Домой United States USA — Sport A Group of Pac-12 Football Players Opts Out of the Season

A Group of Pac-12 Football Players Opts Out of the Season

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The athletes from 10 schools said they were dissatisfied with how their universities were handling the coronavirus, an approach they say prioritizes money over safety.
Thirteen Pac-12 Conference football players announced Sunday they were opting out of the coming season, saying they would not play until systemic inequities that have been highlighted by college athletics’ response to the coronavirus pandemic were addressed.
The players, who are from 10 schools and include All-American and honor roll candidates, said that playing a contact sport like football during the outbreak would be reckless because of what they described as inadequate transparency about the health risks, a lack of uniform safety measures and an absence of ample enforcement.
Those shortcomings, they added, are emblematic of a system in which players have little standing to address social, economic or racial inequalities — and, they said, far more of the millions of dollars they help generate should go toward addressing them.
“The people who are deciding whether we are going to play football are going to prioritize money over health and safety 10 times out of 10,” Jaydon Grant, a senior defensive back at Oregon State who graduated with a degree in digital communication arts said in an interview.
The announcement comes as the college football season is increasingly in doubt as the coronavirus bounces around the country — including infiltrating Major League Baseball — no more under control than it was in March, when college sports and professional leagues in the United States began shutting down.
This has led many universities to keep students off campus and some conferences, like the Ivy League, to postpone fall sports until at least January. But the schools at the lucrative top of the football food chain, which heavily leans on television revenue, are forging ahead. Four major conferences — the Southeastern, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Atlantic Coast — have pared their schedules mainly to conference games.
Still, there is pushback gathering over whether universities should be conscripting unpaid college athletes to keep hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into athletic departments’ coffers by largely assuming whatever risks come with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

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