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Players Can End N.C.A.A. Exploitation, if They Feel the Hunger

Rob Kinnan/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

MINNEAPOLIS — This Final Four is the five-year anniversary of one of the most effective, if inadvertent, instances of athlete activism in college sports.

This was when the Connecticut star Shabazz Napier, speaking to the news media shortly before the 2014 national championship game, said that he sometimes did not have enough to eat.

“There are hungry nights that I go to bed and I’m starving,” he said.

Within weeks, the N.C.A.A.’s board of directors for Division I voted to lift restrictions on how much teams could feed their players.