The Missouri football team's abnormal week was well-documented nationwide. When Missouri players ceased all team activities in support of hunger-striking Jonathan Butler, it became an instant national story.
Missouri coach Gary Pinkel, who announced Friday he would retire at the end of the season due to health concerns, backed his players with a tweet that pictured him with his team locked in arms.
How do collegiate football programs look at their stand and how Pinkel handled the situation?
The news caught Lincoln University head football coach Mike Jones and his players off-guard.
"I hadn't heard of anything like it in a long time," Jones said Thursday. "When I heard about it, and from knowing coach Pinkel, I knew he was going to do what's right for his team."
And what was right, Jones said, was for Pinkel to pick a stance and stick with it.
"Every coach is different," Jones said. "God forbid, hopefully I'll never be in that situation that coach Pinkel was in. But he believed in what the young men on the team told him. Once they made a decision, he backed them 100 percent. ... Because they have so much respect for him because of things he's done, I think that's the biggest thing. When (the players) decided to make a decision, and he backed them, no matter if you weren't always agreeing with him, you respect him because you're saying, "You know what, this man for everything I've done as a football player, he's given us good direction.'"
Lincoln senior linebacker Treston Pulley agreed.
"I thought it was actually pretty cool," Pulley said, "because if you can do something like that as a team it just shows your bond."
Pulley and senior defensive tackle Eric Howard have a connection to Butler, as the three are in the Phi Beta Sigma national fraternity. So when the University of Missouri chapter held a Wednesday gathering to show support for Butler, whose hunger strike lasted seven days and ended two days prior, the two Lincoln players didn't think twice about attending.
"No doubt. I wanted to support my brother," Howard said. "That was a good cause going on. Like a hunger strike? We were just worried for him."
Pulley echoed that statement.
"We knew we should go," Pulley said. "It wasn't even an if or not thing, we just decided to go. We made that decision just for support, really. He's our black history. We all want to support each other. That was that."
The event didn't conflict with Lincoln football activities, as their practice was held in the morning with a tornado watch in effect for later in the day.
"I knew that they were going," Jones said. "They also knew how to carry themselves and that they were representing Lincoln University."
Neither of the two spoke to Butler, as they estimated a crowd of 300-400 fraternity brothers were in attendance showing their support. Howard described the event as an open forum that consisted of prayer and healing.
Later in the afternoon on the Lincoln campus, students gathered in the quad for an impromptu prayer vigil to pray for healing at Missouri.
Jones hadn't addressed the Missouri situation or the topic of racism to the team this past week, but did say players were individually approaching coaches to have such conversations.
All three Lincoln representatives don't foresee there being a similar issue as extreme as a hunger strike happening at their campus. Jones believes the campus he's called home for five years now is in a unique position when it comes to race.
"Even though we're a very diverse historical black college, we're on a different end," he said, saying 45 percent of the university's population is black, while 40 percent is Caucasian with the remainder being other ethnicities. "Now your voice is most definitely heard. You fit that role when you have an equal amount of people. But when your population is nine times that of the other race, then it's totally different. You can feel like you're one of few. But our situation is totally different from the angle we come from as a historically black college."
Jones, a Missouri graduate and a black man, said some of his players have approached him with concerns of racism.
"It's unfortunate, but they have said that and we addressed it, and it wasn't anything on campus or anything like that," he said. "Unfortunately the world isn't perfect and sometimes people aren't as receptive.
"Sometimes it's not a white or black thing, it's a region thing, a state thing. You just grew up differently. But the whole thing is if you can dialogue. You have to be able to dialogue and talk to understand where someone is coming from."