No. 1 Michigan plays No. 2 Washington for the College Football Playoff National Championship at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas, Monday night.
Millions will watch the game, which will air on ESPN and projects to generate more than $200 million for the local economy. It will be played by some of the world’s most talented football players, who have spent countless hours preparing for this experience while having to pass college courses.
Why are these players juggling intense football careers with studying for courses that typically have little to do with those careers? The answer is the peculiar American system known as big time college sports.
These players are full-time students at colleges which are members of the NCAA, which requires the athletes to be full-time students. That’s not the ideal system for sports or education, College Football Players Association (CFPA) executive director Jason Stahl argues, and it’s one he said could change dramatically if college football players are recognized as employees and unionize.
Stahl, a former faculty member at the University of Minnesota, says for many football players in top programs, “they aren’t getting an education because football is the priority.” He asserts the education is often “fake” and “credentialism at its worst” as the players are used to generate revenue.
Stahl adds that schools have been forced to create and pay for academic-styled systems that involve checking to make sure players go to class and relying on an “advising apparatus to make sure they get Cs in classes that are not valuable.”
This line of criticism is shared by many.
During the oral argument for NCAA v. Alston, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito bluntly said, “The athletes themselves have a pretty hard life. They face training requirements that leave little time or energy for study, constant pressure to put sports above study, pressure to drop out of hard majors and hard classes, really shockingly low graduation rates. Only a tiny percentage ever go on to make any money in professional sports.”
Stahl stresses this system doesn’t have to continue. In a world where college football players are employees, they could simply work as players and then pursue college studies after their football careers end.
That might be when they’re 21 years old or, for those who go on to play in the pros, several years later.
Stahl sees educational benefits as key in a world where college football players are unionized employees who negotiate collective bargaining agreements. Those negotiated agreements would be exempt from antitrust scrutiny—a major thorn on the NCAA’s side in recent years—since the non-statutory labor exemption insulates agreements by management and labor from antitrust law’s reach.
Stahl acknowledges this world has not yet arrived. NLRB petitions involving USC and Dartmouth athletes and Johnson v. NCAA are likely years away from resolutions.
But employee recognition increasingly seems a question of when, not if. “I think there’s a false assumption that employee status will make education go by the wayside when the opposite of that is true,” Stahl asserts.
He envisions a setup where a CBA contemplates four years of full-time college football and educational benefits usable at the athlete’s discretion. Stahl notes the NFLPA and NFL have collectively bargained a similar concept with tuition benefits.
“They play football, and maybe turn pro and play for several years. They can come back and get a real education,” he said.
By that point, the players will be a little older and wiser and, most importantly, they won’t be “college football players”—they’ll just be college students—and can focus on academics and career planning without worrying about football.
The schools also don’t “lose” in this setup. Colleges would still obtain these players’ football services, which generate billions of dollars in revenues used to fund other sports and the salaries of coaches and staff.
Plus, through athletic scholarships, colleges already forgo revenue by granting football players full tuition, housing and other benefits for which other students pay. The only difference would be timing: Instead of student-athletes, the players would be athletes and then students.
If college football players wish to take some college courses while they’re players, that would be fine. For decades, colleges have offered pathways for students—some of whom work in full-time jobs for those colleges—to take courses on a gradual basis.
Stahl says a major goal for CPFA, an advocacy group for college football players, is “to make college athletics saner and more sustainable over the long term.” He emphasizes that paying college football players is hardly a radical idea given that other elite athletes in the same age group are paid.
“Coco Gauff is the highest paid female athlete in the world. She’s 19-years-old. No one ever asks, ‘How is she going to spend that money?’ But we ask that about college football players—there is a paternalistic attitude [about them].” Stahl notes that many players come from poorer backgrounds and “could use this money” when they’re in their late teens and early 20s.
As with any structural changes, there would be complexities. Would athletes in other sports gain the same choice? What about football players at DI programs outside the Power Five? Those and other questions would need to be answered, but details can be debated and ironed out.
Stahl says if the NCAA and member schools are smart, they’ll proactively transform rather than wait for court orders that abruptly compel change. He references how the NCAA and schools opposed NIL for years until state laws were enacted that literally took the power away from them.
“Institutions have to be dragged into that change and because of that the changes we get are chaotic,” Stahl warns.
He advises the NCAA and its schools to try a different playbook that calls for collaboration with the players. “If you bargain with the players, the antitrust concerns go away,” he said. “We don’t have to wait for the NLRB or a court. We can start creating this model together.”