Everything about that Missouri bill to ban college athletes from protesting was stupid

This week, Missouri state representative Rick Brattin proposed a bill that would strip a college athlete’s scholarship if the athlete “calls, incites, supports or participates in any strike or concerted refusal to play a scheduled game.” The proposed law, House Bill 1743 was officially pre-filed Monday afternoon, meaning it would have hypothetically been up for discussion when the legislature reconvenes in early January.

The proposal was a response to the Missouri football team’s strike in November, when Tigers players joined pre-existing protests related to campus discrimination, refusing to play until those protests’ demands were met.

Brattin called the protests “completely horrific” and “anarchy.” He thinks the alleged racial issues on campus were blown wildly out of proportion, although he admitted he only talked to non-black students about it. He said the way athletes protested and the lack of punishment was “a disgrace to Missouri.”

But being upset about something is often poor grounds for writing up a law about it. Brattin must have realized this pretty quickly, as he’s already withdrawn the bill.

The law somehow managed to be incapable of accomplishing what it wanted, while also having potentially drastic ramifications for the NCAA. It was a tour de force in short-sighted legislation. It is now dead.

This law would have clearly caused First Amendment issues, as it called for public universities to punish students’ speech. Here’s a list of some of the many times that our court system has upheld the free speech rights of students and teachers at public universities. Even hate speech on campuses has been protected by our courts. Brattin’s bill would have limited the rights of certain students to free speech because of their athletic status.

The idea that a particular student’s athletic status would invalidate their First Amendment protection doesn’t seem like it would hold up in court.

And it’s not quite clear how the rule would have been enforced. The bill didn’t offer any punishment for a school that wouldn’t pull scholarships. And it’s worth noting Missouri’s athletic department is financially self-sufficient, operating off of private donations and athletic revenue, not public state funds.

The ability to punish players largely rests with a player’s coach. College coaches can dismiss players for basically any reason, even without a state law. This law would have taken a coach’s option to punish a player and made it mandatory. It would end the college career of any protesting athlete, even if the coach didn’t think that was a good idea. That would be bad for both schools and players.

As it went, Gary Pinkel handled the Missouri protest tactfully. He could’ve said any number of players refusing to participate in the team’s pre-planned activities were willfully violating team rules and kicked them off the team. Instead, he listened to his players, worked together with them, and nobody missed a single game.

Brattin expressed distress about the fact that protesting players could have cost Mizzou millions of dollars in fines if the team had to forfeit games due to an insufficient roster. However, his bill called for kicking players off the team permanently. That would have led to an even less sufficient roster, and perhaps even larger fines.

If all those players had been kicked off the team by law, Missouri would’ve had to pay fees due to cancelled regular season games. Missouri would’ve had to participate in future seasons with a vastly reduced roster. That would’ve led to a lot of lopsided losses, and that would affect the school’s ability to sell tickets or attract donations. Coaches would have trouble recruiting players to such a bad team, and players would probably choose to play in states without laws that could cost them their scholarships. The school’s ability to field a competitive football team would be ruined for years, maybe decades, costing Missouri millions.

That would’ve been bad.

The NCAA’s business model is dependent on one essential tenet. The NCAA’s lawyers have argued in federal court many times that college athletes are not employees, but “student-athletes,” and are therefore not entitled to any of the benefits employees get, like money.

For this legal argument to hold water, the NCAA has had to repeatedly prove that an athlete’s scholarship is not strictly related to sports. Because if a school is giving an athlete a scholarship just to play sports, well, that’s payment for a service rendered. And if you’re paying somebody for a service, that person is your employee. And if that person is your employee, he or she is entitled to things employees get, like money.

The NCAA’s carefully constructed legal niche could have been destroyed by Brattin’s bill. The bill directly connects an athlete’s willingness to play to the fact that he or she is getting a scholarship. Brattin himself recently sponsored and passed a bill promoting free speech on college campuses, but when asked to justify this bill, he said that the school gives players “a scholarship to come play, not to engage in political activity and hold the university hostage.” He was making a legal argument that a scholarship is a contract to play sports.

The NCAA is currently facing several legal challenges to its business model. If this law went on the books, it would have severely harmed the NCAA’s ability to win those cases, potentially ending college athletics as we know them.

It is time to talk about Rick Brattin, the man who proposed this bill. He has a bit of a history of proposing unpassable bills that would hypothetically right a perceived wrong.

Last year, Brattin proposed a bill outlawing food stamp recipients from purchasing seafood and steak with their food stamps. Besides addressing a “problem” that isn’t really all that common, many pointed out that the bill would have also prevented those on welfare from buying decidedly non-luxury staples, like canned tuna and low-grade chuck steak. In trying to justify the bill, he claimed he could feed his family of seven extravagantly if given $1,000 a month. That’s under $5 per person per day.

He also proposed a bill forcing women seeking abortions to provide consent of the male except in instances of “legitimate rape,” even though similar laws have been ruled unconstitutional elsewhere. In trying to justify the bill, he claimed he was forced to provide spousal consent to get a vasectomy. There is no such law in Missouri.

There is a common thread between these bills and the college athletes bill. For starters, none of them ever had a chance of passing. These bills aren’t proposed to pass. They’re proposed to get people upset about how certain groups allegedly overstep their boundaries, without offering any actual evidence to support the claims made. The laws are meant to turn the tide of public opinion against the relatively powerless, like people on welfare and women in abusive relationships.

College athletes historically haven’t had a lot of power. They risk their personal health, often suffering lifelong injuries for zero dollars, while making schools millions. And most attempts at bargaining over the years have been met with nothing. The Missouri protest was a literally unprecedented example of athletes using their agency to enact change.

SB Nation presents: Mizzou protests proved that sports is never just sports