I won't officially post my next Millennial essay for a couple of days, but I had to make note of this because I think it ties in quite well. This is shocking. In a regional NLRB ruling, college football players at Northwestern University are now allowed to vote to be represented by the CAPA, a players' union for college football players.
To say this opens a can of worms is the understatement of the year.
For an entire century almost, colleges have offered athletic scholarships to provide students an opportunity to attend college. Scholarships are offered in dozens of sports, not just football. According to the arbitrator's opinion, football players are not in fact students, but rather employees of the private university (public universities are not affected by the ruling). They are employees due to the fact that they receive compensation (in the form of a scholarship) and have to adhere to a strict 52 week, 168 hour per week schedule under the supervision of coaches.
At best, the concept of amateurism was on life support. With this ruling, it is now officially deceased (I chose 1896 as the birth year due to that being the first year of the modern Olympics).
The rationale went on to include the economic windfall football provides universities with both good and bad teams. This windfall can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which players and their advocates for years have complained that see very little of that money if anything at all. This has led to all kinds of theories and proposals about pay for play schedules and other compensation for student-athletes. I agreed with some concepts but not for others. Some ideas I agreed with begrudgingly, other not so much. As an educator, my main goal for students, athletes or otherwise, is to prepare them for a world where skills that transcend fields and courts will be far more useful to them than the ability to dunk a basketball...or a football.
Athletic scholarships are a major way several students can get that college education they otherwise might not be able to sniff. However, as athletics, and football in particular, began to just explode in popularity, universities started to rake in millions of dollars. As soon as millions of dollars entered the equation, of course that changes the whole game.
30, 20, 10, even 5 years ago, would the concept of college players forming a union even be contemplated, let alone a reality?
As Ivan Maisel notes, there are now so many other questions this ruling begs to be answered. Do athletes in non-revenue sports get the same treatment as football players? They get athletic scholarships and have to adhere to strict schedules as well, but their sports may not generate a tenth of the revenue that football does. What about academic requirements? If athletes are no-longer student-athletes, can we just kiss the idea of grade point average goodbye too?
There is one simple solution that universities (and the NCAA) can adopt that can take this ruling and render it meaningless, but you know it will never happen.
Drop football as an interscholastic sport.
You heard me. Drop football. It sounds just as weird as it looks.
Or at the very least, place more of an emphasis on the academic part of being a student-athlete, instead of having Nick Saban run Alabama players' lives in the weight room. If big-time Division I-A schools placed half the emphasis on academics that other institutions do, make the kids succeed in the classroom just as much as if not more than on the field, we probably are not having this debate. Unfortunately, the 1% of student-athletes who advance to the NFL are dictating what the 99% of student-athletes who do not can and cannot do. Enforce academic eligibility requirements...really enforce them. If you can't maintain a 2.5, your priorities need to be elsewhere, not on the football field. Academic scholarships are directly tied to GPA, why not athletic? Universities love to boast about high GPAs of incoming and outgoing classes. Why can't football players be a part of that? College is supposed to prepare you for far more than a fleeting career in professional sports leagues. If colleges can get back to that emphasis (and less on Nick Saban winning more championships), I think you will see just as exciting games, and better people who play and coach them.
If that is just not possible, drop football. At least that way I can guarantee there will be no picket lines, just ticket lines.
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