Emmitt Smith is the exceptional Florida man. The pride of Pensacola, Smith racked up the second-most running yards in US high school history and smashed a haul of records at the University of Florida before leading the Dallas Cowboys to three Super Bowl titles in the 1990s and retiring in 2004 as the NFL’s all-time leading rusher. Now 54, Smith is hurtling head-first into the goalline stand that is Ron DeSantis’s war on wokeness.
Last year the Florida governor ratified a law prohibiting the state’s public universities and four-year community colleges from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as Texas and a handful of other states have taken aim at university DEI programs. In response the University of Florida eliminated 28 DEI positions earlier this month, vowing to shift the savings from those cuts – some $5m – into a faculty retirement fund. The school put on a diplomatic face after the fact; “we will continue to foster a community of trust and respect,” read the official statement. But DeSantis’s tone rang far more true. “Florida is where DEI goes to die,” he wrote in a triumphant social media post.
The next day Smith hit back with a post of his own, an iOS press release. “I’m utterly disgusted by UF’s decision and the precedent it sets,” he wrote. “We cannot continue to believe and trust that a team of leaders all made of the same background will make the right decision when it comes to equity and diversity. History has proven that is not the case.” Most notably, Smith called on the “MANY minority athletes at UF” to join in publicly registering their concern while challenging the forthcoming class of student-athletes to join the scrap or risk being “complicit in supporting systemic issues”. The NAACP, which hasn’t hesitated to fight DeSantis’s woke war in the past, took it a step further – urging Black athletes around the country to stiff-arm Florida’s public universities altogether. But this is easier said than done.
— Emmitt Smith (@EmmittSmith22) March 3, 2024
For one thing the NAACP statement specifies that students reconsider “any potential decision to attend, and compete at a predominantly white institution in the state of Florida”, a nuance that will surely be lost in translation. For another, standing on principle was so much easier in Smith’s day, when exposure (on network TV, to pro scouts, to marketing execs) was the only thing that truly mattered in college sports. But now student-athletes don’t have just that to choose from; they have more power than ever over their name, image and likeness – and more opportunity to make serious money while still in school. This new economy, the result of a landmark lawsuit that compelled a rewrite of NCAA bylaws, has flat-footed college coaches – for too long the main beneficiaries under the old scheme, with top college football coaches earning almost $11m per year.
Nick Saban retired as football coach at the University of Alabama in January, not least because he’d have to work harder to recruit. Earlier this week, he joined Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz on a Capitol Hill panel to discuss prospective antitrust legislation that would standardize and cap athlete compensation. This comes a week after Dartmouth men’s basketball players voted to unionize and several active antitrust lawsuits are challenging NCAA compensation caps and whether athletes should have employee status. “All the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics,” said Saban, who was making almost $12m a year at Alabama. “It’s whoever wants to pay the most money, raise the most money, buy the most players is going to have the best opportunity to win. And I don’t think that’s the spirit of college athletics, and I don’t think it’s ever been the spirit of what we want college athletics to be.”
Altogether, the NCAA and Power Five conferences spent $2.97m on lobbying efforts in 2023, according to the Associated Press. (Cruz gave his deeply divided Congress a “50-50” chance of passing meaningful legislation on NILs by year’s end.) But Florida is a school that can pay to keep playing the game as is. Their athletics department, with more than $190m in revenues last year, ranks among the most resourced in the country, their alums give generously to the cause, and the school is a charter member of the SEC – college sports’ primo conference. There’s little reason to believe that Florida won’t continue to compete with upstate rival Florida State for the most fertile crop of college prospects outside of Texas. And there’s little reason to believe that a talented high schooler won’t sign on to the school that provides the best access to plum NIL deals, especially if the price is high enough to help themselves and their families, particularly those athletes who won’t go on to play professionally.
If any Florida school figures to feel the squeeze in Florida’s DEI ban, it’s Florida A&M University (or Famu for short), the historically Black college (HBCU) affected by the state’s DEI ban. With a budget of around $10m, Famu already struggles to compete for talent, exposure, facilities and fundraising support. When the NIL era kicked off three years ago, some thought it would lead more top recruits to consider HBCUs like Famu, especially after Deion Sanders kicked off his college football coaching career at Jackson State University in Mississippi. But that optimism came and went when Coach Prime pulled up stakes for Colorado, where he has demonstrated a particular knack for exploiting the current system. With those strong headwinds, Famu will have to work even harder to remain an HBCU sports leader when it is in a state whose governor seems intent on codifying anti-Black policies.
All of which is to say: this may be the hardest wall Smith has run up against. And he should be commended for standing up to the state that launched him. But it’s going to take more than the greatest running back alive diving into the fray in support of Florida’s woke warriors to see the error of their ways. It’s going to take rivals from other states denigrating Florida colleges, athletics boosters withholding support and the Sunshine State’s other athletic greats backing Smith. Putting the onus on student-athletes to solve this feels like too big an ask. Besides, it’s not their fix to get over the line.
