Kids these days

He seems nice.

“It’s all about our student athletes!” I can’t wait to hear our AD’s sing that tired song. Football players will go back home, hang out in bars and clubs where COVID-19 flourishes and fighting is the only sport available to them. https://t.co/M4nFrge4Li

— Tom Penders (@TomPenders) August 12, 2020

That’s a guy who was actually paid to mentor college athletes once upon a time.  What a country!

Speaking of mentoring college athletes…

… When asked about the proposed players association, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney said in a media session Monday, “It would be great,” but added, “that’s different from a union, I’ll say that.” University of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh sent a letter in which he pointed to the few positive tests among the Wolverines players and advocated for a season to be played, capping the letter with a Teddy Roosevelt quote. University of Nebraska head coach Scott Frost said that the Cornhuskers would look outside of their Big Ten schedule if the conference decided to cancel the season. After the Big Ten became the first Power Five conference to cancel fall sports on Tuesday, followed shortly by the Pac-12, Nebraska’s athletic department said in a statement that it still believes its campus is “the absolute safest place” for players and will continue to pursue playing in the fall.

These voices are the ones who stand to lose money if their cut of the athletic department revenue is distributed among the players. But they also can’t outrightly dismiss a growing, albeit softer, push for financial equity and medically safe play that includes their five-star, NFL-bound players. So instead of taking the Kelly Loeffler route, these coaches and executives cling to the current model of genteel dismissiveness that’s worked out so well for them while nodding their heads at the lightest of the players’ demands.

This is how it’s always been. Swinney was supportive of former Clemson player Darius Robinson when he joined the O’Bannon lawsuit against the NCAA but famously stated that he personally disagrees with paying college players “because there’s enough entitlement in this world as it is.” Harbaugh has advocated for removing the requirement that football players stay in college for three years before going into the NFL but opposes paying players. When a California court ruled last fall that players could make money off their name, likeness, and image, Frost openly worried about it as a “slippery slope” that might “destroy opportunities and competitive balance” in college athletics. (For all his concerns about “competitive balance,” Frost was wooed away from the University of Central Florida by Nebraska in 2018for a $5 million annual contract, which was extended last fall after he led his program to a 9-15 record in his first two seasons.)

Coaches like Alabama’s Nick Saban have employed selective hearing as of late as they try and bend #WeWantToPlay to fit their personal desire to not miss out on a season’s salary. “I want to play, but I want to play for the players’ sake, the value they can create for themselves,” Saban told ESPN. “I know I’ll be criticized no matter what I say, that I don’t care about player safety. Look, players are a lot safer with us than they are running around at home.” This we-know-best logic, beyond being insulting to athletes, is also paradoxical. Saban is respecting some of his players’ decisions to press on and play football but only because they’re unruly children in need of a babysitter. When they ask to be paid or sit out the season, they will once again be too immature to know how the real world works.

The idea of compensation or unionization for players provokes such aghast responses from wealthy men because it would give the young adults actual power. It’s why Swinney claimed in his answer about a players association that Clemson football already had one—that initiatives like “the Swinney Huddle, the Swinney Council” provided all the voice that players needed. It’s why ESPN’s Booger McFarland and CBS Sports’s Danny Kanell both had the same brilliant idea—why not have the players who opt in for the season sign waivers releasing the school from all legal responsibility?—on an issue that the Pac-12 players already addressed.

Doing it for the kids can never fail.  It can only be failed.  By the same kids.

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