I barely got a blog entry off on the ongoing racial tensions at the University of Missouri, and the unexpected response of many members of the football team, when dominoes started falling in shockingly quick fashion.
Monday morning, the president of the university system in Missouri -- four universities, not just the one in Columbia -- resigned. Later that same day, the chancellor of the Columbia campus announced he would be stepping down later in the year.
Also on Monday, the Mizzou graduate student who had gone on a hunger strike in protest of the administration's laggard response announced he would end that hunger strike, and the football players and team announced their return to regular practice and game schedules, which means Saturday's game at Arrowhead against BYU is no longer under threat.
Some thoughts:
1. If there was any doubt about the untapped potential for student-athletes taking action (and frankly I had plenty of doubt), this incident should put a significant dent in it. Mizzou's governing body was set for one of those lovely executive-session meetings on Monday, only to have their principal reason for it be eliminated almost at the beginning.
Even now I'm still surprised that things happened so quickly. I can't quite figure out why they did. Was it the apparent unanimity of the team (even though to the very last ESPN was desperately flogging the interview with the one anonymous white guy on the team who insisted it wasn't so)? Was it coach Gary Pinkel's public support of those players and their stand, and the possibility that any move against the players would risk a backlash? Pinkel's team hasn't had the best season this year, but (as much as it pains me to say it) he's had a good measure of success at Mizzou and probably retains enough support in the university to hold a degree of leverage.
2. In the end, was it really all (or at least significantly) about the $$$? A cancellation of that game at Arrowhead would have required Mizzou to pay a cool $1M to BYU, a little more than twice the salary of the university president. Was it simply not worth the risk?
3. It's really, really disturbing that it took the action of football players to produce any movement on such a troublesome campus situation. For one thing, not every football team on every campus is going to react in such a way. Ordinary students evidently have no recourse in such a situation.
4. There is a legitimate ethical problem with ESPN's role in such situations. That network is, across its multiple networks, probably the most prolific broadcaster of college football games. And guess what network was scheduled to televise the BYU-Mizzou game this Saturday? The SEC Network, a subsidiary of ... ESPN. You'll never be able to draw a line between that fact and, say, ESPN.com's insistence on flogging that anonymous interview. You (or ESPN) will also will never be able to disprove the existence of such a connection, and the smell of such conflict of interest is going to linger.
5. This situation seems to have gone much more successfully for the Mizzou players than for those NFL players -- members of the St. Louis Rams, for example -- who used their moments on entering the field to show support for the community of Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the violence erupting in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown.
At any rate, I'm relieved of the need to watch a football game, at least, and especially a Mizzou game. But the ramifications of this event are going to be interesting to see in the future.
What next?
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