At 1:30 a.m. Saturday, the Gophers were ready to end their boycott of University of Minnesota football. In two hours in the middle of the night, their resolve to remove themselves from the playing field in protest had fallen apart.
A group text went out: "Players-only meeting 6 a.m." Many of them didn't sleep.
At 9 a.m., bleary-eyed and exhausted, the Gophers' senior leaders walked back into a campus building and announced they were lifting the boycott.
"As a team, we understand that what has occurred these past few days, and playing football for the University of Minnesota, is larger than just us," senior receiver Drew Wolitarsky said, reading from a two-page, typed statement.
As he read those words, the Gophers stopped just hours short from becoming the first college football team to back out of a bowl game in protest. That did not happen, several sources told the Star Tribune on Saturday, because the painful details of an 82-page report from an investigation of an alleged sexual assault _ revealed to most players for the first time late Friday _ broke the boycott's resolve.
Saturday morning's announcement was a dramatic reversal from Friday night. Shortly after 9 p.m., most players exited the football facility along snow-clogged 15th Avenue, defiant and convinced the bowl boycott would stand.
After some productive and volatile meetings with university President Eric Kaler, the Gophers players knew he wouldn't meet their demand to lift the 10 player suspensions that stemmed from an alleged Sept. 2 sexual assault and investigation. They were staring down a Saturday deadline to follow through on backing out of the Dec. 27 Holiday Bowl in San Diego.
But Wolitarsky, Gaelin Elmore, Mitch Leidner and the rest of the seniors remained cloistered inside, contemplating alternatives, thinking about a "game-changing" 82-page university investigation report on the incident that most of them had just read for the first time.
