College

The comparison of the NCAA to a Plantation is sensationalist and inappropriate. A more apt comparison is to that of the Company Town. This post takes a deeper look at the money in collegiate athletics.

Among a number of new proposals adopted on Tuesday, the NCAA has approved unlimited snacks and meals as a benefit incidental to participation for student-athletes.[1] Many are looking at this new legislation as a panicked response to Shabazz Napier’s speech against the NCAA after the National Championship. The NCAA isn’t sitting up there, sweating (well they are, but not over this), thinking “Oh no, a visible figure in one of our money sports has exposed an unjust chink in our armor!” This change has been long in the making, starting with the infamous fruits, nuts, and bagels interpretation.

So the Chicago regional office of the NLRB ruled that Northwestern is an employer and that its football players are employees who may elect to form a union. The decision however did not directly address the NCAA. At first glance the NCAA may not be bound by this decision since it is not labeled as the “employer.” However, what is to stop the NCAA from deploying its nuclear option and simply creating a bylaw stating that any player in a union or any player who is an “employee” is ineligible for competition. Well, there are two main obstacles, one from a practical perspective, and another from the legal side. Let’s begin with the legal element.

The National Labor Relations Board decided in favor of Northwestern football players’ right to unionize by saying scholarship players are “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act. While this has been considered a Midway-esque victory in what could be a shift in the landscape of college athletics under the NCAA banner, we are still far off from realizing a college athlete union. Standing in the way of scholarship athletes and “complete victory” are: (1) State-labor laws, (2) an appeal by Northwestern (3) Title IX, (4) the U.S. Tax Code, and of course, (5) the NCAA itself. Before you celebrate the demise of the current NCAA model, consider the difficult road ahead and the possibility that the Board’s decision will be overturned or severely limited.

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 …

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 …