There’s long been a belief among those who would reform college sports in order to ensure better treatment for the athletes who play them that a national title boycott is the surest — and perhaps only — path toward upending the system.
It finally happens, sort of, in the forthcoming film “National Champions,” which opens in theaters Friday.
The effort is led by LeMarcus James, a Heisman-winning QB played by the sublime Stephan James (who previously played John Lewis in “Selma,” and Jesse Owens in “Race.”) Though James is slated to be the No. 1 pick in the draft and sign a lucrative contract, he decides to begin an effort to boycott the game to help players like his best friend Emmett Sunday (Alexander Ludwig), who has no pro future and received no compensation for helping to build a winner and will not have long-term medical insurance to deal with his many lingering injuries.
The two leave their team prior to the title game in New Orleans, holing up in a hotel room nearby and turning off location services on their phones because they know their coach, played by J.K. Simmons, will try to track them down the second news of the boycott breaks.
Sunday’s elbow cracks as he bends it — the result of a hit he can’t quite clearly remember — as the two plot their course. They hope to go public with their plan to boycott and convince other players in the game — including the opposing team’s star running back — to also opt out.
This film is a heavy lift. When I asked James, a rising star able to carefully pick which roles he takes, why he wanted to play this character, he said he was fascinated by the message and the challenge of making a sports movie that doesn’t include sports. There are elements of the film meant to entice the audience with typical drama — for instance, the coach’s wife, played by Kristin Chenoweth, just happens to be having an affair with the professor who turns out to be the one advising the players — but ultimately this is a tightly wound film carefully built around the debate over the future of college sports.
While that debate is getting louder and reaching more people, it’s still only a whisper compared to the roar of all those people who just want to go watch the games on Saturday. So how do you get them to pay attention to a movie like this? That was Smith’s challenge; he saw the film as a “character piece” focused on the people buffeted by “a system that is, quite frankly, unfair.”
It largely works. The film falters in places because it has to build the narrative around a shadow version of college sports, filled with characters who are echoes of people we might know in real life. Real media stars make appearances but their dialogue is forced, and it can be difficult to get invested in the fortunes of the “Missouri Wolves” and coach James Lazor. (Though Russell Wilson, who got an executive producer credit, makes an appearance and demands reform, which I assume is genuine, so good for him.)
[pullquote align=”right” source=”Stephan James”]Art has an incredible way of communicating things that we can’t really communicate in any other space. To be able to be a part of a film where you’re able to see the human beings that make up this system — that we’re able to humanize them for people — and not tell anyone how to feel, but provide them with all the perspectives and opinions, I think that’s the greatest thing that we could accomplish with this film.[/pullquote]
The work of Smith, Simmons and Uzo Aduba carries the film, though, as it unfolds in unexpected ways that shouldn’t be spoiled. Aduba (Crazy Eyes from “Orange is the New Black”) plays Katherine Poe, an intriguing character from the beginning; as the NCAA’s outside counsel, she’s present for, but not involved in, early discussions of how to rein in James. You can tell she’s uncomfortable with the Good Old (and mostly white) Boys running the show. When the NCAA shifts from heavy-handed to dirty, it appoints her the attack dog and she’s willing to dig up dirt on James’ brother and use it to try to blackmail him into playing.
It’s a startling turn, one that is eventually explained when she reveals that she’s not in favor of football players being paid because she fears that there would be no money left for other athletes in that scenario. Poe explains that made it out of poverty thanks to a track scholarship (Aduba is so powerful in the role, she’s said, because she actually did run track at Boston University.)
A note on this argument, in general: It’s bollocks. Most college athletes don’t even get a full ride. At the Division I level, for instance, only football, basketball (men’s and women’s), women’s tennis, women’s gymnastics and women’s volleyball players are required to be given full scholarships. In women’s track, there are 12.6 scholarships to go around… for a roster that often includes 50 athletes.
Besides, if schools want to continue funding the Olympic sports programs, they’ll be able to. If they decide instead to dedicate all their funding to running minor league football and basketball, that’s on them and the market would surely create new opportunities for other athletes. Don’t believe Poe/Aduba. She’s very convincing; she’s also on the wrong side of history.
But this is also what National Champions gets exactly right: How a strained system continues to work because of our emotional attachments to it. This also plays out with Simmons’ character, who at first seems like something of a typical meathead football coach but eventually evolves into a man with layers. He’s something of an overgrown teenager, lusting after football glory every second of the day. He actually adores his players, but only in so far as he wants them to win football games, which is, for him, the ultimate success. The fact that he’s filthy rich and they’re barely scraping by hasn’t really occurred to him, because he spends so much of his time thinking about football (he’s also too busy with that to realize how integral his wife is in carrying the mental load of curating his image for boosters and fans, which is why she strays.) He earnestly believes that the lessons learned along the way to becoming a good football player and part of a good football team will apply to whatever else might happen to a person, and reckons he is, as has always been said, making boys into men. Above all that, he is paid handsomely for the singular pursuit of winning, and so he pursues it and feel, not erroneously, that doing so is his job.
This is, roughly, how big-time college coaches live.
National Champions also presents a couple of nefarious boosters who seek to manipulate the situation from both sides. You begin to wonder why these people have any say in what’s going on with a football team supposedly run by a university and then … you spend more time wondering why these people have any say.
That’s accurate, too.
How the film ends — with so many secrets revealed and every person involved compromised in some way — also feels about right, as does the ultimate decision for the NCAA to carefully consider James’ demands (for player trusts, disability coverage and the ability to collectively bargain) in the form of a committee.
The system leaves no one unscathed.
The system will never reform itself.
Whether any of this will resonate with the fans who continue to fund college sports is anyone’s guess. James told me that was “the hope.”
“Art has an incredible way of communicating things that we can’t really communicate in any other space,” he said. “To be able to be a part of a film where you’re able to see the human beings that make up this system — that we’re able to humanize them for people — and not tell anyone how to feel, but provide them with all the perspectives and opinions, I think that’s the greatest thing that we could accomplish with this film.”
The writing is taut enough to pull people along; the film has the tension of a good sporting even, with each side pushing and pulling. This all should work. This should become a major part of, as James put it to me, the “algorithm” surrounding the way we talk about college sports.
But I also thought that was the case when For The Win got an early look at the powerful script for the film “Concussion.” That it would mark some sort of noticeable swerve in the public perception of football. That it would introduce a new, more careful era for the way the sport is played. It may have, depending on your perception. But the system it fought against had all the money and the built in advantage that football is addictive and enthralling and comforting and offers, as Simmons’ characters bellows, the chance for glory — GLORY — even if it is only reflected.
This film faces those same odds. So it will have to be enough, for now, that a sincere attempt was made to point us where we can’t yet go.
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