Monthly Archive: January 2014

The biggest news yesterday in the sports law world was of course that Northwestern’s Kain Colter is seeking to unionize his fellow members of the Wildcat football team. While this is certainly a big deal, it is a long way from coming to fruition and is fraught with obstacles that must be overcome. Moreover, unionizing college athletes will also open a pandora’s box of secondary issues that will have to be addressed. Tax-exemptions, Title-IX, the O’Bannon antitrust suit, and a slew of other issues will have to be addressed if the landscape of collegiate-athletics is overhauled by unionizing the players.

Northwestern and the NCAA have both made statements regarding this attempt to unionize, with vastly different tones and acceptances. Northwestern offered the opinion that its students are “leaders and independent thinkers.” They subtly show their hand in approving the move by throwing out that they are proud of their students and this action exemplifies the institution’s teachings (well, either that or they are trying to solely emphasize the word independent in a way to say “NCAA leave us out of this, it isn’t us).

So Kain Colter is leading the charge to unionize college football players as the next step from his “All Players United” protest armband. Hopefully union leadership is kinder to him than it was to poor Frank Sobotka on the Baltimore shipyards…
While perhaps a monumental moment in the rights of college athletes, there is one threshold question, which must be addressed. For the purposes of unionizing, are college athletes employees of the university or college?

If you have two ears and a brain you have probably been in at least one vicious argument over the discussion of whether students who participate in intercollegiate athletics, should be paid (and please note the word choice… these students are already compensated greatly).  If you were party to such a...

Allow me to start by saying that the NCAA is by no means perfect. With countless calls for reform, mostly involving amateurism and deregulation of a handbook that could be about a hundred pages shorter, the writing is on the wall that a number of people have issues with the current...