Drawing up a new game plan: athletes’ mental health matters, too

The Pac-12 Conference was always a mixed bag. Big name sports brands were, until recently, locked into a television contract with other less profitable west-coast schools. When UCLA and USC saw their chance to hop conferences to the Big 10 last year, they took it, and the rest of the Pac-12 crumbled in the months that followed. The Pac-12 implosion may have secured most of the former members spots in conferences with more lucrative membership contracts, but the physical, emotional and mental toll the realignment will certainly have on their athletes has clearly been an afterthought. In this episode, we discuss the implications of this unprecedented shakeup as it pertains to the people who make billion-dollar contracts possible — the student-athletes — and place the conversation surrounding it in the context of athletes' mental health and well-being, where it belongs. Plus, on this week’s Fun Friday, we describe which fruit each of the top-ranked NFL quarterbacks reminds us of.Transition track credits:Downtown Walk by | e s c p | https://escp-music.bandcamp.comMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comCreative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/