University of Minnesota football players knew there would be a backlash when they threatened to boycott last month’s Holiday Bowl. What they didn’t anticipate was why.

“After we made up our minds, we told the team, ‘If we take this stand, it’s gonna be huge. There’s going to be a lot of backlash,’ ” said junior Gaelin Elmore, one of roughly 10 Gophers players who orchestrated the short-lived boycott. “We didn’t know what type of backlash because we don’t have insight into how sexual assault victims feel.”

Elmore, 21, spoke to the Pioneer Press on Thursday in an effort to explain why the entire football team protested when 10 teammates were suspended on Dec. 13 in the wake of the school’s investigation into an alleged sexual assault that occurred off campus on Sept. 2.

The players ultimately decided to play in the Dec. 27 bowl game, and beat 10-point favorite Washington State 17-12, but not before being pilloried for their decision to take a stand on what they considered unfair treatment — during and after the investigation — of their suspended teammates in a sexual assault case.

“We were 108 young adult, adolescent teen males trying to do this, and we had no outside voices in the room,” Elmore said. “So, obviously, we slipped up along the way.”

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Elmore, a defensive end from Somerset, Wis., insists the team’s decision to protest was not in vain, and that he’d do it again — only differently. He condemned a series of electronic messages sent by players on the night of the incident, and said it remains unclear how many, if any, Gophers players will transfer in the wake of coach Tracy Claeys and his staff being fired on Tuesday.

Among the reasons for the boycott: poor communication from athletics director Mark Coyle and school President Eric Kaler, and racial issues raised by the more secretive way the wrestling team’s drug scandal was handled last spring.

Here is an edited transcript of Elmore’s conversation with the Pioneer Press, recorded Thursday at a Dinkytown coffee shop.

Pioneer Press: How did the boycott start? How many players got together?

Gaelin Elmore: The thoughts of the boycott really started after that Wednesday practice (Dec. 14) when Coyle came after our practice and spoke to us. He gave us a chance to ask questions and said he would give us answers, and at that point a lot of the guys on the team knew that he was the one that handed out the suspensions. The first two days, it was really up in the air. We were like, what is the EOAA? We really didn’t know anything about that board, so we had to do research on our own.

We told the guys from Day 1, if this stuff happened, we can’t stand by you.

So, we were like, maybe they have the power to suspend our players, and if they did, then we could understand. But we found out that Coyle was the one who handed out the suspensions. That was around the time where, publicly, he came out and said Claeys did it. We knew right away that he told Claeys he was going to do it, and Claeys, not being insubordinate, was like, “OK, you’ve made up your mind, I can’t do anything about it.” So, we knew that (Coyle) handed out the suspensions; we knew he told the public that our coach either agreed or did it himself, so that had us upset.

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Gophers in the NFL: Antoine Winfield Jr. was Sunday’s standout We were asking questions about the appeals process, he said, “I don’t understand the process so well. I can’t give you a date on the appeals.” So, guys were getting frustrated and fidgety, so someone just came out and said, “OK, forget the BS, why did you suspend our players? Because we know you did it.” And he answered, and I think this is where it really turned for the worse, he said, “Based on the information I’ve been given, I’ve come to the decision that we need to suspend the players.”

So, someone followed up with, “Well, what’s that information? Can we know anything?” And he was like, “I don’t have enough information right now to tell you that.” So, the team was like, you suspended our players based on this information, but you don’t have enough information to tell us that? That’s what set the team off, and right after that question, he left, and it was left at that.

At this point, coach Claeys isn’t even in town. He’s at San Diego at the (Holiday Bowl) press conference.

PP: So, Claeys didn’t know you were thinking of boycotting before he left?

GE: No. We didn’t talk to Claeys from Tuesday night to Thursday afternoon. He didn’t have any idea.

(Race) was big. … The wrestling team … had a pretty big investigation there, and I don’t even know who those kids are. I still don’t. (But) if you search ‘Minnesota football scandal,’ those 10 guys’ faces are up there right now. Even the white guys were like, ‘This isn’t right.’

So, the team went home and people were mad and a bunch of us are getting text messages like, “What do we do? We’ve got to do something.” Clearly, there was something wrong in that (Coyle) doesn’t know what’s going on and he’s still acting like we didn’t know what the situation was. No one told us. He never said there was a report, never said anything like that. So, we had no idea. We see they’ve suspended these five kids, and then they lump in another five that we didn’t even know had any connection to this at all, and their names are released to the public with no explanation of why they were suspended, so the public has the opportunity to create their own narrative — “Oh, this happened again. Is this something new? Get rid of these kids.” And 24 hours later, these kids are rapists; we have a rape culture. It was handled so poorly that it changed the whole view of our football program.

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If there was transparency, this doesn’t happen. But you suspended us, then throw it out to the public, then the public creates its own idea of us, and you still don’t say anything when that starts to snowball out of control? We were like, “OK, we’re by ourselves.”

I was getting all kinds of texts: “This is crazy, we’ve got to do something about it. I don’t think this is right.’ And someone threw out the idea of a boycott. At first, I was like, I don’t think there’s any way our team does that. I didn’t even know we were close enough. By Thursday, a bunch of people were like, “We’ve got to have a team meeting before practice to see what guys are thinking and feeling.”

PP: Were the 10 suspended players involved in this?

GE: They’re in there, too. So, people are just throwing out how they feel, and someone said, “I can’t play for the administration, knowing how they treated our teammates, and made our program look.” It was like, I don’t feel comfortable putting on that uniform and, essentially, playing for them — because they benefit from it. If we don’t go, it’s on them. This is all happening and we still haven’t seen Claeys, we still haven’t seen coaches. It’s just the team, and more and more guys are saying, “I can’t do it, either. I don’t think it’s right.” People felt like they didn’t feel right practicing and moving on and possibly going on this vacation when, possibly, 10 guys just got robbed of this experience that we worked year round on, since last December.

PP: But at any point, when Coyle comes in to explain the suspensions, did anyone think, well, he’s the AD, he knows what he’s doing?

GE: No, because his answers made it seem like he had no idea. And it was like, you’re the AD, you did this; how do you not know enough? That’s when a lot of guys were like, ‘This isn’t right.’ We had no idea. (The suspensions) came out of nowhere. If someone just has a conversation with us before (the suspensions) happen, says, “You know what? This is a Title IX, EOAA investigation, it’s really out of our hands; we’re going to suspend the guys until it’s clear,” we’d have been fine. Or even when it was released to the public, at least tell the public the kids were suspended based on the investigation that has been ongoing since Sept. 2. If that’s said, (the boycott) doesn’t happen. But none of that happened, and our team felt we had no other option.

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PP: Did you tell coach Claeys before you boycotted that you were going to boycott?

GE: After we made up our minds, we told the team, “If we take this stand, it’s gonna be huge. There’s going to be a lot of backlash.” We didn’t know what type of backlash because we don’t have insight into how sexual assault victims feel. We don’t know their thought processes, we have no connection. So, that never crossed our mind that that would be an issue. But we talked about other issues, like how we’d be the first team to boycott a bowl game, fans might turn on us. And players said, “I’m willing to take that chance to help out my team.”

PP: Do you understand, though, that people assumed you didn’t think about the alleged victim, and that made people angry? Do you understand why that might make people angry?

GE: Yes. I definitely understand that. I think some people also have to understand it’s hard to get insight into how those people might feel if you don’t know people in your own life who have gone through that. It’s bad. We acknowledge that it’s bad that it never crossed our minds, and it’s something we have to fix, as far as being active in our relationship with that side of it. Because after all this went down, I knew that if we had better knowledge of sexual assault victims, and how they feel and how they experience things, I think we would have handled it so much better, and I think that’s something that, within our program — and athletics in general, and campus-wide — that’s something we have to address. We’ve reached out to groups …

PP: You’ve reached out as players?

GE: As players, not publicly, but behind closed doors. We have to fix this.

PP: The EOAA report is leaked (Dec. 16). Did many of you guys read it?

GE: We read it then and we were like, “Yeah, this makes us look really, really bad.” But we still felt like if we could really get our message across, that what we were fighting for, that it would hurt, no doubt — that we would lose a lot of people — but we didn’t think it would be the ultimate end of what we were trying to accomplish. That morning, we read the police report, we read the court documents, so we had a pretty good understanding of what went on as far as the investigations go. The case wasn’t why we stood up. If we had seen the report, it wouldn’t have changed our stance, but it would have changed the way we negotiated.

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PP: And your (suspended) teammates didn’t share any of this information with you?

GE: Friday after it was leaked, we felt like (the boycott) was over. But as bad as the report was after getting leaked, we met again as a team Friday and came to the conclusion we were going to boycott. Because throughout the day we had met with Kaler and Coyle, and we felt like they were not cooperating, and not taking us very seriously. So, we met with them that afternoon and night. … So, we go into the staff room where a lot of this took place, and we as a council (of players) met with Kaler and Coyle and tried to come to an agreement that would have been beneficial to both sides.

We acknowledge that it’s bad that it never crossed our minds, and it’s something we have to fix …

PP: And what did you want?

GE: At that point, our team agreed that the first five (players involved in the Sept. 2 incident), they would stay suspended, and then the second five were going to be lifted, or a hearing moved up … among other things like, “You’re going to back our football team’s character publicly, that we don’t condone this” — because that’s what got misconstrued. And that we would have ways to advocate not only for our guys but for sexual assault awareness, things like that. There were a few other things, but the main was the five would stay (suspended) and the five would be lifted.

So, we were meeting with them and we talked about student privacy laws, and there were a lot of questions they just didn’t answer. Kaler was really the ring leader; Coyle was an active participant, but Kaler was really in charge. That kind of gave me a bad feeling about what was going on. They were drafting up an agreement that we were going to sign, and my phone was blowing up — because the (rest of) the team was waiting in the meeting room …

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PP: How many of you were talking to Kaler and Coyle?

GE: There were like 10 of us at this point, all upperclassmen. So, our phones are blowing up from the players in the team meeting room, and I finally look down at one and it says, “Don’t agree to anything; you can’t really trust them.” They had just seen that (the school) had released a statement saying we were unwilling to meet with them. They released that at like 6:15 (p.m.), when they were already on their way to come meet with us. We met with them at like 6:30, and the public thinks we’re uncooperative. So, our team was like, “They’re clearly trying to manipulate this. They’re lying.” So, we went back to the team meeting room to see what (players) thought.

PP: You were ready to boycott even after reading the report?

GE: Yeah, because it was never about the (assault) case for us; that wasn’t what it was, and a lot of people missed that.

PP: I don’t know that they missed it, I think they think it’s tone deaf.

GE: True.

PP: I think that was the problem — certainly for me — I think people were confused that you decided to take this stand in this case. Like the kid that got kicked off the team for fighting (on Nov. 2) …

GE: Brian Smith?

(Claeys) said it would cost him his job, and we felt if we kept his involvement as minimal as possible … like, we didn’t need a public statement (from him). Our team just felt like we needed to know he had our back behind closed doors.

PP: Was that an issue?

GE: Yeah, it was. … Brian was a really good kid, and that was his one (mistake), and they just got rid of him, and it made a lot of people mad. That made the team mad, too; it just wasn’t 10 guys. I definitely understand how people can see it as tone deaf in not acknowledging the bigger issue; but for us, we were always willing to let the (appeals) hearings happen, and whatever consequences came out of that (we would) would fully back. … We told the guys from Day 1, if this stuff happened, we can’t stand by you. That’s bottom line, because we all have mothers and sisters, aunts, nieces, that we have to be able to look in the eye.

PP: Did anyone feel, after you read the report, that you’d been betrayed by any of those guys?

GE: I don’t think so because we’ve listened to their side, and read the report, and also read the other investigations, and we see where there are discrepancies in the EOAA report. We don’t know what’s factual, but we know there are doubts, so we can’t take a stance on that report, in any case. That’s why we’ve tried very hard not to say, “These guys are innocent, why is this happening?” I think that’s why we’ve been very deliberate in saying “due process” and things like that. And I think the phrase “due process” really lulled people to sleep, and the sexual assault side is louder.

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PP: Do you feel that because there were no charges, they were exonerated?

GE: No. No. I completely understand that school (rules are) different. And we understand that the (EOAA) investigation is an investigation, and this is what they came up with. We just felt the AD, knowing what he knew prior, and with that investigation … you can’t hand out a punishment at this point. I think a lot of guys felt that they could have been added to that group text (the night of the incident) and been suspended for a year.

But the group text is really something that needs to be addressed by our program and our culture. That’s something concrete (in the report) that’s just not acceptable. The fault is on us a hundred percent. We know that’s something we need to handle. That’s definitely not OK.

PP: Where is the team now? Are guys going to leave …

GE: A lot of guys are mad that the coaches were fired because we knew they didn’t have involvement in what happened, and we know that this boycott is really what got them fired. We acted on our own. There was nothing coach Claeys could do.

The only group that stood up for us during this whole thing was our staff, and they just got rid of them.

PP: Did he tell you not to do it?

GE: Yeah, he came in that Thursday, when he got back from (the news conference in) San Diego, and our mind was made up. He was like, “I know a lot of stuff is going on, I think there are some things we can do to combat it, but I think what’s most important right now is that we stay unified.” But we had already made up our minds.

He said it would cost him his job, and we felt if we kept his involvement as minimal as possible … like, we didn’t need a public statement (from him). Our team just felt like we needed to know he had our back behind closed doors. If we had that, we didn’t need coaches to take a stand for us — and a lot of them didn’t, because we didn’t ask them to. So, we felt if this is our thing alone, they can’t be tied to it. Honestly, even after it all came down, after the bowl game I didn’t think it was an option anymore. I didn’t think it was something they could do, because after that boycott, our program is as close as it’s ever been.

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PP: How much did race play a role in the decision to boycott?

GE: It was big, because we also looked at something that happened a few months ago with the wrestling team. They had a pretty big investigation there, and I don’t even know who those kids are. I still don’t. If you search “Minnesota football scandal,” those 10 guys’ faces are up there right now. So, our team was like, “This isn’t right.” (The wrestlers’) names were protected, and their faces were protected. We brought that up with Kaler and Coyle. … The fact that there was no attempt to protect (the football players) was unbelievable to us.

Our team is predominately black, and we have a bond. Even the white guys were like, “This isn’t right. This one thing is bigger than our team.” It wasn’t just something we could sit back and take.

(We wanted) among other things like, “You’re going to back our football team’s character publicly, that we don’t condone this” — because that’s what got misconstrued.

PP: You’re directly criticizing your AD here, and your school president; are you worried about that?

GE: I have been, but it comes down to someone has to do it, someone attached to our program. I told my teammates, once we got into this fight, that I was going to do everything in my power to stand up for them. I’ve been very critical of Kaler and Coyle to their faces, in negotiations; I expect I have the freedom to do that without any repercussions.

PP: Do you want to stay at Minnesota?

GE: I do, because I love this team and I view myself as a big brother to a lot of these guys, and it would look bad just to up and leave at this point. But it also comes down to if I feel those 10 guys were wronged. I don’t know how many guys on our team can play for an administration that we can’t necessarily know we can trust.

PP: How many people are talking about leaving?

GE: It’s hard to say because we’re not all here yet. We haven’t met. There are texts going back and forth, but it’s not like we can have a team meeting and say, “What do you guys think?”

PP: Will you do that when school starts, on Jan. 17?

GE: I want to, and I think a lot of other guys want to, but we might have a new coach by then. It might be hard to call a players-only meeting once the coach is signed and say, “Who wants to leave?” That’s why I never thought the coaches would be fired, because I knew it would drive a huge wedge into this program, because the only group that stood up for us during this whole thing was our staff, and they just got rid of them. So, we’re like, who else is here for us? The regents have been very good to us; we know they’re going to look out for the best interests of this university. But other than that, we don’t know. A lot of people say that bridge needs to be mended, and it does — especially if a lot of guys are going to stay — I just don’t know how it’s done. Guys are really, really upset right now.

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PP: So, you don’t think there is a culture of disrespect for women in the program?

GE: No, not at all. Coach (Jerry) Kill instilled it. He always told us, “Women are always right.” That’s something that we all believe. Coaches bring their wives, their kids, their daughters; we go to coaches’ houses. I don’t think as a father, a husband, you would bring your family into a rape culture. People can think whatever they think, but we don’t condone it, and if someone were open about that, in our program, they wouldn’t last very long.

PP: How much will the appeals play a role in players’ futures here?

GE: I really don’t think the appeals will mean that much because our stand was never on the case itself. I think it keeps coming back to that: It was never about the case, really. If anything, the hearings can help our image, but I don’t think it helps with relationships because for a lot of those guys, the damage is already done. That’s what we wanted fixed. … It hurts me when I meet someone new and they ask me, “Were you one of those guys?” That’s a pretty big stain on our culture. We’re now viewed as pro-rape, and it’s really just not true.

People can think whatever they think, but we don’t condone (disrespect toward women), and if someone were open about that, in our program, they wouldn’t last very long.

PP: But had you not decided to boycott, that wouldn’t be the case. I think you misunderstood what might happen, or didn’t see it coming.

GE: Yes, we didn’t. But in our eyes, we were forced to boycott. It didn’t have to come to this. It could have been avoided many steps before that, which I think a lot of people are missing — and it’s understandable. This is a pretty heavy case and situation, and it’s a tough spot to be in, and it’s a tough stand to take. I think there is a lot of good that can come out of this in terms of Title IX and the process, because it’s raised a lot of questions.

PP: You would do it again?

GE: I would, but I would know how to handle it better. Like I said, we didn’t understand how sexual assault victims would view it, and that was partly because we were working alone. We didn’t have an outside opinion. We were 108 young adult, adolescent teen males trying to do this, and we had no leadership. So, obviously we slipped up along the way. Something that Coyle used in his press conference, he said this was a learning experience. For us, it truly was.