Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
As Andre Perry wrote in 2014, to be a man and participate in football culture is to “be a bounty hunter, a missile, a shamer, homophobe, punisher, beater, and extortionist who will get on his knees and be thankful for winning a game.”[15]
A large reason we had such a robust discussion around out gay NFL recruit Michael Sam is that homophobia is predicated on the sexist idea that being weak is to be female, or to be female in any way is to be weak. Football players are the height of masculinity, and since we have determined gay men to be feminine, how can you have a football player who is also gay? The answer is that you have to push on antiquated ideas about masculinity. And there’s no better space to do that in than football.
In March 2015, the same month Davis published his piece in the Advocate, I interviewed him. We were sitting in a large suite in Austin, Texas, the room’s wide windows looking out over the river and toward downtown. Reclining casually, one leg propped up so his foot was resting on his knee, Davis talked with me about masculinity and homophobia in football. He told me that gay players and the work that You Can Play is doing are “redefining how people view manhood and masculinity and femininity.” Referring to Michael Sam kissing his then-boyfriend on camera on ESPN when he was drafted into the NFL in 2014, Davis said, “What I really love about what Michael did, very few people from the age of probably twelve to seventy will ever be able to say they didn’t watch two men be intimate while watching football. And football is the holder of masculinity. To have two men be intimate in that space in a such a public way, you watch Masculinity cry, ‘No! Not me! NOT ME! No! No!’”
That matters because of the impact that football culture has on how we think about masculinity. And as Davis explained, football has the power to affect or change the bad parts of modern masculinity.
Still, right now, the masculinity fostered in football locker rooms is often homophobic and incredibly misogynistic. And sometimes it is downright dangerous.
And so, when we look at all the known cases of college football and sexual assault, there are certain patterns that emerge: the prevalence of gang rape, threats against the person who reported, and ease with which people avoid taking responsibility for any of it.
II.
I have collected a list of more than 115 cases of college football sexual assault allegations, spanning from 1974 to 2016. Over the last four decades, through each one of these, coaches, athletic directors, universities, the NCAA, police who investigate the crimes, the media who cover it, and the public who they all report to have learned how to think and talk about the athletes involved, the women who report the crime(s), and every institution that’s implicated when there’s a failure in the system.
One hundred and ten is not such a high number considering how many college football programs there are and how many men play on each team. But the numbers are not hard and fast. First, many of these cases involve multiple players. Also, the idea that you could be raped by someone other than a stranger is a fairly new concept in and of itself. The term “acquaintance rape” first appeared in print in the late 1970s and didn’t go mainstream for another decade. A ripple effect of this is that sexual assault is woefully underreported, especially on college campuses. Finally, it’s much easier for me to locate cases from the last decade or so, since newspapers and TV stations began putting their content online. My Google alerts over the last three years have flagged cases that probably would have gone completely under my radar in the past. The list then is top-heavy over the last few years.
Here’s a sense of the problem, though. In 2015, there were allegations against players at Florida International University, the University of Tennessee, UCLA, and Santa Barbara City College. 2014 saw cases at Utah State, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, Tulane, Bowling Green, Tulsa, Culver-Stockon College, Miami, Vanderbilt, Kansas, New Mexico, Ole Miss, and Eastern Washington University. In 2013, there were cases reported at Baylor, Brown, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Pacific University, Ohio State, Arizona State, Vanderbilt University, McGill University, Wisconsin, and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2012, there were allegations against players at the University of Texas, Appalachian State University, Baylor, Old Dominion, Morehouse, and the US Naval Academy.
You get the idea.
III.
Many of the sexual assault cases I’ve found involve multiple athletes as either participants in or witnesses to the sexual violence, which is a particular facet of hypermasculine spaces. In Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, Peggy Reeves Sanday says that this behavior is common when there is “a group of persons associated by or as if by ties of brotherhood.”[16] These men end up “bonding through sex.” Participating in a gang rape “operates to glue the male group as a unified entity,” Sanday argues. “It establishes fraternal bonding and helps boys to make the transition to their vision of a powerful manhood—in unity against women, one against the world.”
That multiple football players would participate in sexual violence together, a communal act that Sanday says is based around asserting one’s masculinity, makes sense considering how important masculinity is to football (and football to masculinity).
There are so many cases of gang rapes involving college football players. It is a depressing and terrifying phenomenon. The earliest case I can locate at all is from Notre Dame in 1974; it happens to be an allegation of gang rape. The New York Times reported it this way in 1976:
An 18-year-old South Bend high school student alleged that she had been raped by six black football players, that as many as 20 of the Fighting Irish were aware of the incident and that some even looked on. The unsigned complaint was made by the blonde senior at Sound Bend (Ind.) Memorial Hospital. She had driven there following the alleged rape—at a Notre Dame dormitory—to be examined for injuries. Although unharmed physically, the girl was later temporarily placed under psychiatric care. [17]
A university administrator called the woman “a queen of the slums with a mattress tied to her back.” The charges were dropped quickly, “the girl and her parents [having] requested that no charges be filed against the players—one of whom was her boyfriend.” The players were suspended for a year, though, for violating school rules. The New York Times piece from 1976 was about their return to the team and the coach who helped them through it all. It’s a piece that celebrates the coach for supporting these players through a difficult time, one created, the paper says, by the “so-called victim [who] was described as a football groupie.”
But in 2012, Melinda Henneberger, in a piece at the National Catholic Reporter (and about a case at Notre Dame from 2010), revealed that a woman had contacted her to say that in 1976, “two of the same young men accused in the [1974 case], along with a third man, were caught in the act of raping her in her dorm room.”[18] That woman was told by “a top St. Mary’s official” that “one of the men had raped another St. Mary’s student as well. And then? ‘I was told to shut up and mind my own business,’ and she did, until now.”
These two earliest cases could almost be described as generic ones. They are part of a pattern that has repeated for decades.
The list of these cases is truly devastating in its length. It is worth taking in how often this happens.
IV.
In 1980, a running back at Oregon, along with three former teammates, was indicted on charges of first-degree sodomy and coercion from a case dating back to 1978, and the Eugene police were looking into possible charges for other players, as they “had talked to a number of women who said they were rape victims.”[19]
In 1979, seven players at Kentucky were suspended after they were charged with raping another student. Two years after that, another two players were indicted on sexual assault charges.[20]
In 1986, after a woman reported that four Berkeley players had raped her, the school decided that adequate punishment was for the players to apologize to the woman, go to counseling, and do community service work.[21] The players were never charged. The same year, four