Editor’s note: This is the third of three stories that look back on the protests at the University of Missouri from 2015 and the Mizzou football team’s involvement.
Once the dust settled at the University of Missouri following the racially focused protests in fall 2015, once the football team decided to boycott, once UM System President Tim Wolfe resigned and once Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike ended, the university’s next step was to focus on preventing it from happening again.
The aftermath of 2015 resulted in large financial losses for Mizzou and dips in enrollment across the board. From 2015 to 2016, enrollment dropped 22.7% at Mizzou. It fell another 14.6% from 2016 to 2017. A total of $101 million was trimmed from the entire University of Missouri System budget by the Missouri General Assembly in the summer of 2017, resulting in the loss of 474 jobs.
While not all eight of Concerned Student 1950’s demands were met in the years after the protests, the university implemented a mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion workshop called “Citizenship at Mizzou” for all incoming students; it hired its first chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer in 2016; and it added resources for students of color to help rebuild its reputation.
Mizzou’s boycott inspired other football programs to step up and pursue change at their universities, including Oklahoma State, Mississippi State and Kansas State in the years after. Several players at the University of Texas refused to participate in recruiting incoming players or show up at donor-related events in June 2020 if university and athletics officials failed to respond to a list of demands geared toward supporting Black students. That included the renaming of buildings honoring racist figures and donating 0.5% of the annual athletic department budget to the Black Lives Matter movement and Black advocacy organizations.
Right around that time, the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked a wave of marches and protests across the country. Mizzou again took a stance.
Members of the football team, including coach Eli Drinkwitz, marched to the Boone County Courthouse on June 3, 2020, and took a knee for 8 minutes, 46 seconds — the exact amount of time ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd’s neck to the concrete with his knee.
The landscape of college sports and politics in the U.S. has shifted dramatically in the decade since 2015. Student-athletes are now being compensated and have more financial ties, while executive orders from President Donald Trump and Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe have stripped away DEI initiatives from universities.
That prompts the question: Is a boycott in the vein of Mizzou football from a decade ago even possible in 2026?
Six players from fall 2015 gave their insight.
Introduction of NIL, and a look at post-football life before it
The state of college athletics, and particularly college football, is entirely different than it was a decade ago. First came the changes in the transfer portal during and immediately following COVID-19. In 2024, the NCAA removed its previous restrictions and allowed an athlete to transfer multiple times without losing any playing time. But the seismic shift came on July 1, 2021, with the introduction of the NIL ruling, which allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. Today’s student-athletes seem to have more autonomy.
In some ways, this is true. Players have far more financial freedom than they once did. Even though under-the-table deals certainly took place for the best of the best in decades past, there wasn't a way for athletes to receive direct compensation other than scholarships. The money universities received from their fame and talent far outweighed their individual gain. Top programs were bringing in more than $90 million in profits, pre-2020.
The disparity between profit for a program versus the individual even applied to professional leagues decades ago. Willie Mack, an assistant professor in the Black Studies department at Mizzou, is familiar with it in his own family. Clinton Jones, a professional running back from 1967 to 1973, often had to find other jobs in the offseason to keep afloat financially, all while his body was being broken down. The difference in 50 years is stark.
“Athletics for a lot of Black people is just a continuation of this idea of slavery, as kind of gladiators on this field battle, where their owners are getting richer and richer,” said Mack, whose research centers around race, among other topics. “The players are now getting richer and richer. They’re making lots of generational wealth. But in the ’70s and ’80s, they weren’t doing that.”
Today, professional athletes can earn millions quickly. Luther Burden III, who was selected by the Chicago Bears in the second round at No. 39 overall in the 2025 NFL Draft, signed a four-year, $10.96 million contract. Student-athletes, in many cases, are also making millions with NIL deals. When quarterback Carson Beck transferred to Miami in 2025, he received an NIL package worth $4 million to $6 million.
A select group of pre-NIL college players are starting to see some of that money. Those who competed at any time from 2016 through the present day are eligible for compensation back in damages in the $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement that received final approval June 6, 2025. That number will be dispersed in back damages over the next 10 years.
But the amount the athletes who are eligible will get individually still pales in comparison to what could’ve been in most cases.
Back in 2015, Cork Gaines of Business Insider determined that the average salary of a Division I FBS football player should’ve been $149,569 per year. But for a top-end talent at Mizzou, that number would’ve certainly increased.
Seniors on the 2015 Mizzou team, such as former safety Ian Simon, missed receiving compensation from the settlement by just a year.
“I wish I had it when I was playing,” he said. “Life would’ve looked a lot different if I had NIL.”
A common issue that student-athletes face, especially before NIL, is finding a direction in life post-football. For those who couldn’t make it to the professional level, it was like starting entirely fresh. Part of it was finding things they could succeed at other than football, but it was also a search to fill the void left behind.
Former Mizzou wide receiver and three-star recruit DeSean Blair dealt with that very situation. His time with the program didn’t pan out — concussion issues began in his freshman year after a car accident Sept. 18, 2015, involving three teammates, and he only appeared in three more games that season. Then offensive coordinator Josh Heupel, under coach Barry Odom in 2016, didn’t see a fit for the redshirt sophomore in his system.
Blair finished his football career with Valdosta State at the Division II level starting in fall 2017. Circumstances arose that didn’t keep him around long enough to finish his degree, leaving him lost in finding a new direction without football — the game he ate, slept and breathed for so long.
“That is the struggle I’m still dealing with to this very day,” Blair said. “It’s hard when you grow up literally playing football since you can remember anything consciously … and then you get to a point where football hasn’t really made you any money and you can’t do it anymore. It’s like, ‘Well, what do I do now? What am I?’ It’s a very confusing feeling.”
Blair initially wanted to find a path in the entertainment industry — something about which he could feel passionate. But unable to find a way, he started building a career through trade work. Now, he works as the head of security for a Gucci store in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida.
“It’s been kind of depressing,” Blair said, bluntly. “You feel like you want to live up to still doing something great. A lot of times you have to be realistic. … These bills still have to be paid at the end of the day.”
Not all have been able to find a satisfying direction post-football. Some faced financial struggles. Former defensive lineman Marcell Frazier, who earned a master’s degree in education at Mizzou, said former teammates reached out for help; he has lent them money at times. There is a noticeable difference of success to non-success within the team post-college, but many players couldn’t control their situation. Not everyone had the chance to get drafted nor achieve a master’s degree.
While it won’t eliminate the issues entirely, the added financial freedom of NIL grants student-athletes more assistance in finding a new direction — a stark contrast from the past.
“Is a broken free agent system ideal?” Frazier asked. “Maybe not. But I’d rather see at least a couple dozen of these youths get rich instead of having them all be poor and broken like it was my years and significantly worse previous years.”
NIL consequences
At least in a financial sense, players didn’t have the same risks for boycotting in 2015 as they likely would today.
Before enrolling at Mizzou and the program, players signed multiple agreements that included compliance regulations, privacy rights and other student-athlete provisions, detailed in coach Gary Pinkel’s 2017 memoir, “The 100-Yard Journey: A Life in Coaching and Battling for the Win.” That didn’t include an agreement that says they’re obligated to participate in team activities or have a risk of losing scholarships, but the boycott might’ve sparked other programs to change their contract language since.
One of the driving forces behind Wolfe's quick resignation following the boycott was the money at risk. If Mizzou didn’t show up in Kansas City to play BYU on Nov. 14, 2015, it would’ve paid a $1 million fine to its opponent. But in 2026, many players make that amount or exceed it in just a season with NIL packages.
“Back then, (money) wasn’t involved on our side, so we didn’t really give a shit because it wasn’t affecting our pockets,” Simon said. “Our pockets were already empty. Kids nowadays, I can guarantee, will strongly consider their pockets. … I’m sure in some of these contracts something like that has got to be in there, because nobody wants to see what happened at Mizzou happen again.”
Having those financial ties complicates a player’s incentive to be an activist on social issues. Especially for those who escaped lower socioeconomic backgrounds, losing out on life-changing cash might not be worth the risk. If a sponsor doesn’t like what a player speaks out about, it’s possible the company would pull the money out right from under them.
“The other side of the coin is there’s a lot more autonomy and player empowerment, but you’re empowered to make money, and you’re empowered to choose your situation where you make money,” said Jacob Bogage, a former White House economic policy correspondent at The Washington Post who was a Missourian sports reporter in 2015. “How are you going to make that income if you go through with an action like this?”
With future NFL aspirations on the horizon, too, that’s a fallout players from the 2015 team experienced that affected their draft stock and potential earnings(SEE Part 1). Now that players can make significant money in college through NIL, the financial risk already begins freshman year, if not earlier. Potentially losing out on generational wealth because they’re standing up for something might not be worth the risk.
On the surface level, it would make sense that player autonomy has increased with the added financial benefits. But with all the sides involved now looking to make money, players might not actually have all that much power.
The transfer portal has given college athletes freedom to change programs easily. Since its introduction, it has developed fewer barriers and aligned similar to the free agency periods in professional leagues. That’s a battle coaches are currently having to tackle, but there’s no sign that player movement is going to be restricted anytime soon.
“An entire generation of college football coaches has had 10 years to look at this and say, ‘I have to create an environment such that kids won’t leave my program,’” Bogage said, “‘and if kids have concerns, they feel like they’re being addressed,’ because they can transfer for any reason.”
But the same issues could arise at the next program. The money doesn’t have to keep flowing, and a program change doesn’t always fix every problem a player has. The system is still the system.
A player attributed the boycott as the moment that sparked college athletes getting paid six years later. While that may not be entirely true, schools can now legally bind players to their playing duties through formal contract agreements and potentially make player protests more difficult to enact.
If student-athletes were getting paid in 2015, the football team’s involvement in the protests at Mizzou probably would not have looked the same. Players then all received similar scholarship money and didn’t enjoy the benefits of sponsorship deals, whereas players now have that access. Allowing another protest like the one at Mizzou could be a risk that programs want to ensure won’t happen.
If the college landscape looked the way it does today, the boycott just might not have been possible. The racial equity and fair treatment of students of color Mizzou football fought for 10 years ago would now be complicated by money and politics, as it would at any other university.
Excluding diversity, equity and inclusion
A decade later, the progress that Missouri’s football team helped spur in 2015 seems to be rolled back.
To begin the 2025 fall semester, the Legion of Black Collegians planned to hold a Welcome Black 2 Class Block Party on Aug. 22. But four days before, Mizzou administrators canceled the event.
UM System President Mun Choi cited that using the word “Black” in the name could give the impression that the event was solely for Black students and constituted race exclusion. The legion offered to use “Back” instead, but the university stood its ground and kept the cancellation in place. While a similar event, the Welcome Black and Gold BBQ, was still held at the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center, the legion was no longer a sponsor.
Just a year prior, the legion was forced to change the name of the Welcome Black BBQ to the Welcome Black and Gold BBQ because of similar concerns. The timing wasn’t a coincidence — this came after several changes to the university’s DEI office.
In March 2023, Mizzou eliminated the use of DEI statements in hiring policy. A year later, the vice chancellor of the university’s DEI department, Maurice Gibson, left his position after the department was dissolved. Certain race-based scholarships and first-year student success programs, including the Mizzou Black Men’s and Women’s Initiative, were removed to comply with then-Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s crusade.
Missouri isn’t alone in this. According to a study from the Chronicle of Higher Education (last updated Feb. 10), DEI changes have been put into effect at 424 college campuses in 47 states and the District of Columbia. This has increased as the Trump administration has pushed the pace of action against DEI initiatives.
“The pace of change ramped up in 2025, when the Trump administration targeted DEI at colleges and universities through a series of executive actions and threatened institutions that didn’t comply with a loss of federal funding,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Many of the changes that were outlined in Concerned Student 1950’s list of demands back in 2015 haven’t exactly been answered in the time since. The group’s fourth demand was a 10% increase in Black faculty and campus staff by the 2017-18 academic year, but the proportion of Black professors at Mizzou rose by less than 1 percent between 2013 to 2023.
While the football boycott and protests in 2015 led to short-term results, Mack suggests the long-term outlook can be put into question with recent policy, similarly to other examples throughout U.S. history.
“This is the long history of activism, particularly around Black activism and civil rights,” Mack said. “You have some gains in the short term, but then you always have a backlash at some point down in the future.”
Keeping player protest alive
Athlete involvement has historically been one of the most powerful forms of protest in the past century. The University of San Francisco football team led a boycott in 1951, when it refused an Orange Bowl bid rather than compete without its two African American players — Ollie Matson and Burl Toler. Other examples, such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ raised black-gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics and Wyoming’s Black 14 in 1969, have helped shape societal change and raised issues to a higher platform.
Mizzou football made that list in 2015.
Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s movement in the NFL a year later in 2016 grew the reach of Black Lives Matter protests. During this year’s Winter Olympics, several U.S. athletes voiced concerns over recent incidents involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The list of social issues to speak out about hasn’t lessened in the last decade, and its presence in sports hasn’t totally died down. Athletes can make tangible change.
“I think we all know that football players are extremely powerful forces,” said Peter Baugh, a staff writer for The Athletic and former Missourian sports reporter in 2019. “College football is a huge money-making entity in this country, and if you disrupt that, you can make a lot of things happen.”
Would the fall 2015 football team boycott happen today?
Of the six players from 2015 who weighed in, they all agreed that it couldn’t. Much of that sentiment came down to NIL — despite the positives it has brought to college football, it might actually limit player protest.
“There’s too much money involved,” a player said.
It certainly does make a boycott more complicated and less feasible to form at the college level. It probably couldn’t be replicated in the same way in 2026 given the various factors now intertwined with athletes. But that’s not to say it can’t entirely happen in some capacity.
Before the NCAA ruled in favor of NIL, it was a player protest that helped push the decision to be made and often spread behind the hashtag #NotNCAAProperty. Much like with Mizzou’s 2015 protest, a list of demands was made that were later met.
“I think it’d be much different,” Simon said. “I don’t think it’d be handled the same way. It would take some real collaboration and coming together to have something like that happen today.”
The way to keep 2015 legitimized at Mizzou is to keep learning about it. In Mack’s “Black Freedom Movement” course, he typically shows a documentary simply titled “Concerned Student 1950” to remind or teach students about the protests. Through avenues such as this, the importance of what happened stays alive in Columbia, even if the university doesn’t often want to remember it.
“This is part of the school’s history. It has to be acknowledged,” Mack said. “Certain people might not want to hear about it, but it’s important to hear about it because it’s the only way you can really heal. If anything, we should be celebrating those students for being so brave.”
Remembering will be part of ensuring player protest can continue in the current climate. The college football landscape is drastically different, but activism can still take shape in some form, even if it looks to be exceedingly more difficult.
When athletes are able to stand up for things outside of their sport, it speaks beyond just their physical prowess and abilities. It shows courage and a drive to make the world better.
The lasting image from fall 2015 isn’t the football team on the field — it’s the 31 Black players who all locked arms at the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center and demonstrated their power.
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