Recent Northwestern issues are raising eyebrows about how things are being handled

Story broke on Friday that Northwestern University seemed to have a little hazing problem in the football program and the university did their own investigation. This is over several months and came up with a two-week, immediate two-week unpaid suspension in July for head football coach Pat Fitzgerald. On Sunday, the university's student newspaper got details of the investigation and they were pretty graphic and gruesome and vile. And the university has said, well, well, maybe, maybe we erred, maybe we didn't go far enough in discipline for Pat Fitzgerald. We do not know what will happen, anything beyond the indefinite suspension, which it has been changed to. I, for one, have a hard time seeing Pat Fitzgerald coaching another game. But we'll find out what Jason Stahl thinks about this situation. We now have more allegations, not only of hazing, but of a culture of racism.

In another report from Northwestern student paper, Jason Stahl is the executive director and founder of the College Football Players Association at Jason Stahl, H-A-S-T-A-H-L underscore on Twitter. I'm assuming you'll be on threads if you're not already there. Thank you very much for doing this.

I appreciate it. So we have an actual news story to get to first. So let's do that before we get to anything else. Your thoughts on what's going on or what has allegedly gone on, I guess, at Northwestern. You mentioned the breaking story of the racism charges and so forth.

I had not seen it. Has it now been changed to an indefinite suspension? That's what my understanding was that the university had changed it to an indefinite suspension. Again, I think it's in light of it becoming public. The nature of the hazing becoming public and the fact that players corroborated it, I could be wrong. That could have been speculation. Either way, the university is so far still failing. I think what this comes down to is, you know, you look at all the reports, you look at the information that's coming out, you look at the fact that you've got players, you've got staffers, you've got all sorts of people saying, yes, this is what happened.

All right. So then this suggests to me what we have here is the case of an open secret, right? Something that's been known likely for decades that people knew and chose to ignore or chose to normalize, right? And it's only now we get to a tipping point where it seems like, okay, all this is coming out and this has been going on for multiple years. Let's put it that way at the very least.

And this goes right back to why I founded this institution. I think that what we've seen in college football program after college football program, and look, I'm a college football fan, but what we see in program after program is open secrets. We see closed secrets, right?

We see things that are criminal or possibly criminal. And program after program after program, I mean, isolate the big 10 alone. Now we've got nearly every big 10 program has went through something like this, right? And so that's why you need an independent players association to have reps on the ground for players, to act as their advocates, as their independent advocates, to make sure that they have a voice in the conditions of their workplace, because it is a workplace. And what has alleged to go on in this instance has no place in any workplace, plain and simple. And if you had had players association with reps that players could report to, this could have been nipped in the bud years ago. It could have been put to a stop years ago, just as Larry Nassar could have been put to a stop years before you get to that resolution, right? Jerry Sandusky.

I mean, do I really need to go through the whole list? No. This is exactly why you need independent players associations to deal with these problems before they reach their ultimate breaking points. And I think that's what we're seeing now. Jason Stahl is joining us here as the executive director and founder of the College Football Players Association. Now, you're not a widespread association to this point, right?

You're working towards that. Before we get into some things that you could do, where are we in the timeline of you being able to organize and have reps in each college locker room so players can advocate for themselves or you can advocate for them in a legal manner? Well, that's ultimately up to the players, right? Because players have to stand up and say, I'm a member of this organization. This is my players association. We have a chapter on our campus, right?

Because we're not operating. We are, of course, an advocacy organization, but we are not first and foremost an advocacy organization. What we are attempting to be is the independent players association for college football players, past, present, future, all levels of play. But what that means is we have to have players who become members and who say, this is it. Now, of course, Adam, I know, as you well know, last summer, we, I think, came very close to setting up our first chapter at Penn State.

Now, that did not, that was not in the cards. I think that that is likely to come, possibly soon, where we have a new program that steps up and says, yes, this is our players association. And this, and this is the future of college football. And this is the future of college sports, right? Because I think we've seen the sort of in-system stakeholders, the administrative class and in college sports is not preparing well for the future.

And so I do think it's incumbent upon the players to become members and create this independent players association and make the change that's needed in this sport. And we see it right here, right? We see it right here. What kind of a reaction response have you gotten from players across the college football spectrum? I mean, I think over overwhelmingly positive.

I'm not gonna say I've never encountered anyone who has been against what we're doing, but I think overwhelmingly positive. The question though, is we need, we don't just need players and we need courageous players, right? Because to become a member of this organization and become, we have many private members to become a public member of this organization and say, yes, I'm going to be the one who leads the charge or my program with my leadership is going to be the one to lead the charge.

You and I both know that's a guy putting himself out there, right? The way that is going to set him up for criticism and for blowback, possibly, you know, from his own program. And so it's a heavy lift, but I think more and more as we see even coaches come out, you see Nick Saban, you see others coming out saying, oh, well, maybe we need a union and maybe we need a CBA and so on and so forth.

Well, I would say to them, put your money where your mouth is, right? Invite us into the room to talk with your players about creating that, because it's not going to be, this is not going to be like the NCAA division one SAC committee, right? Where you get to sort of control everything that that committee does. This is going to be an independent players association that, yeah, isn't always going to be doing what the in-system stakeholders want us to do or want the players to do. But I think nevertheless, this is the future of college athletics.

You mentioned that it's going to take some courageous players to do this. And I want to fold it back to the Northwestern situation because we're not here today without some pretty courageous college journalists. And I think this is not the New York Times. And for those people who don't know, the New York Times has just basically ended their sports reporting. Now, they own the athletics, so they're not going to stop writing sports, but now it's just going to, they're going to utilize employees from the athletic in sports reporting.

So, it's not like the Times isn't going to have sports anymore. But there are some pretty courageous young students who have, I mean, Northwestern's football program is a pretty established thing run by an alum who are putting themselves really on almost a line of fire. And I use that term very loosely.

I think we should recognize just how courageous that is. Oh, 100 percent. I'm so happy you said that, Adam, because I think when we're dealing with open secrets like this, and that's what I want to keep characterizing it as, right? People knew this.

Come on. I mean, people knew this. People have known this for years, that this was going on, right? Undoubtedly, if I had to guess, there were local sports journalists who knew as well, right? And I think that this shows, though, like there's this dwindling, and you reference the Times closure of their sports department, but who do we have left in the United States of America that's going to do hard hitting sports, investigative journalism?

My God. I mean, it's just dwindling. You see that the USA Today cut a lot of their sports, you know, investigative journalists.

We have the Times closure now. And I think, lo and behold, it's incumbent upon student journalists who, yes, my God, are they putting themselves in the line of fire? And yes, we both use that term loosely, but we know the courage that it takes to put forward this type of response.

This type of report in the student newspaper of that institution, right, of your institution. I mean, such courage. And I just want to commend all those student journalists and all the current and former football players who stepped up to talk about their experiences. Let me ask you one more thing here.

Jason Stahl is joining us, Executive Director of the College Football Players Association. Where do you stand? Let's just use the college football playoff.

Where do you think, is that good? Do you talk to players who love the idea, or are players looking at it like that's just more games to play? Okay, so it's mixed. Because on the one hand, of course, if you're not Alabama, if you're not Georgia, if you're not Ohio State, but let's say you're Penn State, right? Let's say you're, I don't know, other teams that, oh, 12 is a lot easier than four, right? And so I think, yeah, I think you can see that subset of players liking it. Now, on the question of more games, I think what bothers me here, and of course, players talk to me about this in terms of yes, here's the workload expansion, despite the fact that we were not included in this decision making process, right? And I think that that's where the rubber is going to meet the road, because everybody's talking about revenue sharing. I think, you know, this sort of big question of revenue sharing, I mean, if college football players are not going to get revenue sharing from an expanded college football playoff, what the hell are they going to get revenue sharing from? I mean, this is, you know, we're talking about probably a couple new billion into the system, right? Right. And I can think of all sorts of ways you could do revenue sharing, including prize pools, which I think that players and the fans would love, quite frankly, I think you'd see way, way less opt outs.

Yeah. And so I think, yeah, all those ideas are going to need to be explored. And hopefully, we have players well organized by 2024 to be able to talk to the stakeholders about exactly what they want to do with those new revenues. All right, next time we talk, we'll talk about the NCAA's foray onto Capitol Hill, which I think you and I agree has always been a pipe dream that's never going to come to fruition. Jason Stahl, the executive director of the College Football Players Association.