If there's ever a year for a labor movement at the men's NCAA tournament, this is it
The last 12 months have highlighted numerous inequities related to race, gender, class and finances, and that could create the perfect storm for athletes, who will all be in the same city
If there is ever a year for men’s college basketball players to go on strike, to boycott or to organize some other form of labor movement at the NCAA tournament, this is the year. If college athletes want to – for once and for all – have a true seat at the table, if not real leverage and negotiating power, this is the year.
This is an idea that has increasingly been floated during this time of the calendar on Twitter, YouTube and podcasts, with legitimate plans discussed in 2018 for a potential boycott of the open practices at the Final Four.
“The (open) practice is literally us parading around, dunking, shooting 3s. It’s ridiculous,” former Michigan and current Miami Heat player Duncan Robinson told The Athletic. “‘The Victors’ is playing, fans are there. It might be great for fans and I understand that, but that felt like the epitome of what was wrong with the NCAA.”
Ken Davis of the Hartford Courtant wrote, “And by boycotting the major bowl games and the Final Four, the NCAA would finally awaken to the injustices done to so-called student athletes. Those ideas don't seem so far-fetched anymore.”
That was in 2000.
ESPN commentator and former Duke star Jay Williams, who helped the Blue Devils win the national championship in 2001 and who was named national player of the year in 2002, told CBS Sports in 2016 that it would take a boycott for college athletes to get paid, though at the time, he noted he wasn’t advocating for a protest. However, just two years later, in 2018, Williams and fellow ESPN commentator Jalen Rose both individually and publicly called for a boycott.
“Wouldn’t it be a crazy thing if we saw players actually, just not boycott a game in the NCAA tournament, but boycott the Final Four,” Williams said in a video he posted on Twitter. “Imagine how quickly the NCAA will recognize that it’s just not only a business for themselves, but also a business for the athletes as well. That’s how you make change.”
Former Duke point guard Dick DeVenzio, who later wrote a book titled Rip Off U: The Exploitation of College Athletes, told the Tampa Bay Times, “I firmly believe, if I could have an hour with those 48 guys two days before the Final Four, I could convince them not to play without attaching conditions. I think everything about what they teach in American business school would tell them that it's foolish for 48 people to provide $200-million for someone else.”
That was in 1998.
The value of the NCAA tournament has ballooned since then.
A strike, or a boycott, at the 2021 NCAA Tournament would arguably be the most significant upheaval of the men’s NCAA tournament since Marquette turned down its bid in 1970, despite being a top-10 team in the country, and instead chose the NIT, all because the team was going to be sent to a region that was further than desired from Milwaukee.
The stakes of a potential strike or boycott in 2021 would obviously be much, much higher.
In case you need a reminder of the potential reasons why there could be a labor movement
Men’s basketball players have a reason to potentially organize a labor movement.
Strike that, they have a lot of potential reasons why they could choose to organize.
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because when Pac-12 athletes released their demands in their #WeAreUnited letter on The Players’ Tribune last summer, Pac-12 officials described the demands listed by the athletes as “demands,” with the quotes included, in multiple internal emails. Merriam-Webster’s first listed definition for demand is “an act of demanding or asking especially with authority.” The second definition is “something claimed as due or owed.” A seemingly innocuous pair of quotation marks showed that the conference didn’t take seriously a word that, by definition, is very serious.
“That’s not surprising to me,” said Andrew Cooper, a Master’s student who’s studying the intersection of sports and education at the University of California–Berkeley and who ran collegiately at Washington State and Cal, when he was told of conference leaders putting the word in quotes. Cooper, who was an adviser to the #WeAreUnited movement, said, “I ended up getting a lot of attention, I think because I’m a white cross country runner and that’s just a little different.” Attempts to contact each of the football players who were listed as media contacts on the original #WeAreUnited press release were unsuccessful.
“I think there were a lot of reports when it first came out that it was only 13 football players because those were the 13 football players that we listed as media personnel, essentially, so that was interpreted by some as like, ‘Oh, there’s only 13 signatures for this,’” he said. “The fact that it was 13 signatures gathered that much attention and steam, when in reality it was 450, is pretty shocking.”
Very few of the players’ demands were met and those that were granted, such as the ability to opt out without losing a scholarship and liability waivers being prohibited, were arguably the bare-minimum level of protections for amateur athletes during the pandemic and they were also announced as NCAA-wide policies. “The response, from my end, it was unsurprising because they didn’t want to respond,” Cooper said of the Pac-12. “We emailed them a meeting request the moment we published and I think they wanted the issue to go away and when it became clear that it wasn’t going away, they had to take a meeting with us … We asked for daily meetings with all the athletic directors and we were met with only three, four days later, and then in that meeting, we didn’t get past Covid.
“[Pac-12 Commissioner] Larry Scott lost his temper multiple times, called it a ‘misguided PR stunt,’ told Nick Ford from Utah that he was talking out both sides of his mouth. It was unsurprising that they didn’t take it serious, but that goes to show how little they value the college athlete perspective and how they would rather create the perception that they value college athlete voices.”
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because college athletes have been treated as essential employees without receiving hazard or overtime pay, or expanded medical coverage during the pandemic. Meanwhile some of the workers who actually are essential to pulling off the men’s basketball NCAA tournament – bus drivers and flight crews – will be told, presumably for contact tracing purposes, “no verbal interaction with team/travel party unless needed for safety reasons,” according to an NCAA tournament planning document from January that was obtained by Out of Bounds. Members of the traveling parties will be required to wear masks, plus either a plastic face shield or goggles, while the bus drivers will undergo COVID-19 testing and they’ll also be wearing masks, and the windows of the buses will be cracked open.
Yet somehow, the actual essential employees will be under more restrictions – basically, “don’t speak” – than the players that the system is masquerading as essential employees.
“It oftentimes takes a spark to light the flame,” said Erin Hatton, a University at Buffalo associate professor of sociology, whose areas of expertise include labor movements, coerced labor and pay for college athletes. “It could be – although we don’t know – but Covid could be one, in the context of this crisis, and then also keep in mind with the Black Lives Matter movement and the growing consensus and activism around Black lives and racial justice and racial injustice. And so all of these things are just so visible in college sports.”
In the same NCAA tournament planning document, the NCAA “also recommends that institutions consider including an academic support staff member in their 34-person travel party.” College basketball teams can have up to 13 scholarship players, so schools are encouraged just to consider including one academic advisor with the remaining 21 spots in the traveling party, for a trip that could be more than 21 days for teams that make the Final Four. “The rhetoric is that academics come first,” said Hatton. “The reality – and everyone knows it – is that athletics comes first. The NCAA builds this edifice and they’ve been very successful at maintaining it but I do think the cracks are becoming apparent and I think [the attempt to unionize at] Northwestern took a really good stab at kind of starting the cracks, spreading [them] maybe, but I see the cracks are still spreading and deepening. They’re becoming more and more visible, and so that people outside of college athletics are talking more and more about the problems, about the exploitation, about the coercion involved in this labor relation.”
“My theory was Northwestern was unsuccessful in unionizing primarily because it was only one team at one school and it definitely did not help that it was a private university, either,” Cooper said. “And that if it was many teams from many schools, athletes would be more successful.”
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because, after the NCAA announced on Aug. 5, 2020 – three days after the #WeAreUnited post was published – that all athletes “must be allowed to opt out,” representatives from Florida Atlantic, Mississippi State and Washington State told Out of Bounds in September that they didn’t have any responsive records, in response to public records requests that asked for copies of their opt-out forms. Louisiana Tech said it hadn’t produced a form, and the forms at Iowa State and Wisconsin weren’t yet finalized. Don’t forget that Louisiana Tech was affected by Hurricane Laura and that Ames, Iowa, was named one of the worst COVID-19 hotspots in the country after a surge of cases in late August and early September. They should have been among the first schools to have a signable opt-out form, but instead, they were among the last.
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because the NCAA used the cover of one of the biggest college sporting event of the year, the 2021 College Football Playoff National Championship, to officially announce in an all-time news dump that the Division I Council had tabled proposals on name, image and likeness (NIL), and transfers. A few hours later, some of the most marketable players in college athletics squared off in a championship game matchup between Alabama and Ohio State – two schools that have combined for 10 of the 28 total College Football Playoff appearances and four of the seven national championships during the playoff era. Don’t let anyone try to tell you that expanded NIL rights will affect competitive balance, unless they also acknowledge that competitive balance is largely a myth and that it doesn’t really exist right now.
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because the current rules in college athletics don’t allow for a college athlete to profit off of his or her NIL, but the zero-sum culture of college athletics did allow for the public Power 5 schools to spend just shy of $100 million on football coaches’ buyouts alone during the 2018 fiscal year, according to financial data compiled by Out of Bounds, which was the highest total ever for that group of schools. When the latest round of severance payments is paid out, the sport could come within shouting distance of that 2018 total for the 2020-21 fiscal year, despite a season engulfed in a pandemic. The pandemic was never going to stop the good ol’ coaching carousel, which allows college coaches to profit off of an open, free market – a market from which athletes are excluded.
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because in an athlete well-being study that was conducted last fall by the NCAA itself – the results of which were recently published – a relatively similar percentage of athletes (24 percent) said financial worries negatively impacted their mental health compared to number of athletes who said COVID-19 health concerns (31 percent) affected their mental health. “I’ve been advocating for these issues essentially for the last three or four years,” Cooper said. “From being a [Student-Athlete Advisory Committee] President at Washington State, you know, watching our community lose [quarterback] Tyler Hilinski to suicide and seeing how much college athletes struggle with mental health, and then to advocating for systemic reform and experiencing how challenging it was to reform the institution and how little interest there was in reforming the institution.”
Twenty-five percent of female athletes who responded to the NCAA’s recent study and 23 percent of male athletes said that financial worries negatively impacted their mental health within the month before taking the survey. Race had a noticeable impact in the study’s results, as 39 percent of Latinx respondents and 35 percent of Black respondents said financial worries negatively impacted their mental health compared to 21 percent of white respondents. For athletes who said they feel negatively about their family’s current financial situation, 64 percent of those respondents answered that they “constantly” or “most every day” felt overwhelmed by all they had to do. Keep those stats in mind when you see tweets, like this one, that say, “The NCAA and college athletic departments are focused on creating a culture of mental wellness.” If only there was a way to help alleviate some of those financial concerns and the related negative mental health affects…
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because in an email sent in late January that was obtained by Out of Bounds, Syracuse Athletic Director John Wildhack told Louisville AD Vince Tyra, North Carolina AD Bubba Cunningham and Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick that the ACC tournament is “the dominant brand of all Conference Tournaments. Any opt outs would really tarnish the brand.” But athletes can’t monetize their own personal brands, which could provide significant mental health benefits, as previously discussed, plus it would give them real-world business experience. Some athletes are told to keep their social media accounts on private, so college athletics certainly picks and chooses its spots when it comes to whose brand matters.
Tyra responded to his fellow ACC athletic directors, “We recognize the difficult decisions and potential ‘push back’ from encouraging all teams to play, but the goal is clear and you are well aware of the economic impact.” The economic impact Tyra was referring to was that of not playing the ACC tournament with a full field, so just imagine the leverage for athletes in a potential labor movement at the NCAA tournament.
“All opportunities and salaries are predicated on generating revenue,” Cunningham responded. “This point seems to be missed by many. With unemployment what it is and businesses closing it seems as though many in college athletics feel immune – disappointing that they don’t recognize the issues.” Are we sure everyone can correctly identify and properly weigh the issues facing college athletics right now?
“Their coaches and the NCAA are total gatekeepers,” Hatton said. “All these – their bosses, I called them, because they’re workers – their bosses wield so much power over them, have so many levers of control, and so it’s particularly hard. Bosses always wield a lot of power over workers but it’s even more intense for college athletes.”
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because a strength coach who was accused of playing a role in fostering a culture within a football program in which “a small number of coaches felt empowered to bully and demean athletes, especially Black athletes” left his program with a seven-figure settlement (and he briefly failed upwards, as he was hired in the NFL by one of the most accomplished college football coaches ever). A men’s basketball head coach who was accused of taunting a player of Native American descent, punching another player and allegedly attempting to punch an athlete who played another sport, showed that, according to allegations against those two coaches, an athlete’s race can make him or her an alleged target or a potential victim of alleged abuse, and the fallout for the accused coaches can include a payout of a million, or seven and a half million, dollars. But in that college athletics ecosystem – the one that exists right now, which routinely claims it promotes values and integrity – there’s simply just no way for players to get paid in any meaningful way.
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because Texas boosters reportedly threatened to not hire Longhorn football players after they graduated if they didn’t stand for the school’s spirit song, “The Eyes of Texas,” which was associated with minstrel shows and which has racist origins. Or they could choose to organize because after Kentucky men’s basketball players knelt during the national anthem, just days after the Capitol was stormed, Kentucky fans wrote to university and athletic department leadership with statements including “They are for my entertainment,” and “sports are for entertainment,” while another wrote, “send the players on a tour of Iran, Iraq & Afghanistan & let them fear for their lives during bombings.” A labor movement would be a resounding statement that college athletes are more than someone else’s entertainment.
They could choose to organize at the NCAA tournament because there are Big Ten coaches who signed contracts that state they’ll receive an additional $25,000 if their team makes the NCAA tournament and $250,000 if their team wins the tournament, yet when Iowa’s Jordan Bohannon took home a used, March Madness-branded floor mat during the 2019 NCAA Tournament, he was forced to publicly apologize as part of some petty, public relations horse-trading that allowed him to get the mat, but not the last word.
Note that Bohannon’s original tweet, while somewhat joking in tone, was somewhat serious in substance. “Give us the ability to make money off our own name,” part of his tweet read. By the way, if you’re looking for someone who could be a pivotal figure in organizing a potential labor movement, the outspoken Bohannon might be one of the most likely candidates. Playing for a top-five team alongside the presumptive National Player of the Year, Bohannon might wield more potential power than even he realizes.
Not only is the Big Ten the men’s basketball conference with the most depth of potential NCAA tournament teams, it might also be the conference with the most depth of notable players who are willing to publicly criticize the NCAA.
Don’t lose sight of the role that race and revenue play in college athletics
After the official March Madness Instagram account posted a graphic in late January that quoted Baylor coach Scott Drew saying, “Guys are breaking up with long-time girlfriends to keep the bubble tight and play games,” Rutgers guard Geo Baker commented on the post, “And we still ‘amateurs.’”
In a follow-up comment, Baker continued:
That’s nothing compared to what we bring to our schools. Not even saying schools should pay players. (Which already happens anyway). But Others can create their own business and make money off it so why would an athlete not be allowed to do that?? I have to sign a paper that says my name and likeness belongs to the school. Modern day slavery.
Baker’s comment about “modern day slavery” came amid a season that has been bookended by the allegation made last summer that former Penn State coach Pat Chambers previously told former Penn State player Rasir Bolton, “I want to loosen the noose that’s around your neck,” and Thursday night, Creighton coach Greg McDermott was suspended by the university after he told his team after a loss, “I need everybody to stay on the plantation. I can’t have anybody leave the plantation.”
A common thread between the comments that Bohannon and Baker made on social media is that both asked for the opportunity to monetize their NIL, which might be both the most beneficial and the most achievable demand in a potential labor movement. It could be a theoretical strike that hinges upon a one-item request and it would still have monumental ramifications.
“Let us be able to monetize our name, image and likeness, starting today, or else we won’t play in the NCAA tournament and we won’t play until we do have control over our NIL rights.”
Imagine college athletes playing hardball with the NCAA in the NCAA’s backyard, winning and then the first-ever Division I NIL contracts being signed in Indianapolis. College athletes’ social media accounts would soon be flooded with advertisements from local restaurants, car dealerships and startup clothing brands based in college towns across the country, with Indianapolis being the epicenter.
If the players whose teams qualify for the men’s NCAA tournament were to organize and stage a strike or boycott, then they’d arguably have more leverage than their negotiating partners.
The NCAA reported $867.5 million in revenue from television and marketing rights fees during the 2019 fiscal year but just $165.2 million in 2020 after the men’s basketball NCAA tournament was canceled, along with other winter and spring championships. Those losses were mitigated by $270 million in loss of revenue insurance from the cancellation of the men’s basketball NCAA tournament.
The NCAA is scheduled to earn $850 million from CBS and Turner Broadcasting System Inc., from the 2021 NCAA Tournament once the NCAA’s performance obligations are met, as part of a 14-year contract that’s worth up to $10.8 billion. When the two sides re-upped for eight more years through 2032, the NCAA signed up to receive up to $8.8 billion, or $1.1 billion per year, on average. Some of this amount has been prepaid starting in 2018 and the NCAA will continue to receive prepayments through 2024.
When the final numbers were tallied, the NCAA reported a loss of more than $55.7 million for the 2020 fiscal year and last year it lost more than $800 million in revenue from ticket sales and multimedia agreements.
Cooper said he and a former teammate, Kyler Little, tried to design a theoretical men’s basketball work stoppage two years ago. "We essentially thought the best way to catalyze real change in any labor-oppressive infrastructure is through a work stoppage and that basketball would be the best way to do that because there’s only 15 people on a team,” Cooper said. “Me and Kyler were essentially just trying to figure out what that would look like,” complete with “a ton” of whiteboards during his first semester at Cal, searching for a potential solution.
The NCAA’s latest financial report notes that the association has loss of revenue insurance for its 2020-21 championships, including coverage related to the pandemic. Who knows if, and to what degree, those loss of revenue insurance policies would cover a strike or boycott. Whether or not there are clauses that include a strike or boycott in the NCAA’s insurance policies would be telling. If there are such clauses, then behind closed doors, the NCAA is at the very least prepared for the possibility of a labor movement someday, if not secretly scared of one. If there’s not such a clause, then the NCAA is supremely confident that a labor movement will never happen, which could leave it incredibly exposed, both financially and reputation-wise, if one ever materializes.
“The NCAA earns 80 percent of its annual revenue from March Madness and so if it doesn’t have that tournament two years in a row, that’s going to be a big deal,” said Katie Lever, who’s a University of Texas doctoral student who studies NCAA rhetoric and who was a cross country and track and field athlete at Western Kentucky University. “What is the NCAA going to do if they do decide they want to strike and they say, ‘We don’t like the way we’re being treated, we don’t know how the courts are going to decide on amateurism, we don’t know if any of these laws are going to be passed in Congress about our names, images and likenesses, so maybe we don’t want to play this year’? ‘Maybe we want to put the NCAA in a tough position.’
“Because these athletes – and I do hate that there’s some gendered differences here – but the men have a ton of power, especially just because of the kind of revenue streams they bring in, so if these guys say, ‘OK, here’s the list of things we want, NCAA, and if you don’t fulfill these, then we’re going to sit out the tournament,’ I mean what is the NCAA going to do? They don’t really have a lot of power to argue in that situation so I think it’s just the perfect storm for a strike, honestly, and I’m the biggest fan of March Madness. I’m from Kentucky, basketball’s like a religion here.”
Maybe there’s a rough parallel to draw between a potential labor movement at the men’s NCAA tournament and the Internet’s favorite news story of 2021 – anonymous Reddit users’ fight against hedge funds through GameStop stock. A potential strike or boycott of the entire NCAA tournament might not be enough to sink the NCAA – although one could maybe come close to irreparably damaging the association (and some of its member schools) financially, depending on if those insurance policies would be paid out – and the public relations hit would certainly be substantial.
The NCAA’s website used to state, “The NCAA was founded in 1906 to protect young people from the dangerous and exploitive athletics practices of the time.” It no longer says that – I wonder why? – but we know that it did, thanks to media coverage regarding the sentence from 2013 and 2014. (While that line has been removed, there’s similar language on page four of this policy that’s linked on the NCAA’s website.)
The stated basis of the NCAA’s creation could now potentially be turned against the association to bring it down.
‘A strike or a walkout or something is always at least half a problem of logistics’
If there was ever a year for players to go on strike at the men’s NCAA tournament in order to redesign the landscape of college athletics through the rightful reclamation of power that is long overdue, then this is the year. It’s not only a potentially opportune time because of the way college athletics has been handled through the pandemic with little recourse provided for the athletes, but this could also be the year to stage a strike because of the logistical reasons.
By trying to solve – really, mitigate – a public health problem, the NCAA potentially created one of its worst possible public relations problems – a labor movement at its biggest event.
All of the players in the men’s NCAA tournament will be in the same city, Indianapolis, which would theoretically make it easier for players to organize. There wouldn’t be the worry, as there would be in most years, if the players in Salt Lake City are on the same page as those in San Antonio. Boundaries between teams and time zones will largely be removed.
“A strike or a walkout or something is always at least half a problem of logistics,” Hatton said. “‘Can we talk to enough people? Can we get enough people onboard? What time are we doing it? How are we doing it? What are the optics?’ So there’s a ton of logistical effort involved in seeing if other workers, like Uber drivers, who are never in the same place at one time is a logistic that creates a logistical barrier, so when workers are in one place, that decreases that barrier.
“Now, it is true that with social media connections – for instance, I don’t actually know how much those teams would be kept apart by their teams, by the coaches – so if they were able to communicate either in person or via social media, then yeah, I think that could ease a logistical barrier that is often present when workers don’t even get to chat over the water fountain or whatever they do in the workplace.”
While strict social distancing measures in Indianapolis could prevent most potential interactions between players on different teams, apps such as the audio-based social media app Clubhouse could potentially bridge that gap. A multiple-hour discussion on Clubhouse about NIL rights was held among athletes’ rights advocates, including former college athletes, on Wednesday night and those in the virtual room saw 1 a.m. ET come and go. The tools of communication are available for athletes if they want them.
“The other element here is Zoom,” Cooper said. “Zoom has fundamentally changed everything, where now people can virtually convene to discuss issues.”
If the athletes want to stage a walkout this year, they could do it and they’d be doing so in the city of the NCAA’s headquarters. Hell, they could march straight from their hotels and walk to 700 West Washington Street to say, “If you want your tournament, meet us at the negotiating table.”
Seriously, if the athletes were to go on strike, then they could theoretically negotiate with NCAA brass in person, with proper mask-wearing and social distancing, of course.
“It would be very powerful,” Hatton said, “if they did come together, them walking out together, visually, would be very, very powerful.”
Especially if a 47,000-square-foot, replica NCAA tournament bracket, which is on the side of the JW Marriott in Indianapolis, was in the background, behind hundreds of athletes in this hypothetical walkout.
The first games of the men’s NCAA tournament are scheduled for Thursday, March 18, when the First Four matchups are played. They are matchups that are merely a television revenue-inspired growth on the side of the financial beast that is the NCAA tournament. They’re games that, technically speaking, are played before the first round, which means four teams lose and go home before the first round starts.
Congrats on making the tournament.
The First Four this year is guaranteed to feature one or two historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), because the selection committee always puts at least one HBCU in the First Four:
2011: Alabama State
2012: Mississippi Valley State
2013: North Carolina A&T
2014: Texas Southern
2015: Hampton
2016: Southern
2017: NC Central
2018: Texas Southern, NC Central
2019: Prairie View A&M, NC Central
In light of Rutgers guard Geo Baker’s reference to “modern day slavery” on Instagram – a blunt description of a system that’s largely built on the unpaid labor of Black football and men’s basketball players who are statistically more likely than not to be coached by a white head coach – having athletes from an HBCU be among the first to threaten to not take the court unless their demands are met would be both fitting and historic. Too often, as HBCUs frequently face elimination before the first round of the NCAA tournament, their participation in the NCAA tournament is forgotten by the basketball watching populace, if it’s ever really acknowledged in the first place.
But not if there’s a strike or boycott, one whose first meaningful action could prominently feature an HBCU, among other First Four teams, refusing to play. The racial component of this conversation shouldn’t be ignored or downplayed, not when 56 percent of Division I men’s basketball players in 2019 were Black, compared to only 28 percent of the head coaches. The share of DI head coaching jobs held by white coaches (69 percent) was three times the percent of DI men’s basketball players who were white (23 percent).
A labor movement at the NCAA tournament would be about financial equality, racial equality and class equality.
It’d be about equality of brands and earning potential.
It’d be about equality of voice – that athletes, too, need to be heard, just like some of those individual and corporate donors who financially support Texas football, Kentucky men’s basketball, Wichita State men’s basketball or any number of other popular athletic programs, but who all too frequently don’t support the opinions, emotions or, frankly, the humanity of their school’s athletes.
It’d be about equality of opportunity.
It’d be about equality, period.
If there’s ever a year for a labor movement at the men’s NCAA tournament, this is it.
Thank you for reading this edition of Out of Bounds with Andy Wittry. If you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it on social media or sending it to a friend or colleague. Questions, comments and feedback are welcome at andrew.wittry@gmail.com or on Twitter.