We stand and applaud you, Missouri players

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to stand up and applaud anything that Missouri football players have done ON the pitch. They’ve been awful. They’ve been awful with quarterback Maty Mauk, and they’ve been awful with takeover quarterback Drew Lock. Their offensive line has more holes than Penn State’s – and that’s saying something – and if they actually played Kansas in a Grain War in 2015, the game wouldn’t end until 2016, such is the paucity of both offenses.

But off the field, I want to throw these guys a party.

Not because they stood up for their own players’ rights. I don’t believe college football players are slaves. They choose to play college football, and they get a nice education from the privilege.

But what they did last Saturday was awesome. They stood up for someone smaller and weaker than they were.

They stood up for one of their own fellow students, Payton Head (who’s the student body presiident) after the school ignored Head’s complaints after fellow student had yelled racial slurs at him. Head is black.

The football team – including some of the team’s superstar players – staged a sit-in, saying that they would neither practice nor play until the school’s president, Timothy Wolfe stepped down. He did so about 24 hours later, and his resignation was followed quickly by that of R. Bowen Loftin.

It’s really great to see a football team make a difference. Listen, we know that Missouri players have done their fair share of crappy things in the past, from Dorial Green-Beckham’s domestic abuse to Maty Mauk getting suspended from the team for disciplinary reasons. We also know that Missouri are not alone. Every college football team out there (we’re not just going to say “Every SEC team”) has their fair share of assholes, bullies and what some people would nicely call “troubled kids”,  but most would call “candidates for jail”. We don’t hear a lot about college football teams out there wanting to make a difference for something they believe in. But they did.

And here’s to hoping that other college football teams follow suit. I’ll guess that a protest against taking boosters money from SEC players won’t be one of them.