Thank you, Devin Harper.
Thank you, Princewill Umanmielen.
Thank you, LSU, for giving these lads a soft place to land.
Thank you, Ole Miss, for pulling a Peter Finch in Network with an “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” move.
Thanks to all of you because you’ve done college football a great service. And for that, we are thankful.
(Oh, by the way, all of you listed above still have real issues to overcome with this matter. But that’s not why we are here.)
I’m not saying that one day we will all look back and say that Harper, a Shreveport native, and Umanmielen are going down in history as pioneers and eventually take their place beside Neil Armstrong and Rosa Parks.
But the decision they made could – and hopefully will – have great consequences down the line. (And the shorter the line, but better for us all.)
The short version of all of this is that Harper and Umanmielen decided one day in January that they’d like to continue playing football for Ole Miss and thereupon signed a deal with the university to be paid to do so.
Then, before the ink was barely dry, they decided on another day in January that they’d rather not.
Next thing you know, they had hightailed it down I-55 and surfaced in Baton Rouge at LSU. Perfectly within their rights to do so.
But it’s also perfectly within Ole Miss’s rights to remind the two that there was that little thing called a contract and in it, there is the stipulation that if you do leave, you owe us some of the money you had already received.
LSU may or may not have told these two they’d take care of that – schools do that all the time when their new coach wants out of his deal with his previous member institution – but the school’s official policy is N.O.P. (not our problem).
If you are an LSU fan or an Ole Miss, I’m going to take a moment here and ask you to try to take away with overwhelming loyalty to your school and think about how this might play out in the long run.
If you are one of those who hates every single change that has been brought about in today’s college football, it’s been a tough couple of years. Judges, overzealous boosters, state legislation have all worked against you. Lots of fudging of what has attempted to be a rulebook.
But this is different. This is a contract and unless you are scribbling on the back of a bar napkin, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that it’s been looked over by all of the legal beagles.
You can break a contract, but you have to pay for it. And it appears that Messers Harper and Umanmielen failed to do so.
Given the nature of the testiness between the two schools involved, it is perfectly acceptable to wonder if Ole Miss would have gone to these suit-filing lengths had it been USL instead of LSU. (I know it’s not USL anymore, but work with me here.)
But maybe, just maybe, the result won’t be nearly as important as the action itself. You want to leave? Sure, now get out the checkbook.
Maybe this will play a part in retarding the ridiculous amount of player movement that threatens college football far more than athletes getting paid.
You want to be an adult? Then play by adult rules. You don’t get to use the “I’m a kid” excuse when you’re getting paid more than 99 percent of the people in the stadium who are watching you play on Saturdays.
Actions have consequences. And when other players start to realize what’s gone on with Harper and Umanmielen, maybe there will be far less examples of this in the future.
Sure, players can try to do this. Nothing is stopping them from giving it a shot.
But that signature on the dotted line means something. It does for you and me and everyone else.
It should for them.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com