The difference being that those drafts, arbitration practices, etc. are arrived at through a collective bargaining process between the leagues and the players’ unions. Which brings us full circle back to unionizing college athletes!
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They can go the Ivy League route and say “we’re not emphasizing this and you only get on the football team if you can first meet our academic standards”, unlike the other schools which have a completely separate scouting, recruiting, and acceptance process for big-money athletes than they do students.
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I have no idea what this response means in regards to the issue of the fairness of the two-year waiting exemption and whether this impacts a kid who goes to school vis-a-vis one that doesn’t.
Regardless, the overall issue is not the economic impact on those players who made it into the NFL, it’s the impact on those who didn’t. How they had to change majors, how they had a second job (for which they were being “paid” $50k/year+) for which they had to work 40+ more hours per week, how they got injured and lost these scholarships and lost their ability to go to college.
I think going to a situation where the kids are employees or independent contractors, complete with agents, is insane - I agree with you on this.
But also asking them to do put their bodies at risk with no guarantees is immoral. And I am more than tired of living in a world in which everything and everyone is judged by their cost and contribution to somebody else’s bottom line. Give the kids health insurance (extending out for 5 years after they leave school, excepting those who go into the NFL and/or get insurance elsewhere) and guarantee 4.5 years of scholarship even if you suck, or worse, get injured, and most of this will go away. And if you can’t afford to do this, then get out of big time college ball and join the NAIA.
Had the above been done 5+ years ago, this may not even be a lawsuit.
This is one of the most important things, i think.
I was absolutely staggered, some years back, when i learned that, in many programs, a college athlete who gets injured and can no longer play also loses the scholarship that is paying for college.
The absolute minimum requirement of all athletic scholarships should be that they are guaranteed for the full term of the degree, except in cases where the student commits some significant breach of conduct, or fails to maintain satisfactory academic standing.
In addition to mhendo’s point about the scholarships, employees get worker’s compensation for injuries suffered on the job. That’s a huge deal, both for the university’s insurer and for the student athletes who will be covered.
Getting paid is not what the Northwestern players are seeking at all.
They aren’t seeking it in the short run, and indeed they would be foolish to do so, since Northwestern University has no power to grant such a demand. The NCAA would not allow it.
In the long run, however, if a critical mass of schools can be unionized, such a demand will almost certainly be raised with the NCAA. At the very least, player unions will seek easing of restrictions on outside income.
People are deluded, however, if they think that this will mean the end of college sports. Why would a players union want to destroy college sports? Even today, with no pay, the life of a D-I football or basketball player is better in many ways than that of low-potential D-league athletes in other sports. (One way to see this is to look at the large number of talented baseball players who play college baseball without pay, even though they could play in the minor leagues.)
The games will go on, probably with a rather modest reallocation of the immense revenue they produce.
Getting paid is one of the things they seek, but this decision is just one step along the way to getting paid. They are seeking “collective bargaining with respect to health and safety, financial support, and other terms and conditions of employment.” [Last paragraph of part IV of the decision.] To get the pay and other items they figured they needed to unionize. To unionize they needed to be found (and were found) by the NLRB to be employees.
Students are there for an education first and playing sports is secondary. The number of starting players that ever get a pro offer (in any sport) is very low.
Colleges should be emphasizing that any student athlete must maintain a passing GPA. They can’t cut classes. etc.
Unionizing a college team is a bad joke. They aren’t paid and they shouldn’t be. It sends the wrong message. The majority of athletes will never make a dime in pro sports. Why fool them into thinking its a sustainable income by paying them in college?
I played for a small college b-ball team. Thankfully I knew the pro scouts weren’t looking at me. I was like most guys. Too slow and not agile enough for the pros.
Coaching a bunch of unionized players should be challenging. 
Coach: Move your ass punk! Player:* Uh sir, my union rep says you can’t talk to me in that hostile tone of voice.*
But the fact is that they are paid by way of tuition, room and board, rather than cash on the dash, and to earn that pay they are working at their football job far more than at their studies.
That raises two separate problems: the university putting the football cart before the education horse, and the university using its student employees as cash cows. Collective bargaining can help deal with these problems, but without collective bargaining, there is too great a power imbalance impeding movement on these issues.
When I worked at Wendy’s while in school, nobody ever told me that was “sustainable income.” Therefore, by your reasoning, they would have been in their right not to pay me. What sort of logic is that?
You could have worked for Wendys for years. It’s bad pay but the job is there if you wanted it.
Players are ineligible after 4 years of college play. The “job” is gone unless they are one of the lucky few that go pro.
I’m just making the point that a good coach reminds his players that the odds of going pro are against them. They need to consider their employment after college.
NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL. All are unionized.
And of those who go pro, most will not make mega salaries, most will not have long careers, and none will play to a ripe old age.
All the more reason to maximize income during the sports career, rather than spend much of it being taken financial advantage of by the university employer.
If the university kept the football related hours down to ten or fifteen per week so that the students could truly focus on their academics, I’d be on board with not finding the players to be employees, but that is not the path the university has chosen. It has the players work at football more than most folks work at full time jobs, and when there is a conflict between academics or football, football is the priority, with threat of loss of scholarship to back up the university’s position. Well, since it is a more-than-full-time-job, the players might as well get paid on a competitive basis rather than suffer from employer collusion.
If they offer a scholarship with the proviso that you lose it unless you participate in an extracurricular activity, you are to me an employee, and should have normal labor protections, especially workman’s compensation. This gives much better benefits than what are given to seriously injured college athletes who can no longer play.
As for negative income sports, I am missing something. If the sport has negative income, and the students are being forced to play for fear of losing their scholarships, it should be abolished. Then the school can use the money saved to give an increased number of scholarships having no extra-curricular activity requirement. Or they can hire another environmental science professor, or do anything else that falls within the core missions of education and advancement of knowledge.
A negative income sport is analogous to the money-losing division of a profitable company. It is unacceptable for a worker in a money-losing department to be denied rights to the minimum wage, union activity, overtime, and workman’s compensation. Since when do you give up your protections as a worker on the possibility that your department didn’t make money for your employer?
As for a university subsidizing the Olympics through scholarships, I strongly object, as a tuition paying parent, to have possibly helped pay for the Putin winter Olympics. Yuck!
I recall there used to be some clever hand outs that gave the number of pro players in the different sports. Then listed how many players were in college sports. They had the odds calculated of making the pros. It was quite informative.
I don’t understand the need for unions at the college level. But, I’m old fashioned and consider college sports an extracurricular activity. It’s not for an athlete like Jameis Winston but there just aren’t that many potential pros on the average division 1 team.
I do agree modern college sports do require too much off season work for players. Players today are in the weight room year around. The so called off season voluntary workouts and practices. It is too much and distracts from these kids studies.
To protect the students from the university. Their interests do not align well enough. The power imbalance necessitates collective bargaining, 'cause one teenager hasn’t a hope in hell of standing up to a multi-million dollar money making machine that is the administration of a Division I football team. I think it is a shame that universities got away from sports being extra-curricular activities that supplemented the student experience and instead have chosen to develop quasi-professional sports teams that have academics supplementing the player’s sport experience.
I believe that Ohio State and Alabama are two of the few schools that make money on athletics. They would probably welcome the chance to pay players, getting an even better recruiting class.
The median school, however, loses nearly 10 million dollars a year on athletics. It seems crazy for those big money losing schools to pay millions for coaches OR players.
I bet some of those schools do pay a lot for coaches, and you are absolutely right that that is terrible. For these big money losers, the money for coaches (and potentially players) is coming right from the students… who are already paying a ton!
I also am very wary of letting the open market decide. Because schools could decide to chase that Alabama money by paying big bucks for coaches and players. But if they don’t have Alabama success, they just gambled a huge amount of the students’ money and lost it.
A lot of schools have profitable football programs, which subsidize all the other sports within the AD. In those cases, I think paying the coach a competitive salary makes sense.
That being said, I’m embarrassed that my school (which has one of, if not the most profitable AD in the country) hasn’t done the right thing and taken steps to compensate our players. Good for these guys at Northwestern. I’m really interested in following the progression of this story over the next several years.
I have some questions not answered in the OP news article.
Supposed the athlete union strikes. Do students on a full ride continue to be allowed to go to class for free? And what about housing? If a worker living in company housing goes on strike, can the employer then evict the worker?
To sort of answer my own question, I think that any such unions winning representation election will be rather weak. As a result, the students will still make peanuts while individual big-sport coaches (or even assistant coaches) make more than all the history professors combined. Plus, often, unions lose representation elections. So the main benefit here may not be the union piece, but the real possibility, mentioned in the OP article, of workman’s compensation. Schools will, I hope, be forced to take care of students hurt on the field just as well as they would a coach injured on the sidelines.