Major News Coverage is Coming . . .
Monday, May 10 at 10:00 p.m.
Although I have now dedicated this newsletter to my campaign to start the first College Football Players Association, I started this newsletter in July 2020 to bring to light player mistreatment on the University of Minnesota Golden Gopher football team. I was a professor at Minnesota from 2010 through 2020 and specifically from the years 2017 through 2019 I reported internally to university administration what I knew regarding this matter. Very little was done to respond to this internal reporting and I believe that it ultimately led to my demotion from an administrative post that I held at the university in April 2020. Rather than accept this demotion, I resigned from the university entirely in July 2020 and started this newsletter to begin reporting to the public what I knew.
This coming Monday, May 10 at 10:00 p.m., Minnesota’s largest broadcast news outlet, the CBS affiliate WCCO, will begin reporting on these matters. I was interviewed extensively as were former Gopher players who I had not yet included in my reporting. These will be new players voices that no one has heard from yet. I commend these players for their courage in coming forward and look forward to hearing what they have to say. The report will be online after the live airing and so I’ll be sure to share the link when it is.
Given that this report is coming, I wanted to link three pieces of reporting that I did last fall as I know that these matters will likely be discussed on air:
In early October 2020, I wrote “The Disappeared” to tell the story of a former student of mine, Grant Norton, and his traumatic experiences on the Gopher football team.
In mid-November 2020, I published “Beholden to One Man” to try and tell the story of why toxic work environments in college football can be so common.
In one of my first posts in this newsletter in July 2020, entitled “Exploit U,” I detailed why and how I was demoted for reporting on what I knew about Minnesota’s football program.
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I’m very gratified that all of these matters will finally be gaining a wider public audience. I’m hopeful that this will be the first report of many to come which collectively will show exactly why college football players need a College Football Players Association.