ROBERT F. ORR, a retired associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, has been a conservative his whole life. He realizes his politics might seem at odds with his vehement objection to the NCAA, a position that’s blossomed over the last decade.

In 2010, when University of North Carolina fullback Devon Ramsay was under investigation for alleged academic impropriety, Orr advised him and his family as they dealt with the NCAA’s appeals process. Ramsay was a little-known player when his team became infamous that year. Several star players were investigated and suspended for receiving improper benefits from agents, a scandal followed by more allegations, this time of academic malfeasance. The school’s probe resulted in Ramsay being accused of plagiarism and withheld from competition.

“I had a call with the director of enforcement with the NCAA. There was an attorney for them on the phone,” Orr recalls. “I said, ‘I’m a retired judge, I practiced law for a long time, but I’ve never handled an infraction case. I’ve gone through this 400-page book of regulations, and I can’t find anything about the rights of the athlete. Where are the rights of the athlete?’ Finally the director said, ‘That’s a good question.’ ”

ACROSS AMERICA, college athletes are returning to campuses, despite rising COVID-19 cases and some downright scary projections. Computer scientist Sheldon Jacobson told CBS Sports that between 30 and 50 percent of Football Bowl Subdivision players could contract the disease. Although Jacobson recently revised his original death projections to “highly unlikely,” he said schools would have to offer protections on par with pro-sport bubbles to keep players safe—a feat, especially when the president demands college ball be played.

In every discussion about college athletics—especially in a world with this new virus in running battle with an older one, ruthless capitalism—athletes’ rights should be the question, along with who protects them. Students have been left to fend for themselves under circumstances that have flummoxed professional sports leagues and their unions. These students have no such organizations, and no such power, save their voices.

Speaking to the power of college athletes is convenient and intoxicating. There’s something thrilling about the idea of young people coming into their own, and nobility in the thought of children making their own worlds better.

That narrative is also dangerous. The dynamics of an unpaid labor force, asked to use their fragile bodies to generate revenue for ubiquitous institutions, make power impossible. Power doesn’t remain unpaid. Power doesn’t have to scream online for change. Power doesn’t plead for respect.

And power doesn’t play football for free in the middle of a global pandemic.

But there will be football, if at all possible, whether the players like it or not.

“I’VE GONE THROUGH THIS 400-PAGE BOOK OF REGULATIONS, AND I CAN’T FIND ANYTHING ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF THE ATHLETE.”

Perhaps it felt this way in 1968, but America’s tenor since George Floyd’s murder seems unprecedented, the road to Damascus overflowing with the fallen. Seeing a man slowly killed by the state as he called for his mother was beyond the pale—like Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955, the terroristic bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, and the murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in 1964. After America shrugged off seeing police officers in Cleveland perform a drive-by on 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Coast Guard veteran Walter Scott shot in the back as he fled from an officer in South Carolina, and Ahmaud Arbery shot while running through a South Georgia neighborhood by a father and son who had deputized themselves, the depravity of Floyd dying at Derek Chauvin’s knee, with no “good cop”—no good man—among the trio that watched, catalyzed the most obvious and sincere national reckoning in memory.

The powers that be couldn’t hope this moment would pass. The city of Minneapolis pledged to disband its police force before most people could figure out what “defund the police” meant. Marchers in the street meant more than what was one of the most respected institutions in American life. Corporate expressions acknowledging the sentiment that Black lives matter have gone from begrudging to mandatory.

The first generation of the 21st century does not have the illusory comfort of knowing their piece of the rock is around the corner, nor parents who can point to how far things have come since their childhood. There is scant evidence that silence will ultimately provide security for them or the kids they’d be more likely to have if their student loan payments weren’t so massive. From the NFL to the New York Times and Condé Nast (which owns Vanity Fair), young people—from worker bees to superstars—have demanded their employers embody the values they purport to represent. When you barely make enough to live, being able to live with yourself means a lot more.

That spirit struck college athletes, armed with the megaphone of social media, in June. Past and present football players at the University of Iowa described an abusive, racially hostile environment; their revelations led to the “voluntary resignation” of longtime strength-and-conditioning coach Chris Doyle, but no punishment for head coach Kirk Ferentz. Utah defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley was suspended with pay in early June, after his superiors learned of a 2013 text message where he used the N-word. Scalley ultimately had his pay docked and head-coach-in-waiting tag removed after an investigation found other examples of racist interactions with his players. Clemson assistant tight ends coach Danny Pearman apologized for using the N-word during practice in 2017, but, like Scalley, his superiors and players swore he had a good heart, so he’s still got a job.

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The illusion of power has been on full display in Mississippi. On June 22, Mississippi State running back Kylin Hill retweeted the governor, Tate Reeves, who had stated that adopting a second state flag was not an option. Mississippi would have one flag, whatever that flag would be. With remarkable bravery, Hill said he would no longer represent his home state if the flag didn’t change. His tweet closed with “I’m tired,” a telling statement from someone so young.

Hill’s act of defiance amplified the discussion nationally. On June 28, both houses of the state legislature passed a bill to change the flag.

Support for Hill arrived immediately online, and he was gleefully retweeted by professional athletes and sports media who had his back. He deserved that adulation in that moment. No Black native Mississippian is unaware of the backlash he or she might receive for pushing back against white supremacy. Hill weathered the trolls and stood when he did not have to, when the Republican governor refused to do the right thing. A Mississippi state legislator even proposed naming the bill for Hill (the amendment never made it to a vote).

It’s a beautiful story, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Let’s lay everything out: On June 18, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey had released a statement demanding that Mississippi change its flag or the SEC would withhold championships from the state. Conference USA followed suit. Soon after, the presidents of Mississippi State and the University of Mississippi issued statements reiterating their belief that the state needed a new banner (a stance each school had taken five years prior, after the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston). By June 25, nearly every football and basketball coach of the state’s public universities had personally lobbied for the flag to change. Three days after that, it was done. This decision was not made because of contemporaneous grassroots pressure, but much like the Washington Redskins exploring a name change after major sponsors threatened to withhold their accounts. The highest levels of money and power decided that these indefensible symbols weren’t worth it, so they took them down before someone else did it for them.

It’s questionable whether the SEC did anything but provide cover to politicians who didn’t want to openly advocate for something polarizing. In 2002, the NCAA stopped hosting championship events in South Carolina and would not return to the state as long as the Confederate battle flag flew at the state capitol. The flag flew for 13 more years, not taken down until after the shooting at Mother Emanuel. Which is to say, threatening not to host major sporting events in a state that doesn’t host many of them only moves a party that wishes to change. Sports, on levels large and small, did not make this happen.

But creating mythology around such a story is what we do in sports. No wing of media loves fairy tales more—those stories are the very reason we exist. Sports and the people who play them are loved by the public and indulged by every major institution in the world because they lend themselves so easily to ascription. Every positive value that societies wish to instill in their people is somewhere in sports. Might have to squint or look from a very particular angle, but we can make sports whatever we want them to be. Sports destroyed Tommie Smith and John Carlos in real time and tried to do the same to Muhammad Ali to protect “patriotic” sensibilities, then valorized them after time vindicated so many of the ’60s radicals. Those once seen as catalysts of society’s collapse were retrofitted to be America’s conscience. Whether stripping Ali of his heavyweight title and suspending him from boxing in 1967 or inviting him to light the Olympic torch in 1996, sports was on the side of right.

For sports to mean something, especially college sports in a state with no major league teams, Hill’s words had to push things forward. There’s no charm in U. Miss coach Lane Kiffin or Mississippi State coach Mike Leach, neither of whom has yet to coach a game for his school, advancing the flag issue when it’s obvious recruiting is their biggest motivation—as it was when then U. Miss coach Tommy Tuberville fought to stop fans from waving the stars and bars at home games, a stance he has preferred not to discuss during his pro-Trump campaign for an Alabama senate seat.

Hill, however, serves as the perfect protagonist. He grew up under the shadow of that flag, but still loved his home state enough to play for one of its biggest institutions. Black folks want to love their homes, even when their homes don’t love them back.

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This is one of America’s archetypal love stories, where Black folks profess unrequited loyalty to their native land. And in the end, it’s guilt-free. Hill’s frustration with a life under symbols of oppression finally earned a reprieve, and it came via bloodless coup. This speaks less to his power than to the burden he’s carried quietly his whole life. It certainly feels better to say Hill made it happen, but how would things have played out had his message differed from his coach’s, from his university’s? With all his supposed power, you think Hill would stop short of demanding a paycheck?

“Until we change college athletics to a place that ceases exploitation, then they don’t have any power,” says Ricky Volante, CEO of the Professional Collegiate League, an upstart organization that hopes to divorce college athletics from the “amateurism” model.

“The more you say, ‘The players have power,’ then you can easily say, ‘They like it this way,’ ” says Reverend Marcia Mount Shoop, the author of Touchdowns for Jesus and Other Signs of Apocalypse: Lifting the Veil on Big-Time Sports. “Their whole lives are controlled by the teams.”

Only that level of control could explain the peculiar behavior of Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy and the absence of meaningful consequences for what he’s said and done. In April, Gundy spoke with media about a little of everything in a 20-minute monologue. He offered perfunctory concern about the health of his players before saying “so-called medical people” were encouraging herd immunity. Later in the press conference, Gundy gave the game away. “[Players] are 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22 years old and they are healthy and they have the ability to fight this virus off,” he said. “If that is true, then we sequester them and continue, because we need to run money through the state of Oklahoma.” It was shocking, tone-deaf, and unwittingly transparent. The coaching rhetoric about how teams are families was nowhere to be found. Oklahoma State’s players’ humanity, fragility, and mortality were of no concern to their coach, nor, per this telling, to a state that profits off unpaid students. Gundy’s words were so tasteless that many missed his review of his trusted source for COVID-19 information, One America News, whose programming resembles Fox News, but with less legitimacy and no shame.

“There’s no left. There’s no right. They just reported the news,” Gundy said of a network that called Black Lives Matter a “farce.”

His words came back to bite him when Gundy was photographed in an OAN T-shirt in June. Chuba Hubbard, a unanimous All-American running back in 2019, saw the picture and tweeted an effective ultimatum, demanding things change in the Oklahoma State program. Current and former teammates supported him, and some told of their experiences being called a “hood rat,” among other things. After Fox Sports 1’s Shannon Sharpe recounted a conversation he had had with his former NFL teammate Alfred Williams, a 1989 allegation that Gundy repeatedly used the N-word toward Colorado’s players while playing quarterback for Oklahoma State resurfaced.

Hubbard’s initial tweets led to a hastily arranged video produced by Oklahoma State’s sport-information department that featured Gundy promising to do better, an unnecessary apology from Hubbard for speaking publicly rather than approaching his head coach “as a man,” and an awkward embrace that created more memes than it answered questions. Days later, Oklahoma State released a video of Gundy, clearly reading from prepared comments and looking haggard, denouncing OANN and saying Black lives do, in fact, matter.

But he said nothing of the allegations of his abusive statements toward his players, which only underscores his power and their vulnerability. Those allegations matter a lot more than what channel Gundy watches, but it has been lost in a public discourse that rewarded Gundy more for the speed of his response to controversy than the source of it.

OSU investigated Gundy’s behavior as head coach and found no evidence of racism, but simply a disconnect between Gundy and his players. Lest you worry about the credibility of an internal investigation of the most powerful man on campus, athletic director Mike Holder didn’t speak with Alfred Williams, nor did he bother to find out what One America News is (“I just know it’s controversial,” he told reporters). Williams’s 31-year-old assertion that his coach called him the N-word didn’t matter, because, as Holder decided, “Mike Gundy addressed it, denied it, and moved on.” Even an athletic department desperate to rein in its $5-million-a-year head coach, so drunk with power that he reportedly didn’t even know his players’ names— including that of Anthony Diaz, whose heart stopped during a practice—afforded the benefit of the doubt to a man being investigated for present racist behavior. Enough was wrong to cut Gundy’s pay by $ 1 million but somehow, there was still nothing to see. One can understand why Hubbard thought going public would be more effective than a man-to-man chat.

“If athletes really had power, Mike Gundy wouldn’t have a job,” Volante says. “Instead, you get Hubbard and Gundy to do a video together and, overnight, Mike Gundy is woke? Everything is a facade.”

HE SAID NOTHING OF THE ALLEGATIONS OF HIS ABUSIVE STATEMENTS TOWARD HIS PLAYERS.

It’s hard to tell what’s worse: how unlikely it is that Hubbard and his teammates can hold Gundy accountable to his promises, or the fact that doing so is at all their job. Appreciate the absurdity of the sentence “I am going to educate him,” where the subject is 21 and the object is a 53-year-old man tasked with his care and development. Hubbard, like most college athletes, is a kid on payday, but expected to be more grown and more accountable than the revered adults he serves.

Hubbard’s reward for courageously standing up to his coach sounds more like a punishment: more work for free, spending extra time teaching a man who couldn’t be bothered to do the same. In return, Gundy must pretend to listen.

Gundy represents everything generally wrong with college sports, but he is also a problem specific to 2020.

“Is anything really going to change if Coach Gundy gets less overtly racist?” Shoop asks. "The players still don’t have any formal power in the system. For them to enact change, they have to put their necks on the line and risk losing everything.”

Who, with power, have to take the chance of destroying themselves to receive basic humanity?

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PLAYERS AT the University of Texas made one of the most organized pushes for change that we’ve seen from college athletes this year. On June 12, receiver Brennan Eagles and other Longhorns players tweeted their demand that the university rename buildings commemorating segregationists and a Confederate postmaster general, remove a statue of the governor who signed the state’s first Jim Crow laws, and retire “The Eyes of Texas,” the school’s fight song that’s been linked to a 1903 minstrel show. The players said they would not participate in recruiting or donor events without those changes, but they would practice and play.

The threat wasn’t hollow. One of the unspoken jobs of a college athlete is entertaining boosters, attending their kids’ birthday parties, and the like. An athletics program is only as good as its athletes, so refusing to participate in attracting talent could have real consequences. That brought the university to the table, and the school has met them in the middle. Buildings will be renamed, statues of Black figures will be erected on campus, and students and visitors will receive a more thorough understanding of many of the university’s historical figures. Most important, the school released a plan to increase Black recruiting and enrollment, currently around 5 percent in a state that’s more than 12 percent Black.

Think of all the courage and temerity it took for those young men to enumerate their concerns, share them with the world, and stand in their truth. Missouri’s football players helped sway a campus movement. Texas’s players right now are doing the same. They are fighting for dignity like Oklahoma State’s and Iowa’s players, but in the larger campus space, not just the locker room. It’s a noble use of the platform afforded by the spotlight of sports.

But most telling is, in this time of upheaval, when those on the ground have more attention than ever, none of the things those Longhorns asked for were particular to athletes, except asking not to sing a song. For all the power we’d love to say athletes possess, they know what’s “going too far.” Before they even ask for real change, they have to start with something more basic: respect.

THIS BRINGS US back to Bob Orr, who’s been having his own existential political reckoning. The NCAA’s system of punishment is arcane, but so is everything else surrounding college athletics. Every fight athletes have taken up, each one that seems seismic when it hits the news, is asking for something basic. It’s a reminder that the heroes of civil rights in America gave their lives and livelihoods for things the Constitution allowed them to do. The status quo was so backward and indefensible that heaven and earth were moved to allow Black people to do what wasn’t implied in the Declaration of Independence but was promised after the Civil War. The fight for many wasn’t to win. It wasn’t even to get level. It was just to get started. That’s what happens when a group has no rights anyone is required to respect.

That is where college athletes stand now. Professional sports leagues and their respective unions had protracted negotiations about what playing in 2020 would require. College athletes have no organization to represent or advocate for them.

THINK OF ALL THE COURAGE AND TEMERITY IT TOOK FOR THOSE YOUNG MEN TO ENUMERATE THEIR CONCERNS, SHARE THEM WITH THE WORLD, STAND IN THEIR TRUTH.

Devon Ramsay says the lack of allies is what he will always remember about his battle for NCAA eligibility in 2010. He had expected help from his school. Ramsay felt let down by his fellow athletes who had accepted illicit payments, but Ramsay himself had not, nor, he insisted, had he done anything else wrong. Since that seemed obvious, he expected the school to have his back. But UNC was sore with shame and vulnerable to punishment, concerned with protecting itself and indifferent to the fate of the players.

“The school wanted to bring their own investigation to clear their names, then my name came up,” Ramsay said. “Then I got thrown under the bus. It wasn’t even a final draft, and I lose my eligibility.”

Ramsay says UNC’s compliance officer told him to sign something admitting guilt, and doing so would make him eligible immediately. “That was a bold-faced lie,” he says now, speaking by phone. “She knew how the NCAA works. So they lied to me about how it was done and served me up. Once that was the case, you know they didn’t feel like I was Carolina family. You’re sacrificed for the brand.” (Nine years later, that officer defends her process, noting “every effort” was made to ensure fairness, and adding, “I remain confident in the fulfillment of my commitment to serve all student-athletes with their best interests as the top priority.”)

Ramsay’s saving grace was Orr, who represented him in his fight. “I didn’t have any idea of what my options were, had no one to speak up for me when talking to the athletic director. You’re just kind of lost in the system,” Ramsay says. “You think they have your best interest [at heart], but they don’t.”

But aside from the fact that not everyone can get help from a retired State Supreme Court justice, not every man like Orr, twice a UNC alum, can be trusted. “What was really tough about my own situation is everyone’s somehow tied to the university,” Ramsay said. “It’s hard to get an advocate who’s on your side, someone without ties to the community or the school.”

Ramsay was suspended for eight games that season. The NCAA ultimately deemed his work with the tutor to be run-of-the-mill academic counseling. This good student—at 31, a grown man who now works in finance and started Paradi, an education technology business, with his friends—was encouraged by his institution to brand himself a cheater, regardless of truth.

Ramsay sees the current pandemic landscape and can’t ignore the same thing Arizona defensive back Malik Hausman noticed this summer when his school’s president, Robert Robbins, said school wouldn’t reopen if cases didn’t decline. Hausman, taking part in “voluntary” workouts, tweeted a simple question: “So why me and my team on campus then?”

No one has to answer. It’s no one’s job to ask for him. And he can’t do much more about it than tweet.