transferred after this racist incident?
Not looking to discuss the event, this is just a thought experiment.
How bad would it get for them? Assume all the white players stayed (although I sure many would leave)
Last place in the Big XII? Equivalent to the Death Penalty? Or not too bad?
IF that happened, Oklahoma couldn’t hope to compete. Luckily for Bob Stoops, Oklahoma has a large reservoir of good will among blacks in their recruiting area.
Remember that, under Chuck Fairbanks and Barry Switzer, Oklahoma happily recruited black players all over the state of Texas- players the UT Longhorns and Texas Aggies wouldn’t touch. Black Texans have long memories, and to this day, many resent UT and regard it as a racist school (the 1970 Longhorns were the last all-white team to win the NCAA football title).
Black Texans are predisposed to think of the Sooners as the good guys. Oklahoma is one of the rare major colleges that has had a black head coach (John Blake got the job because Barry Switzer went to bat for him). And since the offending white frat boys have been expelled, I don’t believe this will become a serious issue in recruiting.
One major football recruit has already decommitted but this was before the university took action. He may end up at U of O anyway. The current football coach and athletic director joined in the protests and virtually no one is backing the frat boys in any way. I agree that there will not be any real repercussions over this.
Two problems.
First, the NCAA would have to grant exceptions to the one-year sit-out rule. Note that the rule applies only to football (and even then, only if the athlete is transferring to another FBS school, or has only one year of eligibility left), men’s basketball, baseball, and men’s ice hockey, or if the athlete transferred to the school from a four-year school without having to sit out a year.
Second, does anybody have any scholarships still available?
We do!
But I agree with the posters above. OU’s reaction will mitigate the sting. The administration has handled this as well as can be expected (and better than many).
Were any offered to Alabama-Birmingham players?
(Speaking of UAB, they still need to find a sixth men’s sport in order to stay in Division I)
Not that I know of. I do know that Jimbo held back some scholarships instead of making NSD offers to 2nd tier players. His attitude is that he’d rather keep the scholarship then bring in someone he wasn’t recruiting in the first place.
No two ways about it, if black players shunned any major college football or basketball team they deemed unacceptably racist, that program would be brought to its knees. But for various reasons, black players never DO seem to shun any particular program.
There are many Southern colleges whose teams still go by names like “Rebels,” and who still have fans waving the Stars and Bars at game, or playing “Dixie” after touchdowns. Those teams are usually overwhelmingly black.
If black players boycotted, say, Mississippi until things changed, they’d have a lot of power. But top black athletes not only DON’T boycott Ole Miss, they go there in huge numbers.
One problem with this is, you’re comparing “the team is racist” with “a section of the student body is racist” (or even “the student body population in general is racist”). If there was true racism, do you think any black players would have received scholarships in the first place?
Also, how many of the fans waving the Stars & Bars are black, presumably unaware that (if we’re using the same definition of “Stars & Bars”) the flag in question means, “Not only do we have the right to treat black people as animals, but we have the right to raise an army and fight, and kill, people who disagree with us”?
Meanwhile, while the NCAA makes it clear that no NCAA championship events will be held in South Carolina until the Confederate flag no longer flies at the state house in Columbia, it has no problem letting South Carolina’s public universities host NCAA baseball tournament games there…
I’m not saying that Ole Miss as a whole is racist- I’m merely pointing out that many black Americans DO regard a lot of Ole Miss’s traditions as racist. But black athletes have never shown much interest in changing things there, and have never turned down scholarships to play football there.
There’s no real reason to think it will be much different at Oklahoma.
To address your first hypothetical, of course racist universities would offer black players scholarships. When Jeffrey Kessler gets through with the NCAA, rich white southernors will also be ponying up big cash to entice talented young African-Americans to join their beloved institutions. But those players are first and foremost The Help to some segments of the university’s body and there will still be societal boundaries that they won’t be able to cross.
Now there’s a massive overreaction by the football team staging a stupid ‘silent protest’ What are they protesting? It probably doesn’t matter, it’ll get them TV time. Drunken frat kids shouldn’t be a reason not to practice, much less be a reason for non stop CNN coverage.
If they transferred, many would go from being OU starters to backups at other schools’ teams.
They wouldn’t do it.