These are not the palmy days for the NCAA. California has called its bluff on the nifty jing-stacking misdirection play it's been running lo these many years, and now other states are lining up to follow suit. Soon the entire shuck-and-jive will come tumbling down, and the boys in Indy are running scared.
All NCAA pasha Mark Emmert can do is traffic in self-delusion, saying if states start allowing the "student-athletes" to profit from what their schools are so handsomely profiting -- the use of their images and bodies as billboards for chunky apparel deals -- then the "student-athletes" would become mere employees of the university. Of course, they already are employees of the university in everything but name, a reality Emmert surely gets but can't possibly acknowledge.
Case in point: What happened at Penn State yesterday.
What happened was, the Penn State players turned out for warmups wearing T-shirts that read "Chains, Tattoos, Dreads & WE ARE," a show of solidarity for teammate Jonathan Sutherland, the target of a Penn State alumnus' letter criticizing his dreadlocks. Penn State officials made the players take them off, on account of ...
Well. Here's the statement issued by Penn State: "While we are supportive of our students expressing themselves in a thoughtful manner, they are expected to wear team-issued apparel on game day. We asked our students to remove the shirts out of an abundance of caution for NCAA compliance."
Amended, non-BS translation: "While we are supportive of our students expressing themselves in a thoughtful manner, they are expected to wear team-issued apparel on game day of which the university gets its cut. We asked our students to remove the shirts because NCAA compliance dictates we're supposed to make a buck off what our student-athletes wear, and we didn't in this case."
In other words, the Penn State players were violating the office dress code. It's all right there in the employee handbook.
Er, the student-athlete handbook.
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