Nationally televised college football games

After decades of playing for free and risking their bodies, college football players now have a chance to realize their power. The coronavirus pandemic and the national focus on injustice and inequality since the killing of George Floyd are combining to increase players’ leverage over their school. Earlier this month, players at Florida State University demanded an apology from Mike Norvell, their first-year head coach. Norvell, who is white, earlier told a reporter that he had personally connected with each of his athletes about Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests. But the star defensive tackle Marvin Wilson, who is black, knew otherwise and announced on Twitter that he and his teammates “will not be working out until further notice.” The players’ threat worked . Norvell said he was sorry, and no players were disciplined. Suddenly, college football has to listen to athletes. Floyd’s death highlights the injustice, discrimination, and inequality faced by black men, who … [Read more...] about College Football Players Can Resist Their Exploiters

College-sports traditionalists were appalled last week when the Big Ten athletic conference announced that it will add UCLA and the University of Southern California to its membership in 2024—creating a seismic shift in the college-sports landscape that will generate millions of dollars in revenue for the two California powerhouse programs. This reorganization is the strongest indicator yet that college sports is cannibalizing itself. In pursuit of greater revenue from broadcast rights, schools and conferences are more and more willing to ignore traditional rivalries, customs, and regional loyalties. For now, USC and UCLA are members of the Pac-12, long the premier conference in the West. Athletes at the two schools are about to spend a lot more time traveling to play faraway new rivals in the Midwest, where the Big Ten is based. But many college football programs are going to be facing new realities. CBS Sports reported that another major conference, the Big 12, may soon peel as … [Read more...] about College Football Is Cannibalizing Itself

The coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging America, just as it was in August, when the college presidents and chancellors of the Big Ten Conference decided against playing football in the fall. The only thing that’s changed is that the same leaders now feel far more comfortable with the risks. The Big Ten’s announcement this week that college football will begin the weekend of October 23 isn’t cause for celebration, but rather an indication of how easily money shifts priorities. Without football, the Big Ten and its member schools were in jeopardy of losing up to $1 billion in revenue . Last month, the Big Ten was willing to set a brave example. It decided that its members, most of which are large public universities in the Midwest, would play no football this fall. But instead of being applauded for exhibiting farsighted, selfless leadership, the Big Ten has spent its hiatus being scolded by fans and parents , sued by players , and criticized by coaches . Meanwhile, … [Read more...] about For the Big Ten, the Money Was Just Too Tempting

With a CV that includes stints working in a bakery, an Indian restaurant and night shifts in a chippy, Bethany England is no stranger to hard graft. This summer, that teenager who was once deep-frying Creme Eggs until 5am to pay her way through college can now, at 28, add 'England striker at a major international tournament' onto that tasty career path. The Chelsea striker has been picked for July's home Euros - no great surprise after she enjoyed the highest goals-per-90-minutes ratio of any English forward in the Women's Super League last season. But it was a distant dream a decade ago when she says she was earning merely around £150 a month playing for Doncaster Rovers Belles, prior to the WSL becoming fully-professional. "I think the youth coming through these days won't realise how much people had to work to get to where they are," England said. "There was a time where I was basically paying to go to football, not football paying me. It is a reality check but it also … [Read more...] about Bethany England interview: ‘I do a good fish and chips – at Easter we would fry Creme Eggs’

M y reaction to O. J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman was atypical. It was 1994 . I was a young black man attending a historically black university in the majority-black city of Washington, D.C., with zero sympathy for Simpson, zero understanding of the sympathy he elicited from my people, and zero appreciation for the defense team’s claim that Simpson had been targeted because he was black. O. J. Simpson wasn’t black. He came of age in the 1960s—the era of Muhammad Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War and John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics. But the O. J. Simpson I knew, and the one poignantly depicted this year in Ezra Edelman’s epic documentary, O.J.: Made in America , recognized only one struggle—the struggle to advance O. J. Simpson. When the activist Harry Edwards attempted to enlist Simpson in the Olympic boycott, Simpson rebuffed him and later claimed that organizers like … [Read more...] about What O. J. Simpson Means to Me

The most famous story about modern presidential campaigning now has a quaint old-world tone. It’s about the showdown between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the first debate of their 1960 campaign, which was also the very first nationally televised general-election debate in the United States. The story is that Kennedy looked great, which is true, and Nixon looked terrible, which is also true—and that this visual difference had an unexpected electoral effect. As Theodore H. White described it in his hugely influential book The Making of the President 1960 , which has set the model for campaign coverage ever since, “sample surveys” after the debate found that people who had only heard Kennedy and Nixon talking, over the radio, thought that the debate had been a tie. But those who saw the two men on television were much more likely to think that Kennedy—handsome, tanned, non-sweaty, poised—had won. Historians who have followed up on this story haven’t found data to back … [Read more...] about When Donald Meets Hillary: Who Will Win the Debates?

In 2009, a squad of part-time England players, earning just £16,000 a year, reached the final of the European Championship. Despite being thrashed 6-2 by Germany, it was a landmark moment for the modern women’s game – and an achievement not since bettered by any other England team. By then, the Football Association was starting to take the women’s game seriously. There were central contracts for the 17 best players in the country, a dedicated support staff for those on England duty, a strength and conditioning coach, a psychologist and a data and video analyst. But still there was an overwhelming sense football was just a part-time job. Even the best players had to find work to pay the bills. “Central contracts were a huge step in the right direction, and we were very grateful for it at the time,” said Rachel Brown-Finnis, England goalkeeper in 2009. “But when you’re in a final against some of the best players in the world, it showed us in pretty stark fashion that we still had a … [Read more...] about How England’s part-time Euros trailblazers paved way for this summer’s home favourites

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here . I wonder if the remaining sensible Republicans have accepted the irretrievable loss of the GOP they once knew. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic . Let’s use Chicago rules to beat Russia. Hybrid work is doomed. Uber Pool is a zombie. Harsher Truths In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.” Republicans such as Senator Mitt Romney—an honorable man for whom I voted in 2012—and a handful of others in the GOP, … [Read more...] about Are the Last Rational Republicans in Denial?

On a chilly autumn morning in northwest London, just outside the Euston train station, Adam Roberts stops at the top of an outdoor staircase, looks around for police, and tries to appear inconspicuous. This is harder than it sounds, and not only because he’s 6 foot 3. Roberts pulls a plastic-wrapped package from his pocket, tears it open, and slides out a long, slender tube and a swab that looks like an overgrown Q-tip. After checking again for anyone watching, he trots down the stairs, dragging the swab along the handrail, and slips the swab into the tube and the tube into his pocket. Then he strolls away. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone. After a block, Roberts veers off busy Euston Road and down side streets toward his lab at University College London. He’s not up to anything nefarious—quite the opposite—but with closed-circuit TVs everywhere and London on high alert for terrorist threats, … [Read more...] about Hunting for Antibiotics in the World’s Dirtiest Places

Women's footballers are being put at risk of physical burn-out due to "unacceptable" early national team call-ups ahead of this summer's European Championship , Telegraph Sport has been told. Clubs across Europe have expressed "huge concern" at their players' shortened off-season breaks, with the majority of teams involved in the tournament starting their training camps at least 10 days earlier than the opening of the official Fifa international window of June 20. Sources at 12 of the biggest women's teams across Europe all expressed their anger at the situation to The Telegraph , with two club board members saying there was "outrage" at the lack of recovery time since the club season finale, which in some countries came as recently as June 1. England and Italy's squads were among the first to meet up, arriving at their camps on May 30, around five weeks before the start of the tournament and more than two months before the Wembley final. The Lionesses are being given … [Read more...] about Fears rise over player ‘burn-out’ ahead of Women’s Euros