Blair Kerkhoff: Benefits, now power, make it great time to be major college athlete

Quite the winning streak athletes are on these days. Additional benefits, and now power.

What a time to be an athlete in a revenue generating sport.

Extra benefits for college athletes have been a monumental development. Starting this school year, major college athletes are receiving monthly checks beyond their scholarships to cover full cost of attendance.

Training tables have been expanded. Athletes enjoy the highest standard of living at many schools, and more benefits are in the works.

The perks are largely a response to the billion-dollar media contracts signed by the richest schools. Guilt money, if you will. Those whose labor fill our Saturdays with highly desired entertainment and are subject to the amateur code should receive more. Better food, housing, insurance, access to agents and other benefits are the bounty.

Now add leverage, such as the ability to influence the resignation of a university system president and chancellor, which occurred at Missouri earlier this week.

The threat of withholding participation and perhaps impacting games, starting with Saturday’s contest against Brigham Young at Arrowhead Stadium, turned a Missouri campus protest into a story that by Saturday night was gaining national traction.

By Sunday, when coach Gary Pinkel lent support through his Twitter account, the game was over. A longer hunger strike by Jonathan Butler, weeks perhaps, might have gained more widespread attention and sympathy, and forced University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe and MU chancellor R. Bowen Loftin into the same decisions.

It didn’t reach that point because members of the football team got involved days after Butler stopped eating.

Pinkel delivered the most honest line of the joint news conference with athletic director Mack Rhoades when he said, “There’s absolutely nothing normal about this situation. I’ve been a head coach for 25 years and a coach for 39 years, and this isn’t in Football 101.”

Indeed it’s not, so Pinkel’s crisis management coaching instincts took over, and successful coaches like him understand the absolute necessity of portraying a program that any parent and their four-star prospect child would love.

That meant showing a team unity for a cause. Precisely what the cause was — Pinkel somehow publicly didn’t associate the hunger strike with Wolfe’s resignation — wasn’t as important as the photo from Pinkel’s Twitter account showing nearly the entire team standing together.

The team took a position, Pinkel supported his team, and that was that.

Oh, it was messier than that, but at the core was a coach who said he didn’t hesitate when the players asked for his help. That should play well on the recruiting trail.

Still, going forward won’t be easy. The Tigers are a distracted team on the edge of a lost season. The university came off as dysfunctional and unwelcoming. There aren’t many examples of similar occurrences, but Mizzou’s next opponent might recall one.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns and operates BYU, prohibited blacks from pursuing the priesthood. The Cougars played at Wyoming in 1969, and a Wyoming doctoral student and head of the Black Students Alliance wanted to protest what he saw as injustice at BYU. He met with Cowboys football players, and 14 wanted to support the cause by wearing black arm bands during the game.

The Wyoming football coach, Lloyd Eaton, would have none of it and booted the players from the team.

Wyoming was undefeated, ranked 12th nationally at the time and hadn’t had a losing season for 20 years. They beat BYU, but without some of their best players lost their last four games. Now seen as an unwelcoming program, the Cowboys dropped 26 of their next 38. Wyoming had one winning season in the 1970s. The damage had been done.

Pinkel and his staff will soon learn how their university and Columbia will be portrayed by opponents on the recruiting trail. But what cannot be disputed is the coach stood up for his players and protected a big-time college football program, and the athletes have the power and influence to bring about major change. Their winning streak continues.

This story was originally published November 12, 2015 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Blair Kerkhoff: Benefits, now power, make it great time to be major college athlete."