The Year Missouri's Football Team Put America On Notice

This week, VICE Sports looks at the topics, people, and things that made news in 2015. You can read our collection of year-in-review stories here.

I'll start with Charles Harris.

Harris is the University of Missouri's star redshirt sophomore defensive end—a projected early-round NFL draft pick when he decides to leave school. On the Monday when former University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe resigned amid uproar over the campus' racial climate, Harris stood on Mel Carnahan Quadrangle wearing a sweater that read "I Can't Breathe," the same phrase many NBA stars wore on their chests after Eric Garner's death in the summer of 2014.

Harris and his teammates had just staged a boycott of football activities that would not end until Wolfe stepped down. They had stood in solidarity with graduate student Jonathan Butler, who, as part of the student activist group Concerned Student 1950, refused to eat until Wolfe resigned. And now that Wolfe was gone, Harris and about 25 black teammates—plus one white player—delivered a group statement on the quad. Harris said what the Mizzou football team had done was a testament to the power all student-athletes hold.

A reporter with a foreign accent asked Harris to say and spell his name. Harris responded with a glare. It was funny, but also telling. The players were suddenly an international news item, their message so widespread that some reporters didn't know with whom they were talking, only that, as reporters, they needed to be here. If Butler's hunger strike had continued, would people have taken notice? Maybe. Probably—eventually. But because athletes like Harris said they wouldn't play, many more people paid attention, foreigners included. That fascinated me. Because for so long, these men were just football players.

I cover the Mizzou football team for the Columbia Missourian, a student-staffed, faculty-supervised daily newspaper that operates as part of the Missouri School of Journalism and serves the college town of Columbia and the surrounding areas in Mid-Missouri. During and immediately after the players' boycott, my life was hectic. I was both a reporter covering one of the biggest national stories of the year, and a student who had to answer questions from relatives, friends, and even the random, kind-of-knew-you-in-high-school people who wanted to know what the hell was going on in Missouri and how the situation got to where it did. Suddenly, I was comparing my work and the work of my peers who cover this community everyday to the work of reporters from national outlets. (Oh by the way, making things more crazy, Gary Pinkel, the team's coach of 15 seasons, announced just a few days after the boycott ended that he'd retire at season's end.)

The news in Columbia has now slowed down. The team's season is done, Pinkel has been replaced by defensive coordinator Barry Odom, and players have only spoken in vague terms about what their involvement will be with Concerned Student 1950, whose demands included an increase of 10 percent to black faculty and staff by the 2017-2018 school year, and that MU "increases funding and resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals; particularly those of color." Concerned Student 1950 has even stopped camping on the quad.

And me? I'm left wondering whether most people cared about the story's full and proper context. Why did so many people, at least nationally, become interested in Missouri's campus conversation on race only when Harris and his teammates got involved? Sure, sports are popular, and easier to digest than deep-rooted social pathologies. And yes, college football boycotts are almost unheard of. Still, it bothered me that so many of the relatives, friends, and even random, kind-of-knew-you-in-high-school types who asked me about the story didn't try to move beyond the talking heads and hot takes.

A man was actively choosing to starve himself. Meanwhile, people wanted to talk football.

Here's some of my own context: During a Nov. 5 taping of SEC Nation, a pregame television show that preceded Mizzou's Thursday night game against Mississippi State, I stood next to a television crew member and waited to hear something like, "Fuck, what do we do?" when a sign proclaiming that racism lived on the MU campus popped up behind ESPN radio and television host Paul Finebaum's head.

Editors at the Missourian had heard Concerned Student 1950 would protest in the background of SEC Nation's shots—on the Rock M, a signature part of Memorial Stadium. I waited and waited. I circled the football field, waiting some more. Occasionally, I'd scribble down notes from what I saw on the field, where players were warming up. Then I'd crane my neck back toward the Rock M, squinting my eyes to find Concerned Student 1950 signs. Nothing.

There was no protest. Concerned Student 1950, it seemed, missed its chance to make a national media appearance.

As football reporter, I figured I was done with the story. Then 30 black football players tweeted a photo the following Saturday night announcing their strike. A day later, Pinkel tweeted a photo of his coaches and team, white players included, standing with arms locked. Reporters hung around the entrance of the athletic training center for hours. Players filtered out slowly, virtually all offering some form of no comment.

The athletic department, with very careful wording, later released a statement saying players wouldn't participate in football activities until Butler ate. There was no mention of Wolfe in any of the department's prepared statements through the whole ordeal.

We know now that some players had already been discussing the idea of a boycott as early as the Wednesday before that Mississippi State game. Had a protest indeed happened during SEC Nation, it would've been just another moment of build-up in a movement that soon reached a boiling point.

But much of what has happened here in Columbia traces farther back than the football player strike. Back to the death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson the year before. And really, back to the founding of this school.

After Brown died in Ferguson, about an hour and a half away from Columbia, the group MU4MikeBrown began demonstrating on campus, planning die-ins in various university hubs. A culture of activism arose on campus. It never left.

Concerned Student 1950 wore shirts that read, "1839 Was Built On My B(l)ack," pointing out that the school was built during the antebellum period, when slavery was still an institution. Earlier this year, there was debate over whether to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson, a known slave owner, from campus.

Until the football team became involved, I lived on the periphery of all of this. I too was somewhat guilty of not seeking as much information as a I should've about Concerned Student 1950. I was aware of what was happening on campus. I, of course, wanted everyone on this campus to feel comfortable and included. But I didn't read every, or most, articles about the movement in its early stages. I wrote the movement off — not as unimportant, but as something with legs that would eventually stop running, like so many others. I knew racism was a problem on campus, but I didn't know the details. As someone of mixed race who can pass for white, I didn't directly encounter the brute force of racism at MU. I also didn't give enough credit to the idea that this student group could spark true change.

And like so many others, the football boycott hooked me in.

It raised the stakes for Wolfe, too. College sports are big business. It's one thing to consider in abstract terms the power student athletes in revenue sports hold—how universities profit off of these (mostly black) men, both in dollars and national visibility—but it's another when these athletes actually flex their metaphorical muscles. The Missouri football team's social influence didn't exist until it did, until players decided Concerned Student 1950's cause was worthwhile.

That Monday showed the players' power. More Concerned Student 1950 supporters than ever before were on the quad. Players danced in the middle of a huge human circle. There were chants of "Power!" People sang "We Shall Overcome." I took in the scene of more than a quarter-mile worth of people locked arm in arm, trying to block out media while these athletes celebrated. A new type of arena.

When players left the quad, they said they would talk about what had happened the past few days at 4 p.m.—the time of their regularly-scheduled media availability. But the players didn't show up to that availability, and reporters eventually chased them to the student center, then the quad, where the players delivered their statement.

There were no sports information directors present when captain Ian Simon spoke. He read the statement from a smartphone screen with microphones from around the country, the world, shoved in his face. About 25 reporters, almost all of whom were white, stood on the quad to listen. That's an irony that shouldn't be ignored. I didn't think about it at the time, though. What struck me then was simply the moment. The many different microphones. That the reporter with the accent didn't know Harris' name. The magnitude of it all.

With Wolfe's resignation, football was back. And soon after, the national media decamped, most of them by the following day. The what of the story had been covered and disseminated across the country, the world—but what about the why?

So many of the people who reached out to me for more information about what happened at MU had similar sentiments: How did it get to this point? Isn't demanding the ousting of a university system president extreme? Isn't a hunger strike extreme?

In a vacuum, all of these questions make sense. And maybe that's the problem. Here's the big lesson I learned from all of this: News seems to sometimes be delivered in a vacuum. Here's what happened, plus a little context—enough that you'll get the topic, kind of, but not so much that you'll quit reading or watching midway through. Not everyone knows about MU4MikeBrown. Not everyone knows about the debate over the Thomas Jefferson statue. Not everyone knows that in 2010 some students threw cotton balls in front of the black culture center, the very same black culture center that had its sign vandalized after the boycott—the word "black" covered with spray paint.

It was disconcerting knowing that football attracted most people to this story—well, football and my friend, Tim Tai, the photojournalist caught on video defending his constitutional rights, continuing to photograph on Mel Carnahan Quadrangle while protesters blocked him, some forming a human wall and walking into him to push him away. More than anyone I know, Tim is not comfortable with attention—not the millions of views on YouTube a video of the confrontation received, not the approximately 10,000 Twitter followers he attracted afterward—and he's not someone who ever wants the story to be about him.

But that's what happened. We're attracted to simple things: Will there be football or won't there? We're drawn to the viral: People sometimes stare at Tim when I go to restaurants with him, talking amongst themselves to confirm that he is, indeed, The Guy From The Video.

Neither of those two story lines were the most important at MU this fall, though. And yet I'm scared that years from now, those may be the stories we remember most..

For Missouri's win over Brigham Young University on Nov. 14, there was more media coverage than there would've been without a boycott or without the Pinkel retirement news, the remnants of a seemingly never-ending week. Most of the questions answered by players, most of whom were speaking publicly for the first time since the news of the boycott, regarded the events of the week, not the game.

Defensive end Walter Brady answered a question about the repercussions if Missouri had lost to Brigham Young. Did he and his teammates worry about the possible national perception?

"No doubt that there would've been a lot of criticism," Brady said, "but when are we not facing adversity?"

After he left the interview room, a reporter from a national website asked someone for Brady's name. Whatever, I suppose. At least football was back. The context, the details, the why hardly mattered. A few days later, I read that reporter's story. He got the name wrong anyway.