The ways we were being done dirty were even more obvious at Texas A&M because our coach, Dennis Franchione, was involved in a scandal. He ran a side operation, a $1,200-per-subscription fan-letter service called “VIP Connection.” It included injury reports, recruitment information, and private critiques of players. A lot of guys were surprised when it was revealed he was running this kind of game, and that’s when it clicked for many of us that college football was both a hustle and a big business. We looked at that “VIP Connection” newsletter, and meanwhile, they were feeding us peanuts. For real. Peanuts. I said, “You got a billion-dollar cable deal and a $1,200-per newsletter … can we get some steaks in this motherfucker?”
Only now that college is over do we meet up and say, “Damn! We didn’t get paid! We built entire stadiums and have nothing to show for it!” All these jerseys being sold with our name and number on the back, all the autographs we signed for auctions and big-money boosters, all this cable money being made, and we didn’t reap any of the benefits. We didn’t realize that you could be a straight-A student but lose your athletic scholarship at any time if you didn’t fit into a coach’s new scheme. Nothing matters except whether you fit in with the team. A coach will sit in your living room when you’re in high school and say to your parents, “We’ll take care of your son like he is part of our family, as a university, and we are going to make sure it happens for him. On my honor, he’s going to be something great”—but it’s all a line to keep the train moving.
The largest culture shock was being Black in this atmosphere. We had white coaches, and they wanted the Black players to be the embodiment of who they were. They would tell us to wear our pants or shoes a certain way; this is what it meant to “be a man.” They thought our path to manhood was to be found in skinny jeans and a tucked-in shirt. (Although now Migos, getting “Bad and Boujee,” has all kinds of young players dressing like that by choice. Go figure.) But they never understood or tried to understand us. They projected their morals and thought processes onto young Black men without figuring out who we were. This struck me as a recipe for our continually being misunderstood, misguided, and misjudged, ingredients for disaster and rebellion, or at the very least for stress and self-destruction and the creation of the very PTSD that afflicts players when it’s all over.
For all the exploitation we faced, we never realized how much power we had. If we had ever decided to go on strike, we could have gotten a new coach, a new university president; shoot, in Texas, we could’ve gotten a new governor. The Aggies are the identity of an entire part of the state, at the heart of the economic and social life of both the school and the surrounding community. We were both powerless and powerful. In 2015, when Missouri players—Black and white—went on strike against racism on campus, the university president was gone as soon as it looked like the school would have to forfeit a million-dollar game check. People were shocked, but I got it right away. We have this power at every school. The only obstacle is our own fear. If I had it to do over, I would have tried to flex that power.
I don’t have all the answers, but if I were back in school but with my current thirty-two-year-old brain, I’d try to organize players to come together to fight for a list of demands. These would include each player getting a certain amount of money per year, say, $50,000, set up in some type of IRA or money-market account so they could learn to conservatively manage their money. At the end of their college career, they could have $200,000, plus interest, in a savings account, which they’d be required to keep investing until they were thirty-five or forty years old, so it would continue to grow. That kind of system would also be an incentive for players to stay and get their degrees. Only the best would leave before four years. And please don’t tell me that there is no money in the system for this, not when ESPN is making six-billion-dollar television deals to broadcast college football, and Jim Delany, commissioner of the Big Ten, got a twenty-million-dollar bonus in 2017. It’s not just Jim Delany, although that story is particularly gross. Athletic directors have gotten raises of 30 percent over the past five years. Don’t tell me there’s not money in this system. As KRS-One rhymed, “It’s not about a salary, it’s all about reality.” It’s about changing a system that doesn’t work for the people who sweat and bleed on that field and who the fans are paying to see. No one buys a jersey with Jim Delany’s name on the back.
At Texas A&M, I heard teammates complain about the system, but I didn’t see them organizing themselves into any kind of resistance. Instead, I saw the opposite: players getting so twisted into
