What is going on with Grambling State Football

[dalej42]

Grambling State University football team has boycotted practice this week and is now supposedly refusing to play their game on Saturday against Jackson State. Grambling has fired two coaches this year, first Doug Williams and then they fired the interim coach George Ragsdale.

Now, Grambling isn’t a major player in the big time world of college football, but most college football fans are familiar with Grambling because of the Eddie Robinson record and of course, the excellent marching band.

I don’t think I’ve seen such a story in college sports before. The players are upset they were stuck with long bus rides instead of flights for away games. I’d prefer to fly as well, but they’re not playing for a school with unlimited money. There’s got to be more to this story than just being pissed about bus rides.

[Frank]

@dalej42

I don’t think I’ve seen such a story in college sports before. The players are upset they were stuck with long bus rides instead of flights for away games. I’d prefer to fly as well, but they’re not playing for a school with unlimited money. There’s got to be more to this story than just being pissed about bus rides.

In general, the school is going broke, and internal politics aren’t helping. Here’s an SI story.

Near the start of the 2013 season, the Grambling Legends, a group unaffiliated with the school, put up $11,000 to buy replacement flooring for the weight room. Doug Williams, then the Tigers coach – as well as a popular alumnus, a former Super Bowl MVP and a member of the Grambling Legends – helped arrange the purchase of the new rubber flooring, just as he had done last summer with new flooring for the team’s locker room. Williams had a history of ruffling administrative feathers at the school – in April 2012 he sued Grambling State for performance bonuses he says he was owed – and he often circumvented the athletic department’s chain of command. The funds to pay for the new weight room floor, which had not been filtered through the school’s foundation as Pogue and athletic director Aaron James demanded, were yet another instance of that.

Pogue and James, however, refused to install the new floor and had it stored in another building near the team’s practice field. A week after the large rolls of flooring were mothballed, they fired Williams from his job as the Tigers’ football coach.

…

Ask school officials why the football team and other programs are struggling and they quickly shift attention from personality conflicts and staffing decisions to the budget. Since 2007-08, overall state funding for Grambling has gone from $31.6 million to $13.8 million.

Tonight’s game is now officially a forfeit, by the way.

[R.P.McMurphy]

In the historic sense this is really sad.

Racial discrimination in major college football didn’t end until 1972 when the U of Texas finally came to their senses.

Not long prior to that, the schools that put the most players into the NFL were Notre Dame, Grambling and Michigan State (coach Duffy Dougherty actively recruited top black players).

To see a program like Grambling lose any luster is sad because they have such a great history.