A lot has been written already and a lot more will be written about what the University of Missouri football team did. For those who have been doing campus visits to Hogwarts this weekend and missed this story, the football team at the University of Missouri threatened not to play if the president of the university didn’t step down. The president resigned on Monday. This was part of a campus protest regarding racism and other issues on campus.
This story has a lot of twists and turns. It is not simply—in some ways it is barely about—the football team. It’s about race, racism, campus politics, free speech, ‘safe zones’, and institutional control and leadership—among other things. Most of this doesn’t have to do with sport, so I’m not going to comment on it here.
The interesting sports angle to this story is the football team and the immense power they demonstrated. In just about two days, the football team pushed the president of a large state university out the door. Wow. Whatever one might think about the complicated underlying issues that gave rise to this protest, this is huge. It is a potential game-changer.
College athletes, well, the elite division 1 football and basketball players, are waking up to the potential power they have. As many commentators and columnists have noted, including Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel on the Dan Patrick Show, the whole NCAA system rests on the players always playing. If they refuse to stop playing, the whole system grinds to a halt. That’s quite a sword to dangle over Mark Emmert’s head.
I doubt, though, we will see athletes walk out this weekend or in the near future in order to get paid, to get better health insurance, or something similar. The Missouri situation is not so much a blueprint as it is an eye-opener. It was a special circumstance we are not likely to see in the unionization of the college-athletes. The Missouri team was linked with other campus groups and importantly had the backing of the coach. This was, at least in part, about race and so had a unifying effect of bringing the campus, the public, and the media together. But, being about race, it had a silencing effect as well: criticism of the football players for engaging in this protest would almost certainly be framed as being racist and so there was very little criticism. That will not be the case when the issue is more about the pecuniary interests of the players. There will be many vocal critics and the coaches likely will not give their support either. At Missouri, the team was apparently standing with and joining with the campus; the focus was on the university and racism. There was a clear and straight-forward demand that could be met or not: the university president resigning. In walk-outs related to pay-for-play, the players will largely stand alone and the athletes will be the focal point. The demand for pay, share of revenue, unionization, etc., is something that will require months of negotiations and the rewriting of countless rules. It’s a lot more complicated of a goal, one that is harder to know if it has been attained. It will require athletes holding out for a lot longer than two days with many losing scholarships and positions. All of this, along with the huge logistical difficulty of organizing players at different campuses, suggest we are not going to see a college-athlete strike anytime soon.
That said, the players see that they have this power. It will be tested again. How and when they wield it, and what it accomplishes, will be intriguing.
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The Sports Ethicist 
College athletes threatening to strike like this should be suspended and/or expelled. The deep problem in this whole incident is the spineless of the administrators to properly deal with it.
Maybe. But I don’t think suspensions/expulsions are the right answer. First, it wouldn’t work if you had the major schools with top players involved. They would inevitably get reinstated. And the history of such movements seems to suggest that generally such responses don’t work in the long term. Second, though, why? Yes, there is an agreement between the university and the athlete and ostensibly the athlete would be in violation, but is there some deeper reason why the athletes should not use their collective power? As you know, I’m not a ‘union-guy’ per se, but there is value and power in collective action. FWIW, I’m not suggesting they should but I’m not so sure they would be wrong to do so.
The administration must reassert control somehow. This is a power grab by the students. They will not stop with this. Eventually, someone will put their foot down. It’s best to do it early.
Strictly thinking about this from a college sports perspective, I think the players already have that power. It’s a bed the universities have made themselves by putting so much into college football and basketball. They’ve made these athletes powerful. The athletes are just realizing it.
To the extent that this is part of the ‘safe space’/speech restriction stuff going–and I think there is a connection–that’s much more complicated. It’s much more deeply rooted in certain philosophical commitments that the administration (who were faculty members at one time) likely shares.So I’m less than sanguine on that.
My main problem with athlete activism in general is that it makes our job harder in terms of articulating why sport is a valuable pursuit for humanity as an end unto itself. When sport is (over)used as an instrument for change it leads society to view it as a materialistic/pragmatic means to an end.