They're all union men, now that the message lines up. The players wanted to play, so it's OK if they said so in a single voice. After all, the CEO coaches and administrators eager to forge ahead with their cash cow couldn't do so without the workforce.
Oops, sorry. I meant, "the student-athletes."
Across the country they pushed back hard, shoulder to shoulder, when it got around Monday that another couple of dominoes were teetering. When it got out that the Big Ten presidents supposedly voted 12-2 to pull the plug on football this fall (and before they did just that today) suddenly both the workforce -- sorry, "student-athletes" -- and the bosses were on the same side of the fence.
The players coalesced around a hashtag, #WeWantToPlay. The coaches hauled out statistics to bolster the absurd notion that their players would be safer from the Bastard Plague on a college campus than at home. Scott Frost, Nebraska's head coach, said the Cornhuskers would go ahead and play even if the Big Ten pulled the plug -- maybe rejoin the Big 12 for a year if the Big 12 itself didn't move off football in the fall.
How they could do this without Big Ten approval is a separate question, of course. As is how Jim Harbaugh or Nick Saban or Ryan Day could keep their workforce -- er, student-athletes -- safer than at home once their student-athletes weren't the only kids on campus.
Easy to keep things hermetically sealed when it's just you and your players. Not so easy with 40,000 or so actual college students barging around campus with you, sharing classrooms and hangouts and the parties that just sort of spring up out of nowhere on every college campus everywhere.
I suppose you could still keep your workf-, um, student-athletes, sequestered, if you were of a mind to. But that would blow the whole illusion, revealing once and for all that big-ticket college athletics really are an entity wholly separate from the universities they supposedly represent, and that the student-athletes really are just a workforce hired to do a job.
In any event, the workforce is acquiescent for now, so the bosses are down with solidarity. What's going to be interesting is what happens when these newly empowered student-athletes decide to start demanding answers the bosses aren't prepared to give -- like, I don't know, "What are you going to do if we start getting sick?"
Or, even more horrific: "You guys made x-billion dollars last year. Where's our cut?"
In some places they're already asking these questions, and the bosses have not been nearly as inclined to brotherhood. In fact, one player at Washington State essentially got fired for being part of the Pac-12 player coalition. That reaction likely will not be an outlier.
See, here's the thing. However many Power-5 conferences follow the Big Ten's lead and decide to defer football to next spring, the health and well-being of the student-athletes will not be the determining factor, and anyone with a lick of sense knows it. Money will be.
That's because as much money as big-top college athletics brings in every fall, the people who run it spend it like drunken sailors. Fiscal responsibility is an utterly foreign concept to these folks. Theirs is the worst-run bidness in the history of bidness.
And the players who generate all the revenue, these hashtag warriors, are starting to figure that out.
They're one with you on this one, Coach. But just wait.
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