sometimes waiting a bit to find a unified tone is best.
— Kevin Sweeney (@CBB_Central) August 3, 2020
This specific exchange flowed from the twists and turns in the TCU story. Football coach Gary Patterson was accused by a player of using the word “N***er,” only for another TCU player to step in and admonish the original player for having used the N-word himself. Patterson, according to the second player, was trying to police bad speech; he didn’t use bad speech himself.
The incident was yet one more instance of emotions getting overheated in what is a very politically and culturally overheated time in our history. From the pandemic to George Floyd to the economic collapse, to the threat of schools not opening for in-person instruction this fall, to the presidential election, this is a very anxious time in America. The United States has been exposed as a country whose systems and structures aren’t nearly as solid, whose leaders aren’t nearly as competent, as we might have previously thought. The band-aid has been ripped away from our damaged institutions. People of all ideologies and worldviews might still disagree on the specific causes of our problems, but they can all agree that the depth of our national wounds has been laid bare — certainly to a greater degree than before 2020.
I cite the tweet above from Kevin Sweeney (a very sharp college basketball analyst, reporter and podcaster — you should follow him if you like college hoops) because it begins to get at some of the larger conversations we should be having in the United States.
These conversations obviously include college sports and athlete activism, but they go beyond the playing field. Right now, the #WeAreUnited movement among Pac-12 athletes is a central discussion point in college sports. If you follow college sports fairly closely, you know the tension points in evidence right now.
Here is a small sample of those tension points, hardly a complete list:
- Are athletes being greedy or finally asking for things they should have had long ago?
- Is this the right time to ask for more or the wrong time, given that the pandemic demands attention from the conferences and schools? Why not ask for more in a calmer, more normal situation?
- Many of the problems the Pac-12 athletes are trying to address will not be fixed in the 50 or so days before the start of the Pac-12 football season. What is the endgame here?
- Should the Pac-12 players have had a more concrete plan in terms of how they intend to continue to protest current circumstances, or is it primarily important that they didn’t wait for the perfect time to protest and voiced their main concerns when they did, before the start of the season?
Again, that is just a small sampling of the many larger tension points attached to the #WeAreUnited movement in particular and the larger world of activism among college athletes. This is a far bigger discussion than a single column can adequately express. There will be a lot of follow-up articles written on this subject; it’s not the kind of topic which can be easily summed up in 1,000 words.
What I wish to convey here is that college athlete activism — by the very fact that it comes from college athletes — is not a polished, glossy effort. This is not a product of expert stage management or well-funded political messaging.
Billions of dollars are in the process of being spent on the 2020 presidential campaign. Highly paid professionals come up with slick, cutthroat videos and digital presentations to express to voters how awful the opposing candidate is.
College athletes aren’t working with these tools. They don’t have the establishment at their back; they’re fighting the establishment. As people who have lived on this planet for 18 to 21 years (or thereabouts), they aren’t seasoned political operators or communications experts. They are learning as they go along, trying to gain a seat at the table with the 55- or 60-year-old executives and power brokers who lead college sports. The playing field is imbalanced.
This leads us to an obvious and constant tension point which regularly recurs when young people try to take on entrenched interests and the older people who lead powerful institutions: The young activists need to play their cards right — it naturally helps to know what to say and how to say it — but they can’t be expected to be perfect, either.
Phrased differently: Athletes need to know how to carry on a negotiation, but they can’t be expected to make zero mistakes.
When we consider the 50-percent revenue share the #WeAreUnited movement asked for in its Players Tribune article on Sunday, many will quite reasonably view that request as a non-starter. There’s no way it will actually happen, or at least, there’s no way it will actually happen WITHOUT OTHER HUGE CHANGES which would have to occur first.
So, are we going to view that request as a bad political misplay by the Pac-12 athletes, or as an intentional act to make a big request up front so that the movement gains national publicity and earns the attention of college sports’ power brokers?
I understand each side of that question. Both interpretations are valid and reasonable.
Can we then acknowledge how fluid and unusual this situation is — in a pandemic, with a lack of certainty about the ability of college football to play any games this season, let alone a full season? There really isn’t an established playbook for how to negotiate in a pandemic on the heels of what we have seen in this long, hot American summer, which began (unofficially) before the summer solstice with the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis.
We can all agree that the massive changes the athletes want are not going to be implemented in the 50-ish days before the scheduled start of the Pac-12 football season on Sept. 26. Not one person thinks the structure of college sports can be overhauled that quickly, even if there was a desire to do so. This is a question of long-term structural change.
Athletes — given their lack of clout, resources, and longevity (compared to the 55-year-olds they want to negotiate with) — are not going to be polished or supremely savvy. They are going to do things you and I disagree with on a purely tactical level.
Are we going to view those tactical mistakes as game-ending moments, so to speak, or will we have an allowance for imperfection, all the while emphasizing that the leaders of college sports — who have made quite a lot of mistakes in their own right (while getting handsomely paid, I might add, to occupy their current positions of power) — need to look at the bigger picture themselves?
College sports administrators and executives need to look at what the Pac-12 athletes want to achieve in a larger sense more than a specific dollar or percentage amount. If that level of good-faith understanding can emerge, we can all — athletes, coaches, administrators, fans, journalists — learn more together.
In the end, that’s what college life is supposed to be about… so why not focus on education — not just for the athletes themselves, but for all of us?
Everyone has a lot to learn here. Let’s all become better as a result of the #WeAreUnited movement, instead of overly nitpicking athletes’ inevitable imperfections.