Massive roster cuts were not made by head coach Nick Rolovich at Washington State University on Sunday. There was no purge of athletes for participating in the #WeAreUnited campaign initiated by Pac-12 athletes, including but not limited to football players in the conference. There was a brief period of time on Sunday when that might have seemed to be the case, but that part of the story didn’t stick:
Update on #WSU situation: No players have been cut, one (Kassidy Woods) has opted out for health reasons, and everyone else is expected for team activities tomorrow.
— Jon Wilner (@wilnerhotline) August 3, 2020
THIS, however, did stick… and we will see how deeply it sticks to Nick Rolovich in Pullman, before he has even coached a game with the Cougars:
The audio of WSU HC Nick Rolovich’s call with WR Kassidy Woods has been released, and it’s not great. pic.twitter.com/acmXvOE3wZ
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) August 3, 2020
The first thing which needs to be said about Nick Rolovich blundering his way into an embarrassing situation so early in his Wazzu tenure is that we shouldn’t try to fire coaches or hang them in the court of public opinion — at least not at first.
If a coach makes a mistake but then rectifies it — as Mike Norvell seems to have done at Florida State after a rocky start — that’s a good outcome.
People are going to make mistakes. In this age of Black Lives Matter, we should be less focused on “cancel culture” and a lot more focused on learning from our mistakes so that people are newly educated. If this educational process is real and substantive — if it contains depth and isn’t a hollow, performative, superficial gesture which lacks meaning and transformative power — that is a positive step forward. We are hopefully all learning how to deal better with problems, and with the people who are part of these challenging situations which now contain more social weight and cultural resonance than they used to.
College football head coaches are being confronted by the need to truly — genuinely — connect with Black athletes. It can’t be performative bullsh**. It has to be an authentic connection which doesn’t just stay on the practice field or in the locker room, but flows into the larger society and creates positive transformation. This is what Mike Norvell probably realized at Florida State.
Meanwhile, longtime coaches Mike Gundy and Kirk Ferentz have struggled to meet the moment at Oklahoma State and Iowa. Now we have Rolovich at Washington State.
We can jump on these coaches for their failures — and to be sure, they do deserve criticism, especially in the cases of Ferentz and Gundy, who have been around the block many times. Yet, what’s better than jumping on these coaches — “RACIST! GET THEM OUT OF HERE! CANCEL THEM!” — is to try to explain the larger dynamic engulfing them.
We need to find a way to expose and amplify a problem without holding it so personally against specific coaches. This is less a problem about specific men and more about a culture which urgently needs to be changed. If we make the problem about a “few bad apples,” that takes the system — the structure, the larger culture — off the hook.
No. We can’t let the system off the hook. The system is part of the problem.
The Nick Rolovich story and other related stories of insensitivity among college football head coaches is NOT a story about college coaches being bad people. That should not be our focus or our intent, to say that college football coaches are rotten souls with no humanity. That isn’t an accurate reality, and it won’t ever pave the way toward progress. Demonizing anyone isn’t the answer to a question of racial injustice or social ignorance.
What is worth saying — and explaining — is that Rolovich, who might be a perfectly decent person (this in no way excuses his comments captured in the Reddit CFB tweet above), was clearly not prepared for this double-situation in which the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have both opened athletes’ eyes to the reality that college football wants players’ work and effort without giving them hazard pay or guaranteed health care in a pandemic. That most of these players are Black is an inescapable fact which the #WeAreUnited Pac-12 athletes are generally (if not universally) aware of.
This is a moment of increased activism.
Rolovich may or may not be a bad person for saying what he said, but I urge you to de-emphasize that point and that specific conversation. Emphasize this point instead: Rolovich might simply be very confused and anxious by what he is seeing.
On that point, everyone can agree.
This points to the deeper reality we ought to address as a college football community: Why are a number of coaches so unprepared for this moment? It is as though college football coaches are so accustomed to a certain rhythm or structure — with everything proceeding in a normal way — that as soon as the climate of normalcy is blown to smithereens (as it has been by the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, plus the reality of economic precarity for a lot of families in the United States), the coaches don’t know how to react.
I don’t feel comfortable assigning a level of goodness or malice to Nick Rolovich, and you shouldn’t, either.
I do feel comfortable in saying that Rolovich and some of his peers are behaving like people who are seeing their normal world — their bubble — collapse.
We ought to educate young people in such a way that they can adjust to changing cultural situations and apply sound critical thinking which values human beings first and places less of an emphasis on ideological or political tribalism.
We can do the same for college football coaches. Education, not cancel culture, is the best and first response to this larger theater of complexity and emotional turmoil.