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Now welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with clips today from an edge of sports radio, the Young Turks, economic update on the media, op-docs, counterspin and intersection.

The news of the last week is why we decided to do this show in the first place. This show is about the collision of sports and politics and rarely, not just in recent times, but in history, have you seen that collision happen more dramatically than what took place at Missouri with the football team going on strike and refusing to play, unless Tim Wolf, the president of the school, stepped down the road.

What we saw here were the chickens coming home to roost, not just the chickens, but the billion dollar golden goose of college sports coming home to roost.

To take a step back, I'm guessing people know the story, but there have been incidents going on for years at Missouri about racism, racist harassment of students, but also about homophobia, also about gender violence, a lot of these stories and a lot of dissatisfaction among the student body, feeling like they're marginalized.

They're marginalized and feeling like they're not being heard, but the centrality of that anger really was the black student body at Missouri.

Then you had Jonathan Butler, a grad student at Missouri, 25 years old, go on a hunger strike, and this was on October 23rd, and he said he would not eat until school president Tim Wolf stepped down.

Now several members of the football team went and visited with Jonathan Butler, they spoke to him, and they came back to their coach Gary Pinkle as he described later with they had tears in their eyes, and they said they felt like they could no longer be silent.

They felt like they could no longer be on the sideline, and they effectively went on strike.

It started Saturday night with the announcement that the black and brown players on that team would not play next week against BYU, and then that extended to the entire team.

And a photo that went from Gary Pinkle's own Twitter account of everybody standing together, and they quoted Martin Luther King, they said,

Injustice somewhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and this is an utterly incredible story, this is history writ large.

And I think why I said that this is the chicken's coming home to roost, or the golden goose coming home to roost, is that Missouri is not exceptional in this regard.

But Tim Wolf made sure that football was at the economic, psychological, and hell you might even want to say religious center of the campus.

I mean, Tim Wolf said he was going to cut healthcare, he was going to cut academic programs, but he was going to give $72 million to refurbish the football stadium.

He said, we are in the southeastern conference, and we have to start acting like the southeastern conference.

Well, guess what? For a lot of students, that just was not okay.

But what it did was it put the football players in a prime position to not just enact change, but actually topple a school president.

Tim Wolf makes $459,000 a year, or at least he did.

If the team did not play this weekend against BYU, the school would have forfeited $1 million, just that week alone.

The football players, they made this decision to not play until Jonathan Butler was done with his hunger strike and until Tim Wolf stepped down.

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