Jonathan Mahler says “an earthquake has just rocked the shaky edifice of the NCAA”:
Peter Sung Ohr, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, ruled that Northwestern University’s football team can unionize. This is a big, big deal.
If the ruling is upheld by the NLRB in Washington, and the various courts to which the university and NCAA would then appeal, it will be a revolution. As members of a union, the Wildcat players could, for example, insist on having independent concussion experts on the sidelines during games. They could demand that Northwestern cover medical expenses related to sports injuries, as well as pay the full costs, including expenses, of attending college. And now that the NLRB has certified Northwestern’s union, you can expect plenty of other college athletes to follow suit. The ruling might already apply to all private FBS schools, including major ones such as Notre Dame and Stanford. The logical next step would be for college athletes at such schools to join together to form a single players union — much like those for professional athletes.
McArdle weighs in:
It’s long been an open secret that football players at schools with major sports programs are something closer to an employee of the athletic department than to a member of the student body. Many of them aren’t capable of college work, and those who are aren’t necessarily encouraged to do any. The fiction that they’re students is maintained only by NCAA rules that forbid outright compensation of players, and “gifts” that are just compensation in disguise. You can argue, and I would, that these rules mostly benefit the colleges, not the “students.” I understand that the players get something out of the deal. But they would get a lot more if it weren’t for a legalized cartel that’s actively suppressing their wages. Given these realities, it’s hard not to cheer the NLRB. But it isn’t clear how much allowing football players to unionize will accomplish, as long as the NCAA is still allowed to make rules against paying them.
Erik Loomis takes the long view:
Now, this is far from the end of the road. Northwestern is going to appeal and the NCAA is going to back them up all the way. After all, the free labor they take from athletes is at stake. So who knows what is going to happen. But a couple of quick key takeaways. First is the speed of the decision. Usually, these cases are a long, drawn-out process (often a problem of the NLRB, making it an increasingly ineffective agency for workers operating in real time with house payments and such). This case began only two months ago. This means that for the regional director, it was an obvious and easy decision. He declared these athletes workers because they received compensation, even if did not receive a paycheck Second, this continues to chip away at the NCAA. Every time players sue or argue for rights, the NCAA cartel weakens. Every time they win or even gain a partial victory, NCAA power declines even more.
But in the short term, questions remain:
Ivan Maisel, of ESPN, raises a smart series of concerns. There is, for example, a potential problem of scope. Ohr’s decision covers only scholarship players on the football team. What about athletes who play other sports? “The workload of the college athletes in non-revenue sports is also extreme,” he writes. “They also sign that contract to perform services. They are subject to the control of the coaches, and in return for payment. By these criteria, they deserve to join the union, too.” And the decision covers only men. Women’s sports often lose money. Does that mean that the female athletes in these sports are students, rather than employees, and thus undeserving of union protection?
Meanwhile, Bloomberg editors urge schools to give their athletes “union-busting scholarships”:
[T]he ruling was based on the fact that an athletic scholarship can be withdrawn if a player opts to quit a team. This gives the school too much leverage – whether or not courts ever decide that it makes the student an employee.
The NCAA should solve this by making a simple change that would be good for students and schools alike: Require that all athletic scholarships be granted for four years. Then, if a student-athlete lost interest in a sport, or decided the team requirements were too demanding, he or she could quit and still finish college on scholarship. Incredibly, the NCAA began allowing such multiyear awards just two years ago, and while some schools have begun offering them, few do – and only to a small number of high-level prospects.
Alyssa mulls over commercialism and sports more generally:
The idea that elite college athletes are amateurs who devote their college careers to playing sports for nothing but love is of a piece with a larger contradiction in the way American audiences approach athletic competition. Professional sports are an absolutely giant business. In 2012, Major League Baseball signed three television deals covering eight years of broadcasts for $12.4 billion, bragging that the figure represented “more than a 100-percent increase in annual rights fees to MLB over the current arrangements.” But when athletes themselves dare to follow the examples of their owners and their leagues and prioritize their contracts over loyalty to any given city, fans can go ballistic: Witness the frustration vented at Robinson Cano when he left the New York Yankees for the Seattle Mariners.
If we make sports the embodiment of American ideals, it makes a certain amount of sense, however irrational it is, that we want athletes to focus on something other than money. It would be too uncomfortable to acknowledge that the games we set up as objects of worship are really just a way for us to venerate a few talented people for extracting the highest possible compensation in exchange for their gifts.
The Dish 