The Great Black Hope
For someone who has barely touched a football, I have lots of opinions about college athletics. I worry a lot about traumatic brain injury, especially among young people without disability insurance. It’s one thing to ask professional athletes to punish each other like rams on a mountainside, but a whole other deal to ask the same of college students. When, inevitably, some of them are injured, who will pay for their custodial care?
It’s the reason I like it when young athletes get power. For the first time in history, some are now paid to play. NIL collectives gather up funds from boosters, businesses, and other sources of cash to pay Mr. Athlete for the use of his Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL). It’s a way of putting money in the pockets of young people (male and female) whose efforts bring millions to the universities they play for. My hope is that some of them put the money away to pay for their care when they exhibit symptoms of brain injury.
I also like it when athletes acquire other forms of power. In the last several weeks, an initiative has taken shape to get young black athletes to think hard about their choices. Why play for a public university in a state that has just gerrymandered black officials into electoral oblivion? The NAACP makes a powerful argument. The Supreme Court no longer cares about Black representation. Thanks to its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, dozens of Black officials will lose their positions. The Republican Party has said the quiet part out loud. Every Black district is a threat to its hegemony, and it will do everything it can to block the rise of Black office holders.
What Black athletes can do is to strike where it hurts. By withdrawing their brilliance from big Southern universities, those teams will slide to the bottom of their conferences, and their programs will end up begging for cash. The simple calculation is that television goes to winners. If your team is a loser, you don’t get the contracts. Sorry Clemson. Fair is fair.
Pardon me for schadenfreude, but I can’t wait ‘til this happens. It’s exactly the kind of strategic genius the Democratic Party has frequently failed to generate. If the NAACP is successful, lots of people will benefit from its plan. What begins with Historically Black Colleges and Universities will quickly move to the North and the West. It may take a couple of federal election cycles, but football fans are an unruly lot. They won’t take kindly to losing forever.
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Written without the use of artificial intelligence, this is the actual product of a struggling human mind.