What if All of the University of Florida’s Black Football Players Entered the Transfer Portal?
What if All of the University of Florida’s Black Football Players Entered the Transfer Portal?UF Ends DEI Programs and Dismisses Staff
In a post on Meta/Facebook this morning, I read that 67 Black players from the University of Florida (UF) entered the transfer portal in response to UF ending all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and firing the employees responsible for implementing them. I had high hopes for a moment that this was true, but alas, it wasn’t. DEI Programs have been eliminated in all of Florida’s public colleges and universities.
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The transfer portal is a relatively new thing since 2018, allowing NCAA athletes to change schools without losing a year of eligibility. There are myriad reasons players choose to transfer: a chance for more playing time, perceived better chances for exposure or to turn professional, a chance for more NIL money, or dissatisfaction with a program or its coaches. I submit a program or, in this case, a state government that demonstrates it doesn’t mean you well is reason enough as well.
Historically speaking, it wasn’t that long ago that UF began accepting Black athletes. In 1968, Florida gave a football scholarship to its first Black football player, Leonard George. The school had only integrated its law school ten years earlier after Virgil Hawkins appealed his denial to the Florida Supreme Court. A somewhat surprising source described a bit of UF history in a Miami newspaper:
“Between 1945 and 1958, UF rejected 85 black students who applied for admission solely based on race. One of those pupils, Virgil Hawkins, who wanted to attend law school in Gainesville, fought his rejection all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice Stephen C. O’Connell was a self-proclaimed segregationist who would later become UF president. Not surprisingly, the state’s highest court refused to integrate state public universities despite finding that Hawkins had “all the scholastic, moral and other qualifications” to be a Gator.
The school didn’t admit its first black undergraduate students until 1962, a year before Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I have a dream” speech.
Willie Jackson Sr. and Leonard George, the first black high school student-athletes to play football at UF, witnessed the discrimination at the school firsthand. In 1971, when O’Connell was president, Jackson and George were among the only 343 black students at UF. At the time, the student population was more than 20,000. When the black student union staged a protest about the disparity on campus, 66 students were arrested, and O’Connell insisted on pressing charges. As a result, a third of the black students and several black professors left UF.” — Luke Campbell of the Two Live Crew
I met a man last weekend who was part of the second class of Black football players entering UF. He described how some professors called them ni**ers and treated them differently than their white counterparts.
During the first years of the transfer portal, the number of transfers was relatively small. Deion Sanders made headlines for completely revamping the Colorado team after he became head coach. Per ESPN, 8,699 NCAA football players entered the portal between Aug. 1, 2022, and May 1, 2023. Still, it was individual players making decisions for themselves, not as a statement of their rights as individuals or as a people. Former UF and Dallas Cowboys star Emmitt Smith was “disgusted” with his alma mater’s decision to eliminate DEI and spoke out against it.
“I’m utterly disgusted by UF’s decision and the precedent it sets. Without the DEI department, the job falls on the Office of the Provost, who already has their hands full, to raise money for the university and continue to advance the academic studies and athletic programs.
We cannot continue to believe and trust that a team of leaders all made up of the same background will make the right decision when it comes to equality and diversity. History has already proven that is not the case.” — Emmitt Smith
What if every Black student-athlete at UF entered the transfer portal in response to the university’s decision to end DEI programs and fire the 13 workers in the program? The most likely response would be retaliation from the school and the governor who initiated the attacks on DEI in the first place. Players could lose their scholarships for the remainder of the year and might be blackballed by several other colleges opposed to the precedent. The top athletes would still have their choice of programs to switch to, and they’d be welcomed at most HBCUs. Some state schools, like FAMU in Tallahassee, FL, still fall under the same Florida Board of Governors that oversees UF, so retribution could also come from that direction. The Board of Governors replaced the former Board of Regents, which was eliminated because it stood in the way of former Governor Jeb Bush’s efforts to eliminate affirmative action.
I don’t want to understate the risks to the players if they participated in a move like jointly entering the transfer portal. They would be less than the students who sat at segregated lunch counters or organized and participated in the freedom rides to protest segregation. Athletes have protested conditions directly affecting them in the past. When they tried taking on larger issues, the reaction was swift. In 1969, 14 football players from the University of Wyoming wanted to wear black armbands to protest the racist policies of Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church. They were immediately dismissed from the team. Shut up and dribble!
The better strategy would be not to attend Florida colleges and universities in the first place, publicly stating their reluctance to go where they are exploited for their talents and demeaned as a people. The next NCAA Transfer window is between April 15 and 30, 2024. Twenty UF players were in the portal during the previous period; imagine if 50–60 players from Florida entered the portal and UF could not recruit athletes from other schools due to its antagonism towards DEI. I have that dream.