“Then he told us to get into the stands at the fieldhouse, and he just began berating us,” said McGee, a defensive end who won a Super Bowl with the Washington Redskins in 1983. “Every time someone wanted to say something, he screamed at them and told them to shut up.”

Said Gibson, “We had decided before in a meeting that if he did not agree with what we wanted to do, we were just going to play the game. If he had said, ‘No way you’re wearing those arm bands,’ that’s fine.”

In initial media interviews following his decision, Eaton, who died in 2007 at the age of 88, insinuated it wasn’t one motivated by race. His reasoning was a violation of a team policy that forbid protests — one that none of the six former players on campus Friday ever recalled Eaton putting in writing or discussing before the incident.

“We hear Coach on an interview saying they refused to play in the game because they couldn’t wear the black armbands,” Hysaw said. “What? Really? What guys were those? It wasn’t us. We were given no choice.”

Said McGee, “We were kicked off for a protest that never happened. We were punished for something that never happened. We were punished for a rule we knew nothing about.”