“If athletes really had power, Mike Gundy wouldn’t have a job,” Volante says. “Instead, you get Hubbard and Gundy to do a video together and, overnight, Mike Gundy is woke? Everything is a facade.”
It’s hard to tell what’s worse: how unlikely it is that Hubbard and his teammates can hold Gundy accountable to his promises, or the fact that doing so is at all their job. Appreciate the absurdity of the sentence “I am going to educate him,” where the subject is 21 and the object is a 53-year-old man tasked with his care and development. Hubbard, like most college athletes, is a kid on payday, but expected to be more grown and more accountable than the revered adults he serves.
Hubbard’s reward for courageously standing up to his coach sounds more like a punishment: more work for free, spending extra time teaching a man who couldn’t be bothered to do the same. In return, Gundy must pretend to listen.
Gundy represents everything generally wrong with college sports, but he is also a problem specific to 2020.
“Is anything really going to change if Coach Gundy gets less overtly racist?” Shoop asks. “The players still don’t have any formal power in the system. For them to enact change, they have to put their necks on the line and risk losing everything.”
Who, with power, have to take the chance of destroying themselves to receive basic humanity?
Players at the University of Texas made one of the most organized pushes for change that we’ve seen from college athletes this year. On June 12, receiver Brennan Eagles and other Longhorns players tweeted their demand that the university rename buildings commemorating segregationists and a Confederate postmaster general, remove a statue of the governor who signed the state’s first Jim Crow laws, and retire “The Eyes of Texas,” the school’s fight song that’s been linked to a 1903 minstrel show. The players said they would not participate in recruiting or donor events without those changes, but they would practice and play.
The threat wasn’t hollow. One of the unspoken jobs of a college athlete is entertaining boosters, attending their kids’ birthday parties, and the like. An athletics program is only as good as its athletes, so refusing to participate in attracting talent could have real consequences. That brought the university to the table, and the school has met them in the middle. Buildings will be renamed, statues of Black figures will be erected on campus, and students and visitors will receive a more thorough understanding of many of the university’s historical figures. Most important, the school released a plan to increase Black recruiting and enrollment, currently around 5 percent in a state that’s more than 12 percent Black.
Think of all the courage and temerity it took for those young men to enumerate their concerns, share them with the world, and stand in their truth. Missouri’s football players helped sway a campus movement. Texas’s players right now are doing the same. They are fighting for dignity like Oklahoma State’s and Iowa’s players, but in the larger campus space, not just the locker room. It’s a noble use of the platform afforded by the spotlight of sports.
But most telling is, in this time of upheaval, when those on the ground have more attention than ever, none of the things those Longhorns asked for were particular to athletes, except asking not to sing a song. For all the power we’d love to say athletes possess, they know what’s “going too far.” Before they even ask for real change, they have to start with something more basic: respect.
This brings us back to Bob Orr, who’s been having his own existential political reckoning. The NCAA’s system of punishment is arcane, but so is everything else surrounding college athletics. Every fight athletes have taken up, each one that seems seismic when it hits the news, is asking for something basic. It’s a reminder that the heroes of civil rights in America gave their lives and livelihoods for things the Constitution allowed them to do. The status quo was so backward and indefensible that heaven and earth were moved to allow Black people to do what wasn’t implied in the Declaration of Independence but was promised after the Civil War. The fight for many wasn’t to win. It wasn’t even to get level. It was just to get started. That’s what happens when a group has no rights anyone is required to respect.