The long-overdue reckoning for college sports continues. Today, it broke new ground.
For the first time ever, a college sports team voted to unionize. By a vote of 13-2, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team elected to join its local service employees union.
The vote happened because the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled last month that the players are employees of the school.
Northwestern football players tried to unionize in 2014. That effort was derailed after the NLRB found that it has no jurisdiction over public institutions. Dartmouth is a private university; that argument isn’t available in this case.
Dartmouth has opposed the effort, and it presumably will continue to do so. Regardless, it’s the latest precedent — long overdue — in the effort to eradicate decades of imbalance regarding the revenue generated by college athletics and the compensation for the players responsible for it.
As college sports grapple with the explosion of NIL payments to players, along with the inability of the NCAA to impose controls on the process, a nationally unionized system arguably becomes the only way to save the model.
The rules and regulations needed to ensure competitive balance among the schools violate federal antitrust laws. If, however, the various schools form a multi-employer bargaining unit with unionized players, rules that would otherwise be antitrust violations become fair terms for collective bargaining.
That’s how the NFL gets away with a salary cap, a draft, the franchise tag, and other devices aimed at protecting teams from the basic prohibitions of antitrust laws. Without a union, the NFL couldn’t do it.
In all other industries, independent businesses compete among themselves in crafting a workforce. If, for example, a lawyer is considering taking a job at a major firm in Seattle and another firm in New York decides to make a better offer, the lawyer can accept it. There’s no way for the independent businesses to control who works where.
For the NFL, 32 independent businesses treat the workers as one massive group, with negotiated terms permitting the so-called “honor and privilege” of players being required to go wherever the draft process tells them to go — regardless of what the players want.
To create balance in college sports, a similar system is needed. Of course, that would require the schools to abandon what they have been able to do since college sports first developed under the insidiously innocuous and idealistic concept of “amateurism.”
We’ll give you a “free education,” and we’ll agree among ourselves that you get nothing more.
That has resulted in plain-sight violations of federal law, the consequences of which the college system is finally experiencing, one lawsuit at a time. The sooner they acknowledge that it’s time to do the right thing by the players, the sooner they can perhaps craft the right kind of competitive balance among the programs and conferences.
Arguably, it’s too late for that. There’s too much chaos to be undone. That chaos, however, all traces to the simple fact that the various colleges came up with a way to benefit dramatically from low-cost labor, far longer than they should have.
Many think the system is too big to fail; however, the system is failing precisely because it has gotten too big. As the revenues grow and grow, the refusal to pay players has become more and more glaring. At this point, the only way to truly fix the system might be to blow it up and go back to square one, with a truly unionized, national workforce that agrees to a set of rules that promotes fairness and balance among the various schools.
It works in the NFL. It could work for college football and other college sports, if/when they quit fighting the inevitable and embrace it.
They can do it the easy way, or they can do it the hard way. The fact that they took the easy way for so long makes it even harder to find a way out of the maze now.
