The other shoe, she has dropped.
“The Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize Tuesday in an unprecedented step toward forming the first labor union for college athletes and another blow to the NCAA’s deteriorating amateur business model.”
“A separate complaint being heard by the NLRB is asking that football and basketball players at Southern California be deemed employees of their school, the Pac-12 conference and the NCAA.”
Public schools aren’t under the jurisdiction of the NLRB, however. Also, count on the Dartmouth players who voted to unionize to be well into their post-college lives when the issue gets resolved after the inevitable suit and resulting appeals run their course.
Of course the NCAA is working with the schools and athletes to find common ground and common sense solutions to this issue which will upend college athletics, right?
“The association believes change in college sports is long overdue and is pursuing significant reforms. However, there are some issues the NCAA cannot address alone, and the association looks forward to working with Congress to make needed changes in the best interest of all student-athletes,” the NCAA said.
To paraphrase Butch Cassidy, the NCAA thinks it’s got vision while the rest of the world wears bifocals.
–cowetadawg
“I’m the innocent bystander,
and somehow I got stuck,
between the rock and the hard place,
And I’m down on my luck”….
They will need plenty of lawyers, guns won’t help, and they will want ALL of your money. The shit is about to hit the fan.
You’re in a union, pays your dues, gets your benefits, then a boss pulls you aside and explains how some points need to be shaved in tonight’s game.
Back to being servants, they just don’t know it yet. This could have been done right long ago, but that time has passed.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. Really?
NIL is good, but unionization is where the real money is.
I’m not sure I get why the Dartmouth basketball team needs to organize. Does the Ivy League even have a TV contract? These individuals will have great options after completion of their degrees.
I would think sports at Dartmouth (a friend of my daughter’s is a track/field athlete there) is exactly what we want college sports to be.
What am I missing?
Perhaps NIL money isn’t readily available to Dartmouth athletes. Would the alumni of Dartmouth really be interested in donating to a Big Green Collective? Does any local business think it’s worth their while if the Dartmouth point guard or quarterback endorses their chicken fingers or auto dealership? If not, then they might think unionizing is the way to get paid. Or, and this is just a cynical guess here, unions see it as a new revenue stream to collect dues, and thus the effort begins with the players to petition to unionize. I wonder if whatever player they’ve tabbed as the organizer has a guaranteed job as a union-side lawyer or negotiator waiting for him upon graduation.
Guessing option 2 there.
I think it’s about receiving compensation and not missing out on the right moment for getting some. Athletes at Ivy League and other “elite” private guniversities don’t get much, if anything, in terms of NIL. But they still have similar demands on their time for training and travel and deal with the same injury risks as athletes in D1 programs.
I know quite a few Ivy League/Johns Hopkins/Emory/etc. grads. Almost all of them are enthusiastic fans of (almost always) pro teams but very few of them GAS about their alma maters’ athletics. I’ve met a handful who are interested in and supportive of the teams for which they played but I’d be surprised if their commitment extends to creating collectives. Maybe Hopkins and lacrosse? Even then, the stakes wouldn’t be nearly the same as with SEC/Big Integer football.
rec for Big Integer.
For some of the non-revenue sports like men’s lacrosse, going to an Ivy or a Hopkins/Duke/UVa/etc. or even some of the DIII schools like Tufts, Amherst or Bowdoin opens many, many doors that you might not otherwise get into. Those type of schools take care of their own and the grads take care of the soon to graduate, whether it is a job on Wall Street or a job in some other field. For men’s lacrosse players, getting to an elite academic school through lacrosse isn’t about the PLL or NLL. It’s about what it can get you after you graduate from an elite school.
A cynic might suspect that the Dartmouth boys are merely stalking horses for the rest of the NCAA. Nobody at Dartmouth is going to resist the righteous labor organizing of the oppressed hoopsters. And it will set an NLRB precedent of some sort. Maybe someone is financing it. Maybe it’s another example of smart kids with too much time on their hands and a UNIONS ARE THE SOUL OF THE WORKING CLASS mentality. Like Dartmouth is the meat packing industry in 1920. What do a bunch of Ivy Leaguers know about the hardships of the working class, anyway?
However it is occurring, I am pretty sure Dartmouth basketball has about as much to do with the issues facing Power 5 athletes and schools as my local church league. All the money circulating is forcing changes, some unanticipated. It’s just a scramble now to see who gets a bigger share. Olympic athletes were supposed to be “amateurs” 40 years ago, and the influx of cash flowing in helped blow that model up. I am sure college football will survive, less sure that it will survive in a way that interests me.
count on the media people to hail all of this as great . Controversy sells. And the more checks that have to be written, the more the college suits and unions will move toward the ultimate solution of making the pot bigger. Which usually meas MORE CONTENT. CFB will begin after July 4, and we will have a 32 team playoff. I can hardly wait.
I am not a labor law lawyer, so I have zero expertise in this area. I am, however, a guy who has been around and seen a few things. It always ends up being about the money, and who gets it. So, more games, more money, hey, we’re sharing too much with these programs that dont add value, bye! And you can say aloha to the “non-revenue sports.” You have to eat what you can kill. Cant kill? Aloha.
IF the teams break away from the respective schools and are independent business entities, does that mean they are no longer covered by Title IX? If that’s the case, then are the schools obligated to fund some of the women’s sports currently needed to even out the playing field. If not, would they continue to field the teams for the optics or would they cut them to save money??
What if men play the women’s sports….never mind. Way too early to test Otis and his ban hammer! 😉
Collective bargaining is not always about money. There have been complaints from athletes about college coaches violating rules about number of hours per week limits, about inflexibility between timing of upper division class availability and practice schedule times, travel arrangements and nutrition.
I recall an issue our basketball team had with a senior center who had a laboratory required for his degree and the laboratory was only available during practice time. The coach would not adjust practice so the kid was able to practice the days the lab didn’t meet.
Working conditions are always about pay.
When all else fails in college sports, follow the money. The Dartmouth endowment is somewhere around $6b-$7b. Plus, this is all about a players association getting its nose under the tent.
Seems the NCAA is like ole Nero, Fiddling around while Rome burns. Congress is not going to do anything.
It makes you wonder if some of these smaller schools will just say to hell with it and discontinue sports beyond the club level. There’s way too much money involved for the big boys to do that. I suspect the next few years are going to be utter chaos.
This is exactly what I call the great reset around college sports. If the big colleges step over a few red lines and piss off their core supporters, you may see universities do the same.
I do believe we’ll see a complete split between the schools whose athletic programs are big business and the rest in next 7-10 years.
I’ve also wondered if really big programs may drop the pretense of university affiliation at some point and just market themselves as the pro teams they’ve (almost) become. I know there’d be a lot to untangle – mainly setting up leagues independent of schools – but it’s not inconceivable this could happen. After all, in many instances, the universities need football and basketball programs more than the football and basketball programs need them.
Who owns the stadium, the practice fields, the indoor practice facility, etc, etc? Does UGA own it or does the athletic association own it? I have no idea.
UGA (meaning Georgia taxpayers) owns all of the real estate. The buildings are UGAAA property on state property leased by the athletic association.
All of this isn’t going to be so easy to untangle.
the idea that a place like Emory is suddenly going to be the model for intercollegiate sports is kind of sad. But maybe that’s what happens. It will be Collegiate Sports Venezuela: a small upper crust of fabulously wealthy schools spending billions, and a large number of barely above intramural level programs, in terms of revenue and internal financial support.
Fantastic.
Ironically, in this entirely believable scenario, the schools with the biggest endowments are most likely to go the intramural route. Of course, their student athletes/workers are very unlikely to need to pin their hopes on playing professionally.
UGA endowment: $1.4bn
Harvard endowment: $49bn
UGA athletic budget: $174m
Harvard athletic budget: $30m
As an Emory grad I can tell you that the school would probably be just fine eliminating sports in general and taking over the real estate for academic and housing construction.
l grew in in Decatur, used the law library, the tennis courts, and frequently would run around campus and Lullwater Park. It’s a gem, but they have plenty of cash, and are very happy letting sports be a small part of the overall university. I can’t argue with their right to prioritize academics, and it seemed to me a lot of the people there specifically chose a “non sports factory” environment. They like it at their very low, tail isn’t wagging the dog level. I respect that.
i couldn’t have afforded Emory, but I liked the energy of intercollegiate sports. You can do that and still take school seriously. Ish.🤣 I don’t know what the final product will be, but the paradigm is shifting fast. I don’t object to players getting a piece of the action they’ve helped create. But I’m not sure it isn’t all a prisoners dilemma scenario that will wreck most of what made it uniquely fun.
40 years ago everyone knew who the heavyweight boxing champ was, and big fights were on network tv. I haven’t watched a boxing match in 30 years. I have no idea who the champ is. The tip top guys make tons of PPV, and hardly anyone cares. Is the the cfb future? Hope not, but it isn’t a great way to build new fans. <Shrug>
buenis suerte, I guess.
Maybe I’m missing something, but as I understand it, NIL is a fee being paid by a business entity for the athlete’s help in advertising and not by the school. If that’s the case, how does that make them employees of the school eligible for unionization??
The athletes “work” for the schools and the collectives just arrange sponsorships for those workers. In other words, the collectives are just an agency.
Me thinks “work” is doin’ a mess of heavy liftin’ there!
Do away with the collectives and then NIL would be what was intended, and the agency thing is a non issue.
NIL has nothing to do with the issue of whether scholarship athletes qualify for the definition of employees.
Unionizing will lead to work stoppage which will lead to the end of college sports as we know it. The first labor walk off by a Big 10 or SEC school will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I hate to see it, but it is coming.
or lockout by management.
Why do they need to be employees to walk off? Ask FSU for the Orange Bowl game.
Strike now, get nothing for it. Is this sort of like “guilt without sex”? Kind of a suboptimal business model, isn’t it!
I don’t know how this will play out for the programs, schools, and athletes. I never much cared for Basketball.
However, I do know in CFB between the devalued regularly seasons, loss of decades old rivalries, expectation that we will eventually have to pay a subscription fee to an app to watch that my interest is fading quickly. If UGA wasn’t looking like a contender and recent back to back Natties, I wouldn’t even pay attention.
ESPN = satan
killed Boxing, NASCAR, Sportscenter, and closing in on CFB
forgot to add college basketball
Did ESPN kill boxing or did PPV (HBO/Showtime) kill boxing? I’m curious.
I think it was PPV. Deliberately limiting your audience by putting your content behind an expensive paywall isn’t a great recipe for long-term success.
Hypothetically, is it possible that this whole subscription thing might, ironically enough, serve to drive fans back to the stadiums? Unintended consequences and all…
someone should tell the AJC. But FTMF regardless.
Glad we got ours when we did. Can’t see this holding my interest for many more years.
AMEN Brother!
Did y’all see Saben’s comments on why he retired? Pretty interesting.
Elaborate, please sir?
I found my answers on AL.com.
And fuck Bama and their privilege.
I don’t get it with Dartmouth. An employee makes its employer money, right? I’m guessing basketball costs Dartmouth, so why would those kids be paid? If they’re good enough to get paid, go somewhere that can pay them from the profits. Guess I just don’t see how students who play non revenue sports are employees. Kind of like playing rec ball, except you might get a scholarship.