MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — Last week, near the steps of the U.S. Capitol, a scene unfolded that encapsulates the troublesome predicament in which college athletics finds itself.
Flanked by the leader of a players association, the president of the NAACP and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a college football player spoke into a microphone to deliver a message.
“It’s important that people hear what athletes have to say,” said Jackson Pruitt, a Temple offensive lineman. “It’s important that we push for player representation and some kind of player union that gets us what we deserve.”
Not far away, while participating in a panel held by Democrat Congresswoman Lori Trahan, a group of women’s basketball players unleashed a fury of comments directed at college leaders.
One of them, some might contend, said the quiet part out loud.
“I think it’s time to come to the truth: We are employees,” said Oluchi Okananwa, a Maryland women’s hoops player from Boston and the Big Ten’s Defensive Player of the Year last season.
College sports executives may claim that these players were used as tools for partisan lawmakers at a divisive time in American politics.
But their message —schools should deem athletes employees and bargain with them— is beginning to gain traction at the highest levels of the industry, including within the Southeastern Conference and its powerful group of university presidents, chancellors and athletic directors.
“I never thought I’d say it, but I’m there on employment,” one of those SEC presidents told Yahoo Sports recently. “Let’s collectively bargain.”
Here on the sandy white beaches and emerald waters of the Florida panhandle this week, college football’s most-watched conference holds its spring business meetings at the Sandestin Hilton — an annual gathering of athletic directors, presidents, and football and basketball coaches.
And while playoff expansion discussions draw fan interest (there will be no expansion decision this week), more pressing issues are at hand.
Combined with the millions spent on coaching and administrative salaries, rising roster compensation amounts have thrust athletic departments into the red. Universities, some of them already crippled financially considering the enrollment cliff, are using general funds to fill athletic budgetary holes. And costs are only expected to get higher.
At the center of discussions here is how to slow the escalating pace of roster values and bring long-term stability to the system.
Outside of congressional legislation, there is but one real solution.
“There is a construct in the current law of the country that would work well for college sports,” Tennessee athletic director Danny White told Yahoo Sports in an interview earlier this spring. “It’s called collective bargaining.”
‘Look down the road’
A longtime vocal proponent of athlete bargaining and employment, White is no longer on an island.
Within SEC administrative rooms, the topic of collective bargaining has turned from long-shot discussions to full-blown presentations. Momentum is growing enough that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and his conference staff, in an effort to prepare membership, have engaged outside counsel on the aspects of employment and bargaining.
Just earlier this month, in fact, executives saw modeling of a bargaining framework and discussion on such is expected this week — even if it is preliminary in nature. The conference isn’t alone. Big Ten presidents and chancellors received an employment presentation last week during their meetings near Los Angeles and some Big 12 and ACC officials have been studying the issue, too.
Lost in the fodder of the SEC’s continued exploration into a self-governance model — an idea to create its own rules and enforcement — is that such a move may open a path to eventually bargain with athletes.
For some, an NCAA breakaway is necessary to achieve a bargaining structure — directly from the league itself or through a third-party entity created to bargain on behalf of football and men’s basketball players. That concept has been socialized by White and his chancellor, Donde Plowman, the chair of the SEC presidents.
In any self-governing model, “you’d have to have the players’ side be incentivized to follow the rules,” Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said in an interview earlier this spring with Yahoo Sports.
“You can’t just have the schools incentivized,” he continued. “You need both sides. I don’t know what that would look like and are you triggering labor status at that point? You probably are. I have some colleagues who think that’s what we should do. We should study it. Maybe that is the answer.”
On Monday evening, after a lengthy news conference previewing the SEC’s meetings this week, Sankey declined to speak about collective bargaining. But in limited public comments in the past, he has signaled caution over the concept.
He often points to the many challenges, including the considering of one subset of athletes as employees while treating another differently; additional benefits and complications that come with employment; political issues within his 11-state footprint; and, lastly, the absence of a desire from athletes to be employees. Two years ago, in fact, at this very event, he told reporters when asked about bargaining: “I’ve not had a student-athlete come to me and say, ‘I want to be taxed like an employee.’”
Not everyone is in support of even the exploration of collective bargaining, including Georgia president Jere Morehead, one of the most outspoken leaders in the league and the former chair of the NCAA Division I Board of Directors.
“I can’t see how a state that doesn’t authorize collective bargaining for its state employees would authorize it for its student-athletes. I don’t think it’s a viable solution and it’s not one we should be talking about,” he told Yahoo Sports here Tuesday. “Anyone advocating for collective bargaining needs to talk to the NFL and understand what’s happened to worker’s comp claims in the NFL.”
But many administrators within the SEC — most of whom decline to speak publicly about such a sensitive topic — are urging those in leadership positions to find a way to bargain with athletes before the biggest bargaining chip (offering them more money in a higher cap) becomes more difficult.
By the next transfer portal, football rosters are projected to exceed $60 million, according to one prediction from a national agency representing players and coaches. That is believed to be a 300% increase within three years.
“If we don’t get a level of regulation in the market, a lot of people are going to go bankrupt,” Texas A&M coach Mike Elko said Tuesday. “If we get another couple years where it’s up 20% and 20%, the NIL budget is going to be more than the entire TV revenue for all of our universities.”
Ahead of this week’s meetings, in fact, SEC schools were directed to submit to the league their individual roster spend amounts for this year, the last several years and projections for the next couple years — figures that may shape conversations about the future.
According to many school officials who have shared figures with one another, the league’s average football roster value this coming season is expected to fall between $30-35 million, with some above $40 million and others below $25 million. Schools are inching closer to their roster compensation reaching or exceeding the 50% mark of their sport’s annual revenue (and that excludes millions more spent on scholarships, meals, medical, etc.). The 50% mark is the standard for ownership-athlete revenue split in many professional sports.
Half of the SEC’s 16 schools generate $80 million or less in football revenue. Already, many men’s and women’s college basketball programs are spending well more than 50% of their sport’s annual revenue on their rosters.
“Men’s basketball is no longer a profitable sport,” said one administrator here.
CSC ‘imperfections’
Since Jan. 1, SEC schools have submitted for approval more than $100 million in third-party NIL compensation to the College Sports Commission, the industry’s new enforcement entity created and operated by the power four conferences that is charged with scrutinizing and rejecting deals that don’t meet benchmarks for legitimacy.
Much of that more than $100 million in NIL compensation remains under review or has been rejected, sparking fear among conference administrators and coaches.
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Will these guarantees made to athletes go unpaid?
The complications have led to a movement,especially within the SEC and Big Ten, to change rules by which the CSC operates— an effort to easier get deals cleared through the system. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti last week described it as an "immediate issue” that needs solving, and Sankey on Monday acknowledged “imperfections” that leaders are working to “address.”
Those two leagues account for more than 75% of the more than $250 million in above-the-cap NIL submissions since January.
While executives at the Big 12 and ACC are against any kind of so-called “amnesty” or full exemption of those NIL deals, other ideas are under discussion. One of those is creating an exemption for NIL deals if they fall within, say, 25% or 50% of the CSC’s range-of-compensation (example: if a submitted deal of $100,000 is within $50,000 of the CSC’s range-of-comp, it would get approved).
The entire situation has resulted in louder discussions around a self-governing model that may eventually include athlete bargaining.
Some believe such a model is inevitable.
One of those is Jeffrey Kessler, a nationally renown plaintiff attorney whose lawsuit against the NCAA resulted in the settlement of three antitrust cases (commonly referred to as the House settlement) that ushered in direct pay from schools to players.
He encourages conferences to “look down the road.” There, he says, you’ll find collective bargaining. The House settlement agreement allows for the creation of a bargaining structure as a way to provide athletes with “additional benefits” outside of the settlement.
“One conference could say, ‘We are going to recognize these athletes as employees,’” Kessler told Yahoo Sports in an interview earlier this spring. “The [House] settlement is crafted as a way to facilitate that. The settlement would become a baseline and there would be things added on. I actually think that’s how it would be done — on a conference-by-conference basis. Then the question is, would it be done by sport? You could have a union for football in the SEC.”
Within administrative meetings and during presentations, college executives have been told, clearly by outside counsel and consultants, that their athletes will be deemed employees at some point in the future. In fact, school revenue-share contracts already “read like employee handbooks,” said Michael Leroy, an Illinois law professor who has published extensive work on labor policy.
A court case, Johnson v. NCAA, arguing that athletes should be employees of their universities, is awaiting a district court judge’s ruling.
It looms as a game-changer.
“So far, the NCAA has never acknowledged the comparison to work study-style student employment,” said Paul McDonald, the attorney who filed the Johnson case. “It is not credible, or sustainable, to argue that college athletes — the most controlled students, and only students required to prioritize non-academic activities — do not qualify for, and deserve, the same student employee status as classmates selling popcorn at NCAA games or performing menial tasks around campus.”
Several university administrators are serious enough about bargaining that they have participated in in-person bargaining or unionization presentations from those attempting to organize players, like Jim Cavale and Brandon Copeland of Athletes.Org, and Jason Stahl of the College Football Players Association.
They are preparing for the future — one that could come much sooner than anyone anticipated.
“Collective bargaining at the highest level of play in college football is obviously where the sport's future lies,” said Stahl, who is actively in discussion with major conference football players regarding unionization. “Since players are now directly compensated by their schools and conferences, recognizing them as employees with collective bargaining rights is a much smaller leap.”
Why would players bargain?
In many ways, the public push for collective bargaining came at this particular event in spring of 2023, when then-Alabama coach Nick Saban quipped to reporters, “Unionize it, make it like the NFL.”
Plenty of head football coaches have followed suit, none louder than ex-Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, who used his team’s run to the championship game in 2024 as a platform to push for bargaining with players.
In seeking any sort of rules in an unregulated system, many other coaches and administrators are following suit. This is the first sign, perhaps, that college athletes shouldnotwant to bargain, experts say.
It may only be bad for them.
Scott Schneider, an Austin-based sports labor attorney, describes any bargaining or negotiating in college as benefiting only the schools.Why would athletes bargain for a worse deal?“They currently have a whole bunch of universities competing for their services,” he said last year in an interview.
“College athletes aren’t feeling pain right now,” Cavale said in a previous interview to describe difficult unionization efforts. “They are free agents every year and can get $600,000 for playing DB by moving from one school to another and get an apartment and a car.”
There are a litany of other problematic issues and high hurdles to bargaining collectively with athletes, including formal recognition of athletes as employees (more difficult now with a Republican-controlled labor board); the creation of a players association (who can both athletes and administrators trust to lead it?); political pushback and state laws, specifically in the South, against bargaining; and the aforementioned lingering questions: Do athletes really want this and what would they get out of it?
Without a player-led unionization effort — even if conferences deem athletes employees — schools may lose the primary benefit of bargaining: protection from antitrust lawsuits.
“Management does not get to decide to collectively bargain,” adds Gabe Feldman, a Tulane sports law professor.
Even DeMaurice Smith, who for years presided over the NFL Players Association, told Yahoo Sports last year that bargaining with athletes would be "extremely difficult” because there are such a large number of them each playing a disparate number of sports, with some generating revenue and others not.
The four professional leagues bargain with about 4,700 players. Each power league has “two to three times” that amount for upwards of 30 sports, not four, said NCAA president Charlie Baker. It’s “not as simple as a lot of people alleged,” Baker warned.
But it is inevitable, says Copeland of Athletes.org.
“There’s no chance of putting restraints or limits on athletes without collective bargaining,” he said.
However, something else looms.
Many within college sports believe that a congressional bill to regulate college athletics is imminent from the U.S. Senate.
Sens. Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz have been engrossed in negotiations since March over what would be landmark bipartisan legislation that is expected to regulate transfers, eligibility and the compensation cap while granting protections to athletes such as guaranteed scholarships, long-term medical care and against unscrupulous agents.
However, the introduction of a bill is only the start of a lengthy approval process that could end in another disappointment for college athletics at a divisive and unpredictable time in Washington.
That’s why some here believe the time is now to bargain with athletes — before it’s too late.
“There’s a way to do it,” White, the Tennessee athletic director, said in January. “We’re way past time to roll up our sleeves and try to figure it out.”
