On Tuesday, the NAACP called for Black athletes and their families to athletically and financially boycott Southern-based universities in response to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The announcement followed calls on social media from individuals including former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, Texas U.S. Representative Marc Veasy, actor Wendell Pierce, and in a since-deleted tweet, Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude, who all echoed the sentiment exploding across the various platforms.
The notion of a Black athlete boycott of these programs was met with swift backlash, even before the NAACP released its “Out of Bounds” campaign. Responding only to loosely organized conversations on X, CNN’s Laura Coates and sportswriter L.Z. Granderson dismissed the idea flat out, claiming that “children” should not be called to fix adult problems, and Black athletes shouldn’t be called upon to sacrifice what “grown folks” won’t.
Though ubiquitous, these common objections— that teenagers are too young, sacrificing NIL isn’t fair, and adults should set precedent— are both ahistorical and rooted in outdated assumptions about the structure of modern college football.
History reveals that high school and college students have always been at the center of the fight for civil rights. Be it gun control, desegregation, or protesting wars and apartheid, young people have a long and documented history of protest. Collegiate football players are not absent from this history. Black football players at Wyoming, Oregon State, Indiana, Iowa, Washington, and Syracuse all organized practice boycotts over racist incidents during the Black Power era.
As recently as 2020, Kylin Hill, an SEC running back at Mississippi State, directly demanded that Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves remove the confederate emblem from the state flag, or else he would not play football in Mississippi. Eight days after Hill’s announcement, state lawmakers adopted a new flag.
In 2015, the University of Missouri football team threatened to boycott an upcoming game unless Chancellor Tim Wolfe, who had ignored racist incidents on campus, resigned. The days-long hunger strike and weeks-long protests by Black students weren’t enough; but after the SEC football team leveraged its position of power, Wolfe resigned within 38 hours.
Were these athletes too young to be involved in civil disobedience?
College-bound freshmen and their teammates are voting, draft-eligible and working-aged citizens, so we cannot expect them to be civically engaged but infantilize them when opportunities to act arise. And prized recruits are not acting alone. They rely on trusted adults—parents, coaches, and mentors—who bear the responsibility to shape not just great athletes but conscientious citizens. [JA1]
Another objection to these calls for a boycott is that it asks athletes to sacrifice too much. While seemingly reasonable at first, it relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the supply and demand of elite football talent. Top programs across conferences perform a yearly scramble for a relatively small pool of elite [JA2] players in the newest class, so it’s likely these recruits have offers outside of the eight states identified by the NAACP.
And what’s true for scholarships is also true for NIL deals.
While the SEC and Big 10 dominate in revenue, there’s no evidence to suggest that SEC schools, on average, offer more NIL than Big 10 schools. Both conferences have powerhouse and mid-tier NIL collectives offering comparable deals to elite recruits. Considering that the last three national champions hail from the Big 10 (Indiana, Ohio State and Michigan, respectively), and no SEC team has even reached the title game in that span, this demonstrates a player can maximize NIL while bypassing schools in the South. Furthermore, the bulk of Power 4 NIL deals, are valued in the low six-figures, which are easily within the reach of ACC and Big 12 schools.
The last objection to the boycott is the charge that adults must act first and set an example. Again, this makes sense on the surface, but it lacks any analysis of power and history.
In the last decade, adults have marched for Black lives, organized consumer boycotts, and participated in nationwide demonstrations. Yet voting protections continue to erode, Black unemployment is rising, and universities across the country are dismantling DEI programs and retreating from commitments to Black inclusion. The problem is not a lack of adult activism but rather adults with institutional power are wielding it over adults without it.
The decision to play football at large Southern school, however, does come with a level of leverage that most Black adults do not have, and nowhere is that leverage more concentrated than in the South.
Down South, identity is inextricably linked to college football, and college football is a frequent bedfellow with state politics. This creates a culture where social morale and political capital are heavily tied to success on the gridiron.
A brief look at behavior from Louisiana governors alone—from Huey Long in the 1920s and John McKeithen in the 1970s to Jeff Landry in 2025—reveals a pattern of political strategies with college football success as a crucial component. Actions by others including former Kentucky Governor Ned Breathitt, the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also serve as examples of the cross-pollination of Southern politics and football. By extension, Black athletes, who make up over 70% of SEC starting football players, hold considerable untapped leverage in state politics.
What’s different now than in the past is that with NIL and the transfer portal, the stakes have never been lower for elite players to consider options outside of the SEC.
The transfer portal and NIL offer an opportunity for protest to be quiet. Similar to the Great Migration, a quiet migration away from the SEC doesn’t require mass voter mobilization, political rallies, or disruptive protest. Although the North was not free from racism, the option to move north during World War II gave some Southern Black laborers enough leverage to force concessions from planters and owners, as documented in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns.
Although the circumstances are different, the threat of mobility still creates leverage.
Each year, thousands of players post letters on social media thanking teammates and coaches from one school before announcing their transfer to another program. When a team suffers a mass exodus of players, rumors percolate online, and coaching hot seats get warmer, but the young men themselves are rarely interrogated. Thus, no player has to announce why he’s signing with Oregon or Penn State instead of Tennessee or Ole Miss.
But inconspicuous transfer portal entries that follow conspicuous assaults on Black voting power will certainly get the message across to conservative SEC stakeholders- football is fun, but voting rights “just means more”.
