Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther

      2.

      What the Playbook Doesn’t Show

       I.

      When you look at a single play in a playbook, it is usually fairly simple in design. It is sketched with lines, arrows, and symbols that indicate what each position is supposed to do, and there is often a short explanation, sometimes as few as three words, that describes the movement in more detail. What goes without saying is that the play is sketched out on a football field. That is a given. Where else, in fact, would those plays happen?

      In the current playbook about college football and sexual assault, the things not said, the things that are taken for granted, the things that are simply known, are the racial and gendered hierarchies that inform how we think about these cases. In our society, there is a reason cases involving African American players garner more attention than those of white ones. We are trained to see black men as perpetrators who need to be punished and controlled by the state. We also believe women to be dramatic and/or liars when they share their experiences, especially their interactions with men. No one needs to tell us these things each time a new college case breaks, before we hear any evidence or analysis. Who else would commit such a crime, if not young black men? Who else would lie about having sex after the fact, if not young women?

      The given in this playbook is that the intersection of race, gender, and money matters deeply to understanding the intersection of college football and sexual assault. It goes without saying because we already know it. But it shouldn’t go without saying because, while we focus on the black-man-as-criminal and the woman-as-liar, what is lost is that most of the people who create and maintain the culture of college football are white men, from coaches to athletic directors, from university presidents to the media who cover the sport. And all those white men make a lot of money off the backs of the players and they have no problem hushing up the voices of mainly women when they feel those women could threaten their players, their game, and their money.

      This chapter is the discussion of what we so rarely say. This topic has to be discussed with the utmost care, though, in a country that likes to so easily criminalize and stigmatize black men, and so readily deems women as untrustworthy.

       II.

      I remember Travis Johnson. Our time at Florida State as undergraduates overlapped and there was one semester where we shared a class. I knew he was a football player. There were a handful in the class and our teacher, a large, jovial graduate student in the classics department, seemed smitten with the idea that he was sharing space with these campus rock stars. I was too. I never directly interacted with Johnson (there were probably fifty to seventy students in the class) but my memory of him is one of a loud goofball, the class clown. During the middle of an exam, the room silent as pencils scratched on paper, Johnson, seemingly out of nowhere, yelled, “Sexual chocolate!” The room erupted in laughter, a huge smile broke across his face, the instructor shushed us, and we went back to our work.

      Johnson was also a big black man in small Southern town.

      In April 2003, a year after I graduated from FSU, Johnson was charged with sexual battery and suspended from the team.[50] The woman who reported the assault was a shot-putter on the FSU track team and had a prior relationship with Johnson. She said that in early February that year, Johnson took her to another player’s apartment, held her there against her will, and raped her. She then reported it to a coach and twelve days later to the police. At trial, according to the St. Petersburg Times, the woman said she waited because “I was embarrassed, and I wanted him to leave me alone,” and, the paper says, “she also didn’t want to ‘ruin’ Johnson.”[51]

      Nine days after the woman reported to law enforcement, Mary Coburn, the university’s Student Affairs vice president, sent her an e-mail. The Orlando Sentinel published that e-mail:

       “Even though Travis does not admit this wrongdoing, to avoid embarrassment to himself, his family, the university, and you, Travis has agreed to withdraw from spring semester and not return until August 8 which is football reporting day. He has also agreed to receive counseling and provide documentation to me that this has taken place.” The e-mail also stipulated that “all parties agree to keep this matter confidential” and “not pursue any further legal action.” [52]

      It appears that Coburn attempted to make the case go away, and she tried to do it around the football schedule to make sure that the team’s starting defensive tackle didn’t miss a game. Football is big business.

      Three days later, the woman pressed charges.

      Johnson maintained throughout the investigation and eventual trial that it was consensual sex and that he, having had shoulder surgery weeks earlier and the woman being only slightly smaller than him, could not have raped her.

      Willie Meggs, the state attorney, took the case to court. The trial lasted two days, Johnson did not testify, the woman was on the stand for three hours, and it took the six women who made up the jury thirty minutes to find him not guilty. The Sun-Sentinel reported at the time that the woman and her family, as well as Johnson and his family, cried after the verdict was read.[53] Afterward, Johnson’s attorney said the fact that “this case was even brought this far is troubling.”[54] Johnson played for FSU the next season and was drafted into the NFL in 2005, where he played for six years.

      When news broke in November 2013 that Willie Meggs’s office was investigating Jameis Winston, Travis Johnson emerged as a vocal critic of the state attorney. Johnson tweeted repeatedly about Meggs throughout November and into December. He called Meggs “the most Racist&Biased individual” and “the Most Corrupt Criminal in all of Florida.” “Willie Meggs will never give anyone let alone a black man a fair shake in the state of flordia he is a media hoe,” read one tweet. He also told Yahoo! Sports, “Facts don’t matter when you are dealing with a guy like Willie Meggs. Willie Meggs isn’t out for the facts . . . At the end of the day, this is still the Jim Crow South. You think, ‘It’s Florida.’ Well, it’s not Florida. It’s South Georgia. Tallahassee is South Georgia.”

      Tallahassee is only a twenty-minute drive from the border with Georgia, and much of what surrounds it is rural. The refrain that it is really southern Georgia was one I heard while attending school. The county votes Democrat generally, but often with close margins. And, like most cities in the US South, it has a history saturated with segregation and racism.[55] Tallahassee was the site of a seven-month boycott of city buses in 1956 after two black women were arrested for sitting beside a white woman. The KKK held rallies in the city and burned crosses from the 1940s on. Young black people in the 1960s and 1970s held sit-ins, picketed segregated businesses, and marched through the city.

      The past is never left in the past, though. There are ongoing arguments about the school’s mascot, the Seminoles, which has a red-faced man in profile as its main symbol. A social media post at the start of the school year in 2013 referred to black FSU students as “monkeys,” sparking justified outrage and a university investigation. The following year, a lecturer who had been with the university for eighteen years quit after her racist Facebook rant went public. In late 2014, multiple black churches in the rural area around Tallahassee were vandalized within a week of one another.[56] On March 18, 2015, the local paper, the Tallahassee Democrat, reported that the KKK had distributed leaflets in the city.[57] “Imperial Wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Frank Ancona said the fliers found in Tallahassee driveways