The thinning veneer, Part Deux

They don't want us using the term, because that would end the Kabuki show once and for all. But the Blob has never been much for following rules when the rules are so clearly self-serving.

So I'll say it: Organized labor is having a hell of a week in big-top college athletics.

The student-athlete coalition in the Pac-12 is stronger than ever, it seems, and now 1,000 Big Ten athletes have joined in. It's nothing less than a blossoming labor movement, just as surely as the ghosts of Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood and John L. Lewis still walk among us. And it's the inevitable result of decades of running college athletics like a bidness while pretending it's all part of the academic mission.

Well, that veneer is gone now, scrubbed away by the tidal wave of cash generated by all those "student-athletes." And now the "student-athletes" want some accountability for their labor.

So the Pac-12 union is demanding answers and the Big Ten union is demanding answers, and down in Lubbock, Texas, other "student-athletes" are demanding answers, too. They want to know when that university is going to do something about Texas Tech women's basketball coach Marlene Stollings, whom a whole pile of parents, former players and assistants claim is basically crazier than a s***house rat.

In a USA Today report that cites interviews with 10 players, two former assistant coaches and two parents, as well as exit interviews from departing players, Stollings is accused of fostering a "toxic environment" since taking the Texas Tech job in 2018. Among her more batty tactics, her accusers allege, is making players wear heart monitors to determine playing time. Those who maintained a heart rate of at least 90 percent capacity play; those who don't ride pine.

Stollings says, in so many words, that she's simply trying to change the program's culture, and that it's working. The team went from seven wins to 14 in her first season, and to 18 in her second.

Along the way, however, a dozen players left the program. You can say, and some will, that they're just a bunch of whiners who couldn't abide "discipline." Of course, it's even more possible they're simply saner than those who've stayed.

All depends on your perspective.

In any case, the days are over when coaches and the administrations who enabled them could do whatever they want to their "student-athletes" in the interests of revenue. The "student-athletes," it seems, are done taking it.

Now they're dishing it out.