Drew Magary: College football should die forever

Because college football shouldn’t exist. I wanna believe there’s a way for the sport to work, so that players are fairly compensated and I still get to watch Michigan inexplicably blow three-plus games a year. In fact, just last week a group of Pac-12 players issued a series of demands for their return to the field which included not only intense safety precautions but also genuine reforms to address the ongoing sham of amateurism that has allowed coaches and administrators to bank millions off a glorified NFL farm system. Their vision of the sport, complete with formal player unionization, SEEMED like it could work.

It’s just that no one in charge will ever allow that to happen. The Pac-12 coalition’s #WeAreUnited campaign has already been upstaged by a #WeWantToPlay campaign that’s just a watered-down list demands. That second campaign was instantly co-opted by coaches and by the Axis of S--tbags — Trump, Jim Jordan, Nick Saban, etc. — as justification for putting players in harm’s way. You see? These guys wanna play! I know why this means so much to the President. The absence of college football would serve as glaring proof — to voters in the GOP’s favorite states — of his numerous, deliberate failures to contain the pandemic. He can’t let that happen. He and other power brokers need us to go back to a normal that had no right to exist in its previous incarnation.

That’s why college football can never return. The sport has been so corrupt for so long that even the people who RUN it can’t even sort out the composition of the rot. The NCAA, which only asserts its authority across the sports when there’s money to be made or because some fullback from Iowa State committed a rule violation when he got $10 to mow a neighbor’s lawn, has essentially told conferences and schools that the situation isn’t their problem. This is because the NCAA has no interest in actually FIXING any of this s--t, because that would cost them money.

Well, it’s my stance — no wait, my DESIRE — that the NCAA come out of this with no money at all. AND LO AND BEHOLD, here we now have a morbidly perfect opportunity to kill the NCAA dead forever. But the only way to effectively do that is for the games to stop. That’s not the most enticing proposition to players who really do want to play right now, either because of their NFL prospects or because they need Big Jim McBooster’s monthly cash envelope. Already, some of them — like surefire No. 1 draft pick Trevor Lawrence — have bought into the idea that football, a lethal sport, somehow represents a relative safe haven from the pandemic. Others, like his teammate Darien Rencher, have said this:

"The thing we rallied around is wanting to play," Rencher said. "If we play, like we've seen in other sports, we can use our voices to stand up. But if we don't play, we don't have any leverage to speak upon things that can change."

That is exactly wrong. The second these players take the field, their leverage is gone. They’re all faceless, replaceable drones in helmets again. The money will start flowing back in and those who stand to profit will tune those players right back out. This is because colleges have never had to deal with players refusing to play en masse. They can’t imagine it. Their budgets won’t even allow for it. The Pac-12 is already preparing to take out billions in loans if the season gets scuttled. That’s how dependent these schools are — not just the athletic departments, but entire schools — on free football talent. Player exploitation is the backbone of the college sports industrial model, and those schools have any number of fans and bootlickers in the media to present that exploitation as a FAVOR granted to college football players. They have money and football history to use against players, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds. They are already forcing those players into a losing proposition right when the stakes are highest, and they aren’t afraid to use every weapon in their arsenal to browbeat them into compliance. They never have been.

There’s no heartwarming endgame to this. I’d like these players to unionize, but it’s not necessarily possible for them to do so legally. I’d like them compensated for their work, but the Pac-12 already challenged the Fair Pay To Play Act in court and successfully got a judge to rule that its players aren’t employees. I’d like to watch college football starting at the end of this month. For real, when the season opens, I get alarmingly jazzed when I open up my DirecTV channel guide and see Utah kicking off the season with a home game against Hawaii Tech at 10:30pm on ESPNQ. But I know that game would prove more dangerous to its players than football already is. I also know that game would end 31-6. I’d like to believe Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh when he says they’ve been hyper-vigilant with regards to player testing and activity, but A) college coaches are serial bulls--tters, and B) that’s one school out of hundreds. What about Eastern Kentucky, whose kicker quit in protest last week because his coaches gave zero fucks about safety? What about Washington State, which has already cut players loose for having the gall to tweet #WeAreUnited? What has college football ever done to earn my trust, or anyone’s?

You already know the answer. Nothing. These players give everything, and what the f--k have their bosses ever given back? We’ve reached a point in history where it’s crystal clear that American universities are where corruption goes to get laundered. Many of them can’t exist without their s--t football teams, and those football teams can’t exist without screwing over their own players. That’s the system. You don’t fix a system like this. You bury it. I hope every college football player opts out and never opts back in.

Drew Magary is an in-house columnist for Medium’s GEN magazine, and a former writer for both Deadspin and GQ. His third novel, Point B, came out in April.

MORE DREW: Bill Simmons has had this coming for a long time now

EVEN MORE DREW: Put Colin Kaepernick in the Hall of Fame

SO MUCH MORE DREW: Adam Rapoport's 'Bon Appetit' was a terrible magazine