Life gets headache-y in the executive wing when the workforce won't tote that barge. That's as sure a thing as rain on parades and coming up a penny short of exact change.
And so the other day a football coach named Nick Rolovich cashiered a wide receiver named Kassidy Woods out in Pullman, Wash., and not because the kid cheated on an exam or plagiarized a paper or anything else so trivial to the success of a corporate college football program. No, sir.
He told the kid to clean out his locker because, basically, he wasn't sufficiently grateful enough to Rolovich and Washington State University for the wonderful opportunity they were giving him to make money for them.
As detailed here by Chris Baud of Deadspin, it seems Woods was part of a coalition of Pac-12 athletes who announced in The Players' Tribune they would opt out of playing if the conference couldn't guarantee their safety in the midst of our current pandemic.
Woods went to Rolovich and said he was opting out of football this fall because he didn't think it was worth the risk to his health. Rolovich said that was fine, but then asked if he was part of the coalition.
When Woods said yes, Rolovich told him to clean out his locker.
History tells us how the rest of this could very well go. The football team will rally behind Woods, because that's what teammates are taught to do. Rolovich will thus have at worst a revolt on his hands, and at best a whole lot of grumpy players who might not be as disposed to toting the barge as usual.
The irony of this, if happens, will be that Rolovich told Woods he was being shown the road because Coach didn't want any "mixed messages" for his football team. He'll be right -- but probably not in the way he envisioned.
No, the message will be clear and unambiguous, and it's this: You are not here to run the show. We run the show. You can opt out if you feel at risk, but you'd better not do it in a single voice. Because you're here to do a job and you get a free education and the best of all our resources to do it, so get back in line.
Where this gets thorny is no one running the show can admit their "student-athletes" are there to do a job, even though they are. That would mean they're a workforce, and workforce rules would have to be applied. And that's the last thing the people running the show want, because they've got entirely too cushy a deal going and they don't want anything to jeopardize it.
But when the workforce starts acting like a workforce regardless ... well, the veneer sloughs right off, doesn't it? The bare wood shows through: If the workforce walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck.
Or a Washington State Cougar. Or a UCLA Bruin. Or a Washington Husky, an Arizona State Sun Devil, an Oregon ... Duck.
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