College Athletes Need a Union

There’s a well-meaning idea circulating around the halls of Congress that would move toward fairly compensating college athletes. But just because it’s well-meaning doesn’t mean it’s the best answer to the problem.

Here’s a description from a story last week in USA Today:

A bipartisan trio of U.S. senators on Thursday unveiled a discussion draft of a college sports bill that aims to provide a national solution to issues with athletes’ money-making activities related to their name, image and likeness, and to establish a set of rules for athletes’ short- and long-term health care, their safety and their educational choice. 

Under the 50-page draft from Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., those standards would be created, in part, and enforced by a new entity that would be called the “College Athletics Corporation.” It would not be a government agency but would be granted investigative and subpoena powers.

The corporation would be charged with creating a formal certification process for people seeking to represent athletes in name, image and likeness (NIL) dealings. It also would maintain a publicly available database showing a variety of data that schools would have to provide annually, including the number, average and total value of athlete endorsement contracts, all broken down by sport, race and ethnicity, and gender.

Here are my problems with the bill:

First, it doesn’t address the central issue, which is that athletes in money-producing sports need to be treated by their schools like the employees that they are. NIL is fine and providing some guidelines is okay, I suppose, though not without risk. But it’s only part of the problem.

Second, I’m not sure creating a new quasi-public regulatory body is such a great idea. It will grow its own expensive bureaucracy, which will be mostly interested in protecting itself. Since it’s quasi-public it looks to me like it’ll have some of the powers of a public body, but without the transparency. And, finally, regulatory bodies always run the risk of being coopted by the regulated — in this case the schools and the athletic program boosters.

Third, what happens to the NCAA? Would it be replaced by this new body? Would it co-exist and if so, what would be the division of labor? Won’t this just create turf battles? My own view is that the NCAA should go away as its main purpose is to preserve the myth of the “student-athlete.”

I think the better answer is to follow the pro sports model. Allow college athletes to form their own unions — they’d probably need unions representing Division 1 football, lower division football, men’s basketball, hockey, women’s basketball, volleyball and track, etc. That’s because each of those groups of athletes would have different interests and would deserve varying levels of compensation. A starting football player for a Power Five conference team deserves higher compensation than a pole vaulter because, as a rule, football earns the revenues that feed everything else.

Then, just like the pros, the union would negotiate with the schools to get the best deal possible for the players. The union contracts would set minimum salaries, NIL guidelines, and conditions of labor. Of course, it would be more complicated because there isn’t one entity with which to negotiate, like the NFL owners. I suppose the entity could be the NCAA, but it seems to me that that organization is so far gone that it is beyond saving. Maybe abolish the NCAA and create new naturally occurring entities of interest: Power Five football schools, Division 1 men’s basketball, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. This bill draft represents progress. We’ve now come so far as to have a serious discussion of how to compensate college athletes as opposed to if to compensate them. I just think that we’ve already got a model that works in the pro player unions and that’s the better answer.