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Former Northwestern QB talks about Ohio State, California’s passed bill regarding name, image, likeness
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Back from 2010-13, Northwestern had Kain Colter playing the quarterback position. Colter may not have put up eye-popping numbers, but he did his job as a member of the Wildcats.
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Colter won a Gator Bowl at Northwestern, came up “short” on a controversial call where he didn’t get a first down against Ohio State in 2013 and, most notably, helped lead the unionization push at Northwestern in 2014.
Earlier this week, Colter was interviewed by The Daily Northwestern and below is a snippet of him talking about the unionization push:
The Daily: Looking back to the unionization push in 2014, how do you feel about it now?
Colter: “I think a lot of the criticism we faced was that this is just at Northwestern, it’s one private school within a sports league that’s composed of mostly public institutions and therefore if we were able to negotiate or collectively bargain just so that one institution within the Big Ten — within the NCAA — that it wouldn’t bring, I forget what the judge said, it wouldn’t bring stability in the labor relations or something like that.
“And I think a lot of it was portrayed in the media as ‘Kain’s just attacking the school,’ rather than the players are actually trying to get meaningful participation in the decision making process of all these things that are gonna be affecting their lives.”
The Daily: How do you feel about the way you were portrayed through all that?
Colter: “I don’t know. In some ways, it followed the typical union-bashing campaign, carried out. Third partying the union, that was a lot of the rhetoric, just talking about how this is one disgruntled employee that had the issue instead of 98 percent of the team signing cards. They did do a good job of controlling the narrative and going along the lines of a regular union bashing campaign, but that only came after we won the regional decision.
“I don’t know, it was also difficult because I just wasn’t with the guys on the team as that whole process was playing out as much as I wanted to be. I wasn’t able to communicate with them the way I’d like, and talk about some of these anti-union arguments that they were receiving — and that their parents were receiving. It would have been nice to actually be on campus at the time and try to combat the propaganda that they were receiving on the other end.”
More from Colter’s interview where he talked about Ohio State, the Gator Bowl he won and other topics can be found here.
Kevin covers Big Ten football for Saturday Tradition.