On Wednesday, a Pennsylvania jury awarded a former Penn State athletics doctor $5.25 million after he claimed the school fired him in 2019 in retaliation for arguing with football coach James Franklin over player treatment and whether or not athletes were fit to play.
Officially, the lawsuit was filed against Penn State Health’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. Franklin and the university were dismissed as defendants due to the statute of limitations. This whole story from ESPN’s Paula Lavigne is really worth a read to understand the full scope of the trial, but there’s one part I can’t get out of my head.
Among the appalling, but rather unsurprising, revelations from the testimony was just how much of a concern spatting — the practice of taping an athlete’s ankle around their cleats — remains in college athletics.
Didn’t we do this a decade ago? Don’t apparel companies have bigger things to worry about, like say, whether or not their jerseys are transparent or legible?
The controversy essentially boils down to apparel companies whining about spatting covering up their logos. This is, of course, absurd, but it mattered enough for Nike to write it into Penn State’s contract.
Multiple witnesses discussed a clause in the university’s contract with Nike, which was up to $1.6 million by 2018, that prohibited “spatting,” or the practice of wrapping athletic tape around athletes’ ankles for greater support. The tape wasn’t allowed to cover the Nike logo on any footwear, according to witness testimony regarding the contract, which interfered with the actions of athletic trainers and other medical staff.
[Dr. Peter] Seidenberg said a Nike representative spoke to a group of athletic trainers, listed the athletes who had been spatted the weekend before “and asked why the athletes were spatted and said that the athletes should not be spatted.” He said Franklin required notice each week of players who were designated to be taped.
“Coach Franklin did not want the medical staff to spat,” Seidenberg testified. “He was concerned about the Nike contract.”
USA TODAY Sports previously investigated the issue of spatting in college football back in 2013, but Penn State was not required to provide copies of their apparel contracts due to state open records laws despite being a public university.
USA TODAY Sports obtained the apparel contracts for 54 public schools that were in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conference last season. (Per state public records laws, Penn State and Pittsburgh were not required to supply contracts.) Of those contracts, 22 did not allow spatting and 32 provided for it in cases where it is medically necessary.
That those agreements inhibit the taping of ankles, including financial penalties on multimillion dollar contracts, illustrates what is seen as the ever-expanding influence of shoe companies in collegiate sports. It also raises questions about the release of players’ private health information and calls attention to the players’ lack of control over their own bodies.
It is now 2024 and we’re still talking about the same dumb issue, but it sure seems like change is inevitable. The NCAA is rapidly evolving before our eyes, amateurism is on its death bed and players have more autonomy than ever.
So let’s put this in terms apparel companies can understand.
Yes, spatting may or may not provide more support in certain situations. Yes, your logo is very important. But let’s imagine a situation where a player who isn’t allowed to wrap their ankles over their cleats suffers an injury to the joint. How good is that logo going to look when the broadcast is zooming in on the cleat to get a better look at what went wrong?
Wait, we don’t even need to answer that one. We already saw it in 2019 with Zion Williamson at Duke when he blew out of his Nike sneaker in the year’s most-anticipated game against North Carolina. Nike was fortunate to avoid the worst-case scenario of Williamson severely injuring himself and still took a nasty public relations hit.
There is simply no reason any apparel company should be telling athletic trainers what they can and cannot do. There is certainly no reason for Nike to send trainers a list of players who were spatted in a given game and tsk-tsk them into making sure it doesn’t happen again.
You would think companies like Nike, with all of their vast resources, would be able to come up with a better solution than threatening schools who cover up their logos. Or at least heed the suggestions made a decade ago when this last popped up.
Is there a reason Nike hasn’t created athletic tape with it’s logo all over to allow athletes to continue spatting and show that they’re wearing a specific brand? Why hasn’t Nike just added logos to parts of the cleat that aren’t spatted? Does the company really think people at home can’t connect that a team wearing Nike jerseys and pants is also wearing Nike cleats?
What are we even doing here?
The fact that this is still an issue is baffling when the solutions have been readily available all along. It’s a new world in college athletics, one that apparel companies helped revolutionize. Now it’s their turn to grow up.
