Minnesota players have ended their boycott and will indeed play in the Dec. 27 Holiday Bowl. Turns out reading an 80-page report describing in painstaking detail of an alleged sexual assault committed by your teammates tends to soften feelings of revolution.
But another factor contributing to the stakeout: Tracy Claeys‘s job.
The Minnesota head coach told WCCO radio he informed his players there was “a great chance I could lose my job over this.”
“That was the commitment on my part. I knew that was a possibility in happening,” Claeys told the station, via the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “That’s why that meeting took a long time, to go through the fallouts.”
Even still, Claeys insisted he was okay risking his $1.4 million a year job to show solidarity with his players. (Claeys told WCCO he will donate $50,000 of his own money to support victims of sexual assault.)
“This was not about getting somebody replaced. President Kaler and the Board [of Regents] have been very supportive of athletics, as has the whole university.... The thing was on the due process and how this all came about.”
Have never been more proud of our kids. I respect their rights & support their effort to make a better world! 〽️🏈
— Tracy Claeys (@t_claeys) December 16, 2016
Unrelated to this week’s stakeout, rumors in the wind throughout the fall have been that new Minnesota AD Mark Coyle has been looking for a reason to get rid of Claeys. Coyle did not hire Claeys, who was elevated to head coach to replace Jerry Kill in the middle of last season and given a 3-year contract with a low buyout. Claeys, however, won his way to temporary job security, posting a better-than-expected 8-4 mark.
Having the first team in half a century to protest its way out of a bowl game -- in support of alleged perpetrators of sexual assault, no less -- would have given Coyle significant cover to replace Claeys, however, and the coach was well aware of that.