You may recall that several members of the University of Missouri’s football team announced that they’re going on strike from all team activities in protest of how officials at the main campus in Columbia and the University of Missouri System have handled recent incidents of racial harassment. Specifically, the players have vowed to continue their boycott until system president Tim Wolfe either resigns or is fired. Now it appears that the players have the full support of their head coach, Gary Pinkel.
On Saturday night, safety Anthony Sherrils tweeted a picture showing himself and 29 of his teammates linking arms as they announced the boycott. One of the players in the picture, cornerback John Gibson, later said that the Tiger coaches were “100 percent behind us.”
Any doubt of this was erased on Sunday afternoon, when Pinkel fired off a tweet showing the entire team–both blacks and whites–in a similar pose to the one shown the previous night.
The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP pic.twitter.com/fMHbPPTTKl
— Coach Gary Pinkel (@GaryPinkel) November 8, 2015
An unnamed football player first approached Concerned Student 1950, a group named for the year in which blacks were first admitted to MU, on Wednesday. After the Tigers lost to Mississippi State on Thursday, a number of players spent the next two days discussing their options before deciding on a boycott. If Pinkel’s tweet is any indication, it’s a move that now has his full-throated support, as well as that of his staff.
It would be a laudable and courageous act for the head coach at any major university to stick his neck out in this manner, even at risk of putting his career on the line. However, it’s not likely that Pinkel will have to worry about any reprisals. He is the winningest coach in Missouri history, with 117 wins in 15 years.
The incidents of racism reported at MU are an outrage in and of themselves. Almost as outrageous, though, is that it took Pinkel and the football team speaking out for this to get noticed outside of Columbia or Missouri. A major university has its student body president subjected to racial slurs, and a swastika scrawled in a dorm–and we didn’t know about it until now? A graduate student is so outraged by university officials’ response to these incidents that he starts a hunger strike–and we didn’t know about it until now? What’s wrong with this picture?
The Tigers are next slated to play on Saturday against BYU in Kansas City. If they can’t field enough players for a viable team, it will cost the university $1 million. From where I’m sitting, though, this should be the last thing on MU’s mind. When it takes a football team speaking out to bring national attention to racist behavior at a major university, something is wrong. Very wrong.
