‘We had the power’: Remembering Missouri Tiger football’s 2015 player boycott

Editor's note: This is the first of three stories looking back on the protests at the University of Missouri in 2015, and the Mizzou football team's involvement.

It wasn't hard to spot J'Mon Moore on campus back in 2015.

Then a Missouri Tigers wide receiver, he always rode around on his patented yellow-and-gold scooter. It was a unique look compared to those of his teammates, as he struck up conversations with whomever he wanted.

On the morning of Friday, Nov. 6, 2015, after an economics exam and the start of an extended break following a game against Mississippi State the previous night, something caught his eye in front of Jesse Hall.

Tents. All scattered around Mel Carnahan Quadrangle.

"What are all these tents for?" Moore asked a student. "They camping or something?"

That's when Moore first discovered Jonathan Butler's hunger strike. Butler, a graduate student and leader of the student-led movement Concerned Student 1950, was on his fifth day without food. It began Nov. 2, 2015, in protest of UM System President Tim Wolfe's failure to protect Black students on campus following a number of reports of racial slurs, a swastika drawn in feces in a dormitory bathroom and other disruptive incidents throughout the school year and in the past.

The hunger strike would end only if Wolfe resigned from his position, as stated in Concerned Student 1950's list of demands. Often separated from campus activities as student-athletes because of their heavy workload of meetings, practice and conditioning, members of the football team were unaware what was going on.

Moore found Butler's tent and spoke with him. Butler was firm in his stance that he wouldn't eat, and Moore wanted to help ensure his safety. For him to help Butler, something needed to get Wolfe's attention and put further pressure on the administration. He thought the football team had the power to do that.

Moore quickly returned home to tell his roommates, cornerback Anthony Sherrils and defensive end Charles Harris, about the situation, and they helped relay the message to other teammates. Sherrils, who was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, had previously heard about the incidents occurring on campus, but Moore put the weight of the situation in perspective.

Roughly 15 players from the team met the morning of Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015, at quarterback Marvin Zanders' house to discuss what the team could do. They landed on a boycott of Mizzou's Nov. 14 game against BYU in Kansas City.

Away at the Lake of the Ozarks, football coach Gary Pinkel was made aware of the situation — an unexpected call on a leisurely Saturday during a weekend off. With legitimate concern for the safety of Butler's life, Pinkel wanted to support his players.

Later that night, a total of 31 Black players gathered at Mizzou's Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center. They filed in, at different times, in smaller groups, not like the bigger packs of wolves in which they usually ran. No player brought his scooter. They met to talk with Butler, whom most of them were meeting for the first time.

Safety Ian Simon recalled seeing Butler on campus in the summer before at Speakers Circle but didn't introduce himself officially until the meeting. Butler looked like an entirely different person than he remembered.

"I've never seen a human being so emaciated," Simon said. "For (Butler) to even look at you, it felt like an eternity. He was so depleted of energy. It was hard to see another person like that."

The team solidified their plan in a matter of a day. That plan would draw enormous attention to the team, the university and the entire region over the coming days, months and even years. After passing the 10-year anniversary mark this past November, it still remains strikingly relevant.

At 8:08 p.m. on the day in question, Sherrils announced the boycott via Twitter: "The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere.' We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students' experiences. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!"

The photo with Sherrils' post showed their unity. The players locked arms with Butler and one another. The protest wasn't just about the hunger strike - it was about removing Wolfe and making students of color feel safer at Mizzou.

"The picture was just something that was almost like collateral," Sherrils said. "We had already made up our minds to go through with it. Pinkel sided with us."

Pinkel was reluctant to make the boycott a civil rights or political issue, rather an effort to ensure Butler's safety, but it was hard not to see the collision coming. Of all scholarship players on the 2015 roster, 69% of them identified as Black. Without them, Mizzou couldn't field a team. The players were in a rare position of influence, and the majority of the roster agreed, regardless of racial identity.

"If I had to do it all over again, I'm not sure what I could have done differently," Pinkel wrote in his 2017 memoir, "The 100-Yard Journey: A Life in Coaching and Battling for the Win."

"The football staff and other Mizzou athletic programs would surely struggle recruiting African American players had this unfolded differently," he wrote. "I didn't want to see what we built left in ruins."

The following day, Sunday, Nov. 8, 2015, Pinkel, his coaching staff and athletic director Mack Rhoades met with the team. Again, they relayed that the boycott was about Butler's safety, not Concerned Student 1950's demands. A team photograph was taken and posted on Pinkel's Twitter account.

The hashtag #ConcernedStudent1950 was added at the end of the caption.

Wolfe resigned in an emergency meeting of the UM System Board of Curators on the morning of Monday, Nov. 9, 2015, just 38 hours after the football team began its boycott. The pressure the Mizzou football team put on the university administration helped force it to take action, due in large part to the $1 million Mizzou would have had to pay BYU if the game wasn't played.

"We were the extra ammunition, extra beef for the protest," defensive lineman Marcell Frazier said 10 years later. "These people were like, ‘Oh, we're going to lose our Kansas City Arrowhead Stadium game. No f-ing way at all.' ... It was totally clear that we were the deciding factor of the protest or hunger strike itself ending."

Without the team's involvement, Butler's strike could've extended longer than eight days.

"I guarantee I wouldn't be here alive if the football players didn't step in," Butler said in Spike Lee's 2016 documentary of the Mizzou fall 2015 protests, "2 Fists Up."

Mizzou went on to pick up a 20-16 win over BYU the following Saturday, as Moore caught a 4-yard pass early in the fourth quarter for the go-ahead touchdown. The Tigers finished out the season with a 5-7 record - a stark decline from the previous two seasons, in which the team won 12 and 11 games, respectively, and made two Southeastern Conference Championship appearances.

Some have questioned whether the team would've made the stand it did if it had a better record. Today, players don't believe the outcome would be any different.

"If we were having a good season, I would have done the same thing, because football is just a game," Simon said. "No football game is bigger than any person's life."

In the decade since a turbulent fall 2015 centered on racial issues, the political climate has shifted dramatically, and Mizzou has stripped diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and programs. The introduction of name, image and likeness has also potentially altered the future of player protest.

In many ways, the progress made that November has been rolled back. But for a season, Mizzou football set a modern-day example of the power athletes have.

"We really changed the whole dynamic of the country," Sherrils said. "We did something great. It was a selfless act. I wouldn't change it for nothing."

The morning of Wolfe's resignation, five days before Mizzou was to play BYU, was a celebration on the south quadrangle.

Kendrick Lamar's freshly released "Alright" - a defining anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement - blasted on speakers. Students Swag Surfed and enjoyed the catharsis of the victory right in front of the ESPN cameras broadcasting the end of the protests.

The team's decision to boycott immediately sparked a wave of national media coverage. It made sports talk shows such as "SportsCenter" and "First Take," and CNN broadcast live from campus. In fact, Butler found out about Wolfe's resignation on a live phone call with CNN.

Then-President Barack Obama even spoke on Mizzou's protest during an ABC News interview.

"I think it is entirely appropriate for students in a thoughtful, peaceful way to protest what they see as injustices or inattention to serious problems in their midst," Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

Donning a hooded sweatshirt with the message "I Can't Breathe," defensive end Charles Harris was one of the 20-plus football players on the south quadrangle. The hoodie was in reference to Eric Garner, a Black man who uttered those words 11 times while New York Police Department officers restrained him against a sidewalk and caused him to lose consciousness in July 2014. He died an hour later at the hospital.

The protests at Mizzou represented the systemic issues - such as police brutality and racial discrimination - that were rampant during the time. It was just a year removed from the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a roughly two-hour drive east in North St. Louis County. MU4MikeBrown was the student movement that sparked Concerned Student 1950, created by Ashley Bland, Nayome Daugherty and Kailynd Beck in 2014.

National media coverage wasn't always focused on the root of the issues going on at Mizzou. Most of the conversation centered around the football team rather than the activism being done. This created a disconnect.

"You had this block of demonstrators who were predominately, if not entirely, Black, and then you had this horde of media that was predominately white," said Jacob Bogage, a former White House economic policy correspondent at The Washington Post who was a Missourian sports reporter in 2015. "A lot of the questions I don't think were meaningful. Basically, the implication was to justify yourself.

"It's a very reasonable response for these demonstrators to be like, ‘What do you mean justify ourselves? We're trying to tell people that racism is not acceptable and tell people what we've been experiencing on campus.' It created this dynamic of the media against the demonstrators and a very white media against Black demonstrators."

Without a car, it was hard for Simon to avoid running into reporters in Columbia searching for an interview. The players instructed each other to deliver the same message - that the focus of the boycott was on the hunger strike, which was a result of the treatment of Black students on campus - or deny interviews if media approached them on campus, just to ensure the messaging of the protests weren't changing interview by interview. For that week, it was almost inescapable.

"Campus was like a ticking time bomb," Simon said. "I felt like I was on the red carpet. Cameras were put in my face at some points in time, people were feigning to try and get interviews with us. We knew the media coverage was insane, but I don't think we ever could've predicted what it was."

Attention across the country when the university's premier sports team got involved with the protests spiked. It unquestionably boosted the speed of Wolfe's resignation. But the players didn't want to take the spotlight away from the students who had spoken out against these issues months before and fought for Mizzou to make change.

As important as it was for Mizzou football to join the cause, its actions weren't meant to be the sole attention of the story.

"We are just the shoulders that they are here to stand on," Simon said reflecting now. "We'll say our piece and let them take over the show, because this is about them."

That sentiment aligns with what Simon said a decade ago on south quadrangle.

"Our main message is here to distract from the narrative that's been out in the media. It is not about us," Simon said, reading a statement from his phone, per the Columbia Daily Tribune. "We just wanted to use our platform to make a stand as fellow concerned students on an issue, especially being as though a fellow Black man's life is on the line. Due to the end of the hunger strike, we will be ending our solidarity strike, go back to practice and return to our normal schedules as football players."

Football ruled everything, while academics and campus issues often had to be secondary. Simon, in particular, wasn't involved in student activities beforehand and hardly had friends outside the team. It could almost be considered a lived-in "bubble" that helped shield players from many of the obstructions facing Black students.

"You live a different life than the rest of the student body," Simon said. "You live in a bubble because your life revolves around football. To deviate from that was deemed bad."

Some were able to escape that bubble more than others. Sherrils acted as a liaison of sorts, being one of the few members of the team to be involved in Greek life at the time. That connection broke the barrier between student-athletes and students; if it hadn't been for that, he doesn't think he would have discovered the injustices happening on campus.

That's why it took so long for the team to take notice of Butler and the protests. No game on Nov. 7 also gave players down time they don't often get. A player protest would've been difficult to enact without it.

"When you're a college athlete, all you have time for is practice, film, study hall, sleep, so we didn't really have any extra time to hang around campus and see some of the things that were going on," Moore said. "It kept us occupied, so we wouldn't find other things to get into that would maybe take away from our purpose, which was academics and football."

When the boycott began, student-athletes were alongside students and student-activists alike for those two days. They were part of the same fight. The team could've stayed out of the protests and carried on for the rest of the season, but it felt empowering to get involved.

"I think it was our duty, being that we had the power to influence change," Sherrils said. "We would've been just as bad as the people doing the stuff if we didn't stand up when we could."

Undergoing immense stress already as a team captain, Simon had many things floating through his mind throughout the weekend. He felt involving himself in a boycott would likely hurt his draft stock, and he had conversations with coaches to ensure he wanted to go through with it. But there was no other option.

Mizzou football wanted to be on the right side of history.

"If he would have died, ... I couldn't live with myself and say I did nothing," Simon said.

With a look of devastation speaking in front of his team Nov. 13, 2015, Pinkel broke the news of his impending resignation because of his cancer diagnosis in an unscheduled team meeting at 2:35 p.m. The news of his diagnosis leaked earlier than expected that morning on a radio report, forcing the announcement to take place before Pinkel's planned date of Nov. 15.

Frazier described the expression of Pinkel as something that he didn't want to but had to do. Tears flowed down Pinkel's face, and the room fell silent. A legendary career at Mizzou was coming to a close, just as the season resumed.

To this day, players continue to speculate that Pinkel's departure wasn't only because of his cancer, given the timeline of events. But in his book, he wrote that he told Rhoades in an Oct. 28 private meeting, 10 days before the boycott. The cancer shifted his focus to his life beyond football.

In that conversation, Pinkel told Rhoades: "The reason I'm telling you today and not three weeks from now is I want you to have some time to work on hiring my replacement."

Only a select group of people were made aware of Pinkel's diagnosis before the news leaked. Aside from family members, only Rhoades, longtime secretary Ann Hatcher, media relations director Chad Moller, assistant athletic director Bryan Maggard and director of football operations Dan Hopkins were in the know.

Pinkel's cancer was relayed to the Board of Curators, which then relayed it to the media. He wanted his players to know before word got out to the public, but the leak put further attention on the football team and its season.

The boycott did not sway Pinkel's decision to retire, nor did it directly lead to staff departures the following season. Defensive coordinator Barry Odom was hired in-house Dec. 3, 2015, as the new coach to succeed Pinkel; he was replaced by Eli Drinkwitz on Dec. 10, 2019. Under Odom, it was a new era that attempted to move on from a turbulent season on and off the field, which returning wide receiver DeSean Blair felt.

"After (the boycott) happened and the season ended, to me, personally, it was kind of brushed over in a sense," Blair said. "Everybody moved on to the new season."

As typical of coaching changes, Odom chose the staff he wanted. Meetings were conducted between him and members of the previous staff - some were kept, while others found new homes.

But at the end of the 2015 season, players felt the boycott put other members of the program under a microscope by coaching staff superiors and upper administrators. That was also felt from the Missouri General Assembly, which made funding cuts to Mizzou in the aftermath. Student enrollment also took a huge decline following the protests; in fall 2016, there was a 42% drop in Black students and 21% in white students. The number of Black students has remained mostly on a steady decline since.

An assistant coach at the time suggested that his future in Columbia was on the line after the boycott ended, underscoring the pressure felt behind closed doors.

"If we don't win this game, they're gunning for my job," multiple players recall hearing in a meeting days before BYU.

Several players recall the boycott being used in pre-draft meetings for 2015 and years later as more of a concern for general managers than a positive. Especially in the years after former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's protests began in 2016, organizations took note of Missouri talent that came through during the 2015 season.

Sherrils described hearing from NFL general managers: "You think you made a good decision during that protest? You see Colin Kaepernick isn't playing."

Another former player recalls similar rhetoric during a pre-draft meeting with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick: "What was your intention? Why did you risk football? Would you do it here if something like this happened again?"

While it's impossible to tie the boycott directly to whether NFL front offices drafted members of Mizzou's 2015 team, many feel that it had some effect on their chances.

Frazier, who was projected as a fifth- or sixth-round pick in 2018 according to his NFL Draft profile, believes that strongly. After an All-SEC campaign and leading the conference in tackles for loss, he fell out of the draft. He signed an undrafted free agent contract with the Seattle Seahawks on April 28, 2018, but his NFL career never panned out.

"It wasn't like all this crazy stuff was happening to me off the field," Frazier said. "My draft stock kept just plummeting and plummeting to the point where I clearly wasn't getting drafted. I have enough emotional intelligence to understand what was happening."

Beyond some potential implications of the boycott, the 2015 team probably wouldn't be mentioned today aside from the occasional reminder - Matt Zollers became the first true freshman last season to start a game since Drew Lock did it in 2015.

The relevancy lies in the boycott. Simon, Sherrils and Frazier were standouts on the roster, but none was ever going to be remembered for football over the team's protest. Moore, who was chosen by the Green Bay Packers in the fourth round of the 2018 NFL Draft, said every team he talked to asked him about the boycott, wondering if he'd be a player still willing to speak out on issues. But it ultimately didn't matter.

"I hate to say it, but no team wants a player that's very self-spoken, even if it has nothing to do with his job description of playing football," Moore said. "So it kind of hurt my draft stock in a sense.

"At the end of the day, I knew I did something right," he said.

Back at home in Mansfield, Texas, in January 2016, Simon and his father, Kim, went out to eat together in Dallas. A man in the restaurant approached the two at their table.

"You should be really proud of your son," the man said to Kim.

Kim, a man of few words with a stoic presence, had to take a step back. The man offered to shake Ian's hand and commended him for his involvement with the boycott. Even half a day's drive from Columbia, people took notice of what happened.

"What you did was huge for people like us," the man said to Ian. "Thank you for sacrificing your career and putting yourself on the line."

Not known to offer praise often, especially in front of a stranger, Kim took the man's advice.

"I'm proud of you," he told his son.

Moments like that are what keep 2015 alive today. After 10 years, it remains one of the defining examples of player protest in the 21st century across all sports.

Looking back now, Simon doesn't put himself on a pedestal for taking part in the boycott. He doesn't really have a profound view of it, either. For him, it was just the right thing to do; Mizzou football was a smaller part of the equation that Concerned Student 1950 led.

"I don't think too much about the legacy part of it," Simon said. "It was a moment in my life where I took a stand for something, and it was really important to me, really important to some of my teammates and something we did together. I try not to put too much stock into it."

On the exact anniversary in November 2025, Mizzou football didn't have anything to show in remembrance of the 2015 team. Many from that season's team have stayed silent since. Players don't often speak on it through social media or interviews, and it's long enough removed that the lives of those involved are completely different.

Simon is now a supervisor and billing clerk for Mansfield Medical Associates in Texas. He and his wife, Bailey Simon, have two children - a 3-year-old and 20-month-old.

After earning a master's degree in education at Mizzou in 2019, Frazier works in regional government and for a national organization back home in Portland, Oregon. Moore keeps football alive by training young talent but stays ready for any opportunity to get back to the NFL.

Sherrils still fuels his love for football in The Arena League with stops with the Kansas City Goats and Ozark Lunkers, but he also owns the company Premier Kansas City Movers. He played the entire last season on two pulled hamstrings.

Now in his 30s, he acknowledges the legacy of the 2015 protests can sometimes be lost. "You know there's people in college right now that don't know who Nelly is?" Sherrils joked. That may or may not be true, at least for those from St. Louis, but it has been 26 years since "Country Grammar" made it to the airwaves.

But when the future calls for it, those who were there will be the ones to remember. It was a defining chapter in the history of Mizzou and its football program, and its lessons will continue to remain topical going forward.

"It doesn't even matter if people know, really," Sherrils said. "The only thing that matters is it was done out of good faith and good heart. And the people that know will tell the truth later."

As more time passes, perhaps the truth of this story will continue to further unfurl.

Copyright 2026 Columbia Missourian

This story was originally published March 26, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘We had the power’: Remembering Missouri Tiger football’s 2015 player boycott."