The "woke" movement of major sport leagues like the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball has filtered down into the collegiate ranks.  Given today's insane environment, how could it be otherwise?  A case in point is that players from the Pac-12 Conference have issued demands and are threatening to sit out the 2020 season unless they are met.

This was done in a letter to conference commissioner Larry Scott and is said to be backed by hundreds of players from all 12 universities in the Pac-12.  A number of the demands are reasonable such as the call for adequate safety protocols in lieu of the Wuhan virus.  Think of the hypocrisy of the universities here.  Many are keeping students off campus this fall because of the pandemic, yet football players are being asked to show up for practice and play games.  Why?  Money for the schools.

Also reasonable is the demand that a player who opts out of the 2020 season due to virus concerns does not lose his eligibility or his spot on the roster as is the demand for the right to have an agent help the players with marketing themselves once it becomes legal to profit off the name, image, and likeness.

But then there are other demands in the letter, which leads one to believe the jocks have grossly overestimated their value.  For example, the players want the Pac-12 to distribute half of each sport's total conference revenue with the participating players.  It seems these footballers want to skim the cream off the top and not worry about the infrastructure costs that undermine college sports.  Obviously, none is an accounting major.   

And what would demands be without a heavy social justice aspect to them?  The woke football players are concerned about "the racial and financial inequities of the NCAA model, in which universities['] white coaches rake in millions from the success of a mostly black, unpaid workforce."  Valentino Daltoso, a senior lineman at California, is quoted as saying, "Moving forward, we want to have a system in place that values black lives by ensuring that a majority black workforce is provided basic economic rights and health protection." 

The players have been watching too much MSNBC and CNN and are encased in their left-wing college bubbles.  They don't understand that America is getting sick and tired of Black Lives Matter and so-called social justice which is anything but just.  Nor do they realize how replaceable they actually are.  Just because they might run the 40-yard dash a few tenths of a second faster than the kid who didn't get the scholarship doesn't mean the passed over kid can't play a respectable game.  Plus an athlete's ability is a fleeting asset, and each year that passes brings another crop of players, many of whom are just as good as if not better than the current ones.   

Let's take a time out at this point and ask a politically incorrect question.  How many of these footballers who are spouting off on social policy and making demands on their schools actually belong in college in the first place, never mind in elite universities like Stanford and University of California, Berkeley?  Call me old-fashioned, but shouldn't college sports be reserved for legitimate students, not athletes masquerading as such?  The major abuses in this regard are the sports where big money has corrupted things — namely, football and basketball.

But circumstances look as though they might pre-empt the players' threat not to play.  Already the Mid-American Conference has canceled its 2020 football season.  Other conferences could soon follow.  And then the Pac-12 players who issued demands will learn a harsh lesson.  When there's no college football this year, life will go on without it and without them.  That will give the players an opportunity to hit the books more instead of each other on the gridiron.  Wouldn't that be something?

Image: Mike Mozart via Flickr.