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1 For Martin Jenkins and other members of the 2014 Clemson Tigers football team, it was a simple rallying cry, but others saw a financial opportunity. The three-word phrase—“We too deep”—began as an internal mantra, chanted by players in the locker room and on the sidelines, but it took on a life of its own when Jenkins transformed it into a song. He bought a camera off Craigslist and coaxed a handful of his teammates to help him produce a music video.
2 “It was just something I did on a whim, but it ended up blowing up,” Jenkins, who was a four-year defensive back at Clemson and is now an insurance agent in Atlanta, told The Guardian.
3 The song became an anthem of sorts for the team and the video went viral. And in the football-obsessed college town, it didn’t take long for merchants to cash in on the phrase.
4 “I saw people with ‘We too deep’ shirts on and I asked them, ‘Hey, where’d you get that from?’ One person pointed me to a website. One person pointed me to a local T-shirt vendor,” Jenkins recalled. Initially, Jenkins was flattered. “I thought it was really cool,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, they’re selling something that I helped bring to the forefront.’” Looking to get a piece of the action, Jenkins tried to sell his own line of shirts, but was quickly stymied by Clemson’s compliance officers, who told him that the sales would be a violation of NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) rules, which prohibit college athletes from earning money from their playing careers. “That was one of the major inspirations for me to effect change,” Jenkins said. “It was just insane to me that it could be a rule for so long.”
5 For more than a century, the NCAA has served as the chief governing body of college sports in the United States. Comprised of three divisions, the organization regulates more than 1,000 institutions nationwide and has swelled into a multi-billion-dollar outfit, as media companies have paid ever-increasing sums for the broadcast rights to marquee competitions like the College Football Playoff and the NCAA basketball tournament (better known as March Madness). But players like Jenkins had long been denied their share of the spoils, due to the NCAA’s ban against paying student athletes.
6 Jenkins’ seven-year battle culminated in June, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the former athletes. It was the start of what has been a summer of upheaval for college sports in the United States. A week after the high court’s decision, the NCAA bowed to mounting political pressure by announcing new rules that allow student athletes to make money off their names, images and likeness (commonly known by the abbreviation “NIL”), a policy that would have enabled Jenkins to capitalize on the success of his music video.
7 The NCAA has earned a legion of adversaries through its insistence that student athletes retain their “amateur” status, which the association has long held up as incompatible to compensation. Supreme Court justices were unimpressed with that point during oral arguments in March, grilling the NCAA’s attorney and telegraphing their unanimous decision that would arrive months later. While the revenues generated by big time college football programs are used to subsidize the often-enormous salaries of coaches and the world-class training facilities on campus, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said that “the athletes themselves have a pretty hard life.”
8 For his part, Jenkins said that although he came from an upper-middle class family, many of his teammates struggled financially during their time at Clemson.
9 “They face training requirements that leave little time or energy for study, constant pressure to put sports above study, pressure to drop out of hard majors and hard classes, really shockingly low graduation rates. Only a tiny percentage ever go on to make any money in professional sports,” Alito said. “So, the argument is they are recruited, they’re used up, and then they’re cast aside without even a college degree...how can this be defended in the name of amateurism?”
10 Critics of the NCAA reacted with glee over the justices’ tough questioning, and even more after the ruling and NIL decision were delivered in June. But there remains an old guard for whom “amateurism” is a sacred cow. Dabo Swinney, the head football coach at Clemson who recruited Jenkins, has long expressed opposition to the idea of paying players. Swinney, whose $8.3 million annual salary makes him one of the highest paid coaches in college football, clarified his stance last month, saying that he is still “against professionalizing college athletics” but that he welcomes the NIL rule.