Football on an empty campus? UNC sends clear message that student-athletes don’t exist
If you’ve been living under a rock with the UNC System’s Board of Governors, this will come as shocking news: After North Carolina had to take all of its classes online and send all of its students home on Monday amid a blossoming COVID-19 outbreak on campus — fallout from the UNC governors’ reckless reopening mandate — it still plans to proceed with fall sports.
And with that, North Carolina, the ACC and all of college athletics have now painted themselves into an existential corner.
It’s not safe to have students on campus.
But it’s OK to have athletes on campus.
How can you possibly reconcile those two statements without admitting that athletes are, at the least, not merely students, never mind a labor source that generates essential revenue … and therefore employees as well?
For those of us old enough to remember those halcyon days way back last month when “student-athletes” were no different than anyone else on campus and therefore couldn’t possibly benefit from their image or make a buck on the side without compromising the ethics of the entire enterprise — never mind their acting, singing, dancing, coding and incorporating non-athlete peers all can — well, that’s more than a little jarring.
There’s now officially no such thing as a “student-athlete.” (There never was, but still.) There are students and there are athletes. Full stop.
North Carolina gets singled out here for the scope of its campus outbreak and the tone-deafness of its “We are still expecting to play this fall” rhetoric, but the university is far from alone. (The SEC put out guidelines for fans in stadiums Tuesday!)
Across the country, in Chapel Hill and elsewhere, the people in power in college athletics are giving the game away.
The idea that athletes are just regular students who happen to play a sport for the love of the game has been the fundamental underpinning of every NCAA defense of a system that makes billions for everyone but the athletes. The “amateur” model.
But if athletes aren’t regular students, then there is no amateur model. There is only a model that exploits athletes and profits from their labor.
It was always thus, but the fig leaf is gone.
While the Big Ten and Pac-12 pulled the plug on football early, the ACC gave itself until mid-September to figure out whether it could play football, hoping the COVID-19 environment would change for the better. That hope was still predicated on some sort of semblance of a normal fall semester, which is out the window now.
Back in May, ACC commissioner John Swofford said the idea of athletics without classes on campus was very difficult to comprehend: “Most people I talk to in college athletics and higher education I think agree that that’s a foreign thought to most of us.”
Monday, North Carolina said “our student-athletes will continue to attend online classes.” Even by the standards of college athletics, that is a long way to move the goalposts in only three months.
That’s not lost on the athletes.
North Carolina basketball player Armando Bacot tweeted early Tuesday morning: “Student-athletes? Amateurism? Or employee?”
That followed teammmate Garrison Brooks’ tweet Monday night: “So what’s the difference in student athletes and regular students ? Are we immune to this virus because we play a sport ?”
They’re not, of course, but we’ve seen from the football experience this summer that colleges can actually do a pretty good job of keeping athletes safe and virus-free while the campus is empty of non-athletes. There’s no reason that can’t continue to be true with the UNC campus otherwise empty again now.
But that also demands an answer to Brooks’ first question, an acknowledgment that athletes aren’t merely students. They’re something else entirely, a protected class with its own obligations and responsibilities — and one that deserves to share in the rewards.
That’s always been the case. But there’s no pretending otherwise now, at North Carolina or anywhere else.
This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 11:34 AM with the headline "Football on an empty campus? UNC sends clear message that student-athletes don’t exist."
