College Athletes’ Voices are Valuable Missing Piece of House Settlement

How can collective bargaining take place in college sports without steering into employment status?

Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The House v. NCAA settlement has yet to be approved, and it remains an imperfect solution to college sports in the NIL era.

The harsh truth is that it didn’t need to be this way. Simply put, it should have taken input from college football and basketball players — those most affected by revenue sharing.

The NCAA has consistently lost litigation due to athletes not agreeing to the set rules. It’s why the transfer portal rules were eradicated and why NIL is legal and without guardrails at present.

The need for collective bargaining and a negotiation process has never been clearer. Is there a pathway to that future without employment status for college athletes?

How Could College Sports Move Toward Collective Bargaining?

The settlement's core is at odds with its claims amid roster limit issues and other changes.

Under the guise of publicity rights, athletes will sign these NIL deals directly with schools, which ultimately amount to pay-for-play.

The problem is that it limits the athletes’ opportunities to use their likeness for real endorsement deals outside of the school.

For example, a brand might conflict with the brand that sponsors the school, but the athletes won’t own their rights to do endorsements in the same way.

The athletes did not agree to these restrictions, including the compensation limits imposed by the cap and the NIL clearinghouse for third-party deals.

Jim Cavale, founder of the players association for college athletes, Athletes.org, has been working to implement a process for collective bargaining in college sports.

He views the cap on their earnings as the most contentious aspect of the settlement, given its lack of collective bargaining.

Next come the contracts where athletes are confused once they see they can’t do other NIL deals or are asked to do extra promotion for free. The coach may try to push them out, but they can't because they're not performance contracts.

These lawsuits will no longer target the NCAA; instead, they will target schools or even coaches, compounding the problem.

“The next frontier of lawsuits is coming directly to campus, and it's a huge liability for everyone involved,” Cavale said.

Athletes don't know what they're signing up for and what they're giving up in revenue sharing. It’s an issue that has been brought up with U.S. District Judge Wilken and the plaintiff’s attorneys, but it’s one they keep alleging isn’t pertinent to the settlement.

“They're just trying to get an answer on the settlement, and that's distracting them from all the other things they're going to have to figure out next,” Cavale said. “Which are complex but yet could be simplified through taking an existing blueprint and copy and pasting it into college sports, and that's collective bargaining.”

Athletes.org is the largest players association in the country, with 4,700 members, and their goal of collective bargaining is shared with coaches and even athletic directors.

Cavale has created a process they’ve begun to socialize with athletic directors to show them what it would be like for athletes to have a seat at the table.

“One thing that's been encouraging about those meetings is a lot of the things that the ADs want is not far from what the athletes want,” Cavale said. “I think getting a deal done is realistic once we have those conversations.”

Cavale and his partner created a bill for their conversations in DC that shows a path for collective bargaining without employment status. He believes that route would have the best bipartisan support.

He also sees an information gap where schools and commissioners may believe collective bargaining would occur directly between the athletes and the school.

“The Atlanta Falcons players don't collectively bargain with the Atlanta Falcons,” Cavale said. “The Atlanta Falcons players collectively bargain with the NFL.”

It’s clear that schools and athletes are lacking a vehicle to collectively bargain, and a league entity like a player’s association solves that.

The House settlement appears to have no positive impact on the state of college sports without the athletes' input.

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