Drinkwitz wants players to keep speaking up on social media
College football players have discovered their voices.
In the three-plus weeks since George Floyd died while in the custody of a Minneapolis police officer, athletes across the country have used both their social media accounts and their actions to speak out against racial injustice. The Missouri football team took one of the more public stands when safety Martez Manuel organized a march from campus to the Boone County Courthouse in downtown Columbia, where 62 players registered to vote.
The Tigers’ march has been widely well-received, but the athlete awakening hasn’t gone so smoothly at every Power Five program. A slew of allegations from current and former Iowa players that longtime strength coach Chris Doyle used racially insensitive language resulted in Doyle’s ouster and could put 21-year head coach Kirk Ferentz’s job in jeopardy. Florida State defensive lineman Marvin Wilson called out new coach Mike Norvell on Twitter, saying Norvell’s claim that he had communicated with each player about Floyd’s death was untrue. Watson threatened to stop workouts and a few other players voiced their support, but he quickly reversed course after a team meeting.
This week, the focus has shifted to Oklahoma State, where coach Mike Gundy was recently photographed wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a logo for One America News on a fishing trip. The right-wing television outlet has been critical of the Black Live Matter movement, at one point calling it a “farce.” Star running back Chuba Hubbard, the leading rusher in the country last season, called the shirt “unacceptable,” tweeting “I will not be doing anything with Oklahoma State until things CHANGE.” Tension escalated when several of Hubbard’s teammates, including star receiver Tylan Wallace and linebacker Amen Ogbongbemiga, tweeted their support for Hubbard. Multiple former players also chimed in, hinting at racially insensitive behavior in Gundy’s past. Gundy has since released a video in which he apologized for wearing the shirt and said he was “disgusted” by OAN’s rhetoric pertaining to Black Lives Matter, and Hubbard apologized for taking to Twitter rather than approaching Gundy directly.
In the wake of these highly-publicized dust-ups between players and coach, it would be understandable for some college coaches to view the new wave of players speaking up as a threat. Their first inclination might be to limit social media access, trying to return to the days when head coaches controlled the narrative about what went on inside a program. But first-year Missouri head coach Eliah Drinkwitz has no interest in muzzling his players. Instead, he’s trying to educate them on how to stay on the right side of the thin line between making their voices heard and igniting online controversy.
From multi-year starting running back Larry Rountree III to redshirt freshman receiver C.J. Boone, several Missouri players haven’t been shy about posting on social media to voice opposition to police brutality and racial inequality. Drinkwitz is okay with that. During a virtual press conference with local reporters Wednesday, he said he wants players to be able to use their platforms and voice their opinions.
“They have Twitter, they have a voice,” Drinkwitz said. “They can speak if there's something that they feel adamant about, that they want to speak about, that's what they have Twitter for.”
At the same time, Drinkwitz isn’t exactly encouraging players to live-tweet everything they do. Drinkwitz said the staff has emphasized that players’ platforms can be a blessing and a curse, as anything they put on social media will reach a wide audience and could quickly go viral. As a result, they need to think before they tweet.
“Social media is a new experiment for everybody,” Drinkwitz said. “I think it’s an extreme challenge, especially in this day and age when you can put something on social media and immediately it’s retweeted by somebody with millions of followers and turns into a national story, and then you can put out a one-minute video and it’s over. So I don’t know what the answer is, other than we try to educate them on freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of consequence. Think about, what you tweet now, in five years, will you feel the same about it? Is it going to stand the test of time on a tweet?”
Drinkwitz noted that the same goes for himself, and his caution has to extend beyond his social media posts. As the controversy at Oklahoma State has illustrated, head coaches even have to worry about how their clothing might be perceived.
Drinkwitz busted out a head-turning shirt of his own Wednesday, rocking a button-down, short sleeve Hawaiian shirt that featured flamingos and palm trees alongside the Missouri logo. He opened the press conference by calling the shirt an homage to Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid. While shouting out the defending Super Bowl champs is about as far from controversial as possible in the state of Missouri, Drinkwitz did note that he’s had to start being more careful about not only what he says and does, but what he wears. He pointed out that he owns the same “Football Matters” t-shirt that earned Dabo Swinney criticism in recent weeks after he was photographed wearing it while on vacation. The shirt was a gift from the National Football Foundation.
“I'm a lot more aware now of everything I do than I ever had been in the past, and hypersensitive to anything that I may potentially say,” Drinkwitz said. “I guess now, too, I'm worried about what my shirt choices are. I mean, I don't know if you can go to an ugly Christmas sweater party anymore as a head football coach, I'm dead serious.”
Drinkwitz made it clear that he wasn’t trying to defend Gundy or Swinney. He doesn’t condone wearing either shirt, he said, nor One America News. However, he sympathized with the two coaches drawing flak for shirts they were wearing while off the clock.
“We are talking private time,” Drinkwitz said. “These guys are getting pictures taken by fans out on vacation time or on their own. How many of y'all go to a lake and think about what shirt you put on at a lake?”
Ultimately, the situations at Florida State, Iowa and Oklahoma State underscore Drinkwitz’s point that, for better or worse, football players’ voices carry weight. And those voices are only going to get louder. As a result, the best form of protection against scandal is likely not keeping players from tweeting, like Ferentz, but engaging them in honest conversations about the issues they want to speak out on.
By all accounts, Drinkwitz and his staff did just that after the death of Floyd. When players first expressed concerns about racial injustice, the coaches listened, and each position group discussed the issue. When Manuel came up with the idea to take action in Columbia, he felt comfortable approaching the coaching staff, who helped him organize an event that included members from across the athletics department as well as local law enforcement. The team held a meeting an hour beforehand to make sure everyone was on the same page.
Rountree said the staff’s willingness to have those non-football conversations with the team helped the new coaches build trust among the locker room. For a staff that has had its face-to-face interactions with a new roster limited by the coronavirus pandemic, that trust could go a long way.
“It was great to know that they see this as a serious matter,” Rountree said. “... There’s usually nothing that we could do or talk about, it was just a thing that we could talk about in closed doors. But we actually talked about it, and it made me really feel like my coach really cared about what's going on in America, what is right and what's wrong.”