The NCAA Blew It For Twenty Straight Years!
That's gotta be a record
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It’s almost incredible that it has come to this, but a bunch of basketball players at Dartmouth may become the first unionized college athletes in America.
Memo to the NCAA: You know you’re getting dusted when the Dartmouth hoops guys start dunking on you.
This is an outrage. Not that a labor judge decreed that athletes are employees of a university and thus entitled to organize — that’s been rattling around in one form or another in a bunch of different venues, involving different schools.
I’m not even outraged — or maybe I’m only slightly outraged — that it’s Dartmouth basketballers and not somebody who, you know…matters. Man, they don’t even get athletic scholarships in the Ivy. When were Kentucky’s or Michigan State’s players going to jump up and demand some W-2 cake?
No, the real outrage is this: The NCAA has been staring down the barrel of this precise problem for two decades, going back several years before the Ed O’Bannon case that set up the entire college sports landscape for change.
The NCAA knew this was coming. You know what its leadership has done for 20 years? Incurred some serious billable hours, is what.
The NIL process, ragged and erratic as it is, was the NCAA’s last-minute workaround solution to allow athletes to collect money for their labor. But it came only at the point of a bayonet. The org had already lost all its court cases and was staring down another huge defeat, so it said, Sure, give the kids some deals — the good ones, anyway.
The Dartmouth case, which the university says it will appeal, may alter that landscape again. The NLRB judge merely recognized the athletes as workers, but that is one gigantic recognition if it is allowed to be applied at both public and private institutions. By the NCAA’s own reckoning, D-I sports generated roughly $17.5 billion in revenue in 2022 alone.
Chip Kelly has it right, and he’s had it right for a while now. The UCLA coach thinks that Division I football should simply splinter off and become its own thing, with the players paid for their role in the multi-billion-dollar enterprise that constitutes college gridiron. All the other sports could stay in their conferences — or they could have stayed, if the splintering and the consolidating hadn’t already begun. (See ya, Pac-12.)
You had decades, NCAA. Any solution would’ve been better than the cluster-tumble you’re facing now. And we, the fans, have to deal with the fallout. Yuck.