Could collective bargaining be the answer for college sports? Some ADs are ready to say the quiet part out loud

ORLANDO — For more than two years now, Danny White, the athletic director at Tennessee, has quietly socialized with select colleagues a detailed presentation that, he believes, serves as a solution to what ails the college sports industry.

He’s worked mostly in the shadows, pitching his solution through a multi-slide deck in an effort to rally support for this passion project: collective bargaining with college athletes.

Well, he’s done being quiet about it.

“It’s time to go public,” he said recently from a gathering of athletic administrators at the Orlando World Center Marriott. “I’ve been voicing it in private rooms for four years. I’m not going to bite my tongue anymore.”

The presentation, shown in detail to Yahoo Sports, illustrates how a college athlete collective-bargaining model might work. The fact that this concept derives from the leader of an SEC athletic department and one of the country’s most valuable brands makes it all the more relevant.

The package features multiple flowcharts, a detailed explanation of the concepts and a stunning change that may make university leaders squirm: It refers to players not as student-athletes but as employee-athletes.

In White’s model, college athletes would, in fact, not be employees of their schools. The structure calls for the creation of a national employment organization that partners with a players association, perhaps one already formed in the professional leagues, to create a “modernized and improved ecosystem” for football and men’s basketball players, White describes, and one still tethered to higher education via requirements in a bargained agreement.

“Collective bargaining and employment status shouldn’t be seen as negative terms,” he told Yahoo Sports. “I think there’s a lot of people who think the same way I do. We can go through another three or five or 10 years of a difficult environment. Or we can accept the reality and fix it right now.”

White is right. He’s far from alone in thinking that, despite the impending start of athlete revenue-sharing, college sports is in need of a collective-bargaining solution as a way to avoid future litigation and create a more stable environment.

In fact, more than three-dozen college athletics leaders — many of them sitting power conference athletic directors — say they support some form of collective bargaining with athletes.

A few, like White, are beginning to now speak publicly.

“Whether you call it collective bargaining or some kind of negotiating process, I think it is needed,” Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades told Yahoo Sports.

“It’s worth exploring,” SMU athletic director Damon Evans says. “There is concern over unionizing and I understand that, but where we are right now … I don’t think this is the last iteration of this process.”

Some athletic administrators, and even head football coaches, are serious enough about the concept that they have participated in in-person bargaining or unionization presentations before those attempting to organize players, like Jim Cavale of Athletes.Org and Jason Stahl of the College Football Players Association.

A small group meeting unfolded at the site of the Final Four in San Antonio, in fact, and other gatherings have transpired across individual campuses. FSU athletic director Michael Alford participated in one. “I want all the options on the table, including collective bargaining,” he said.

On Tuesday, the industry lurches into the age of athlete revenue sharing. Schools can directly pay their athletes millions of dollars every year in a capped system tied to the NCAA’s landmark, multi-billion dollar settlement of three antitrust cases, most commonly referred to as “House.”

With college sports on the eve of its most transformative era in more than 100 years of existence, some of the industry’s leading figures fear that the new compensation and enforcement system, while a step forward in progress, fails to bring a permanent level of durability to the landscape, leaving exposed multiple avenues for legal challenges.

It is time, they say, to begin talking about the next chapter before the newest one even begins.

But what would collective bargaining solve?

And how could it realistically happen?

“I see everybody saying that collective bargaining is a solution. It’s not,” said Scott Schneider, who leads an Austin, Texas-based educational and employment law firm. “Logistically, at this point, it’s impossible.”

Collective-bargaining solutions

In many ways, the public push for collective bargaining with players began years ago with some of the country’s most high-profile coaches.

While Michigan’s coach two years ago, Jim Harbaugh, encouraged the unionization of players, so did then-Alabama coach Nick Saban, famously quipping in spring of 2023, “Unionize it, make it like the NFL.”

The approval of the NCAA’s settlement and the arrival on Tuesday of the revenue-sharing era has, for some, only exacerbated their feelings on employment and bargaining as a way to avoid more violations of antitrust law. There is a dire need for a different model, they contend, one that effectively sets regulations for an array of concepts that they believe will not survive a legal test as they currently exist, even within the legal settlement.

The unannounced motives of college sports’ new compensation and enforcement system are obvious.

Revenue-sharing contracts between schools and athletes are intended to limit athlete movement, many of them even written to financially penalize players for entering the transfer portal. The new enforcement clearinghouse, designed to prohibit booster-backed deals, and the quasi-salary cap — schools are capped at sharing $20.5 million with athletes in Year 1 — are intended to control compensation and, as it turns out, may force a reduction in player salaries that grew exponentially over the last year.

In fact, during a recent football team meeting, one SEC school illustrated the impending decrease in pay, showing players that their expected allocation this coming year (about $14 million) is roughly half of what the school spent on last year’s team (about $27 million).

Brian Davis, an attorney in California who represents more than 100 football players in the NIL space, anticipates successful legal challenges over both — the restrictions on movement and constraining of salaries.

“If the NCAA thinks they’re going to put the genie back in the bottle and have the millionaires and billionaires sit on their hands, good luck!” said Davis, who heads the California-based Forward Counsel law firm. “I don’t see that ever surviving a challenge in the courts without collective bargaining.”

Collective bargaining, supporters say, will assure that school revenue-share contracts are binding and that the amount of revenue shared with players is properly agreed to and legally capped.

“We continue to negotiate against ourselves,” said North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham. “We’re starting to realize the transfer portal and the ability to move can only be regulated by the students who agree to that regulation.”

The player contracts are at the center of debate.

As a mechanism to share revenue with athletes and to avoid the appearance of employment, schools are signing players to what universities are terming “marketing” contracts where the school purchases the player’s name, image and likeness (NIL) rights.

White says this is “disingenuous.”

“They aren’t marketing deals,” he continues. “We have to stop pretending that they are not getting compensated for playing for us.”

Michael Leroy, an Illinois law professor who has published extensive work on labor policy, has obtained, through records requests, several contracts schools are offering to athletes. The contracts “read like employee handbooks,” he says, featuring liquidated damages (buyouts) and clauses that grant schools the right to end the deal or stop compensation for a variety of reasons, including for injuries and academic eligibility — hallmarks of employment deals.

Already, this past winter, several athletes broke revenue-share contracts with schools and their collectives.

At Baylor, basketball guard Rob Wright III left Waco for BYU just weeks after signing what Rhoades says was a “seven-figure” deal with the school. At Wisconsin, defensive back Xavier Lucas transferred to Miami after signing a revenue-share contract with the Badgers — a move that has resulted in a potential precedent-setting legal fight.

“Contracts have to matter,” Rhoades said.

How can they matter?

“We should try to get much more like the NFL and have real contracts,” Ole Miss head football coach Lane Kiffin told Yahoo Sports in an interview last fall. “If you’re trying to do it right, just copy their system.”

Collective-bargaining problems

For roughly 15 years, DeMaurice Smith presided over the NFL Players Association. And, yet, he is a realist when it comes to unionization and collective bargaining in college.

“Pragmatically, it would be extremely difficult,” he told Yahoo Sports in a recent interview. “There are such a large number of athletes playing a disparate number of sports, with some being revenue generating and some not.”

Smith identifies one of the many headwinds that any college bargaining concept might face. There are plenty more, legal experts contend, including but not limited to the 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?); and, perhaps, the biggest of them: Do athletes want this?

“It’s not clear at this point in time that college athletes want to be in a union,” said Gabe Feldman, a sports law professor at Tulane. “They may feel they’re getting the benefits they need through antitrust law.”

Schneider, the Austin-based 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 says.

It’s true. Even players association leaders, Cavale and Stahl, acknowledge that major conference athletes, at least financially, are benefiting from an environment of booster-fueled NIL payments and unrestricted movement.

But will that continue under a more rigorous settlement-related structure?

None of these issues are stopping the circulation of collective-bargaining proposals across the industry. Everyone seems to have a plan of how to do it, including one from an SEC athletic director — he wanted to remain anonymous — that eliminates recruiting by holding a college draft.

As for White, his concept sets up a national organization to employ and unionize athletes, not unlike universities contracting with unionized dining service companies like Aramark, he says — a potential way to avoid complications within right-to-work states with anti-union political leaders.

In his proposal, athletes of a particular sport would determine whether they’d like to bargain as employees of the national organization or continue as they currently exist. He’d expect only football and men’s basketball to bargain. Sports that do not generate a profit are unlikely to opt into bargain “for their loss,” White said.

Cavale’s proposal relies on congressional action. He’s pushing his own draft bill, The Save College Athletics Act, that resolves the employment issue by creating a special, non-employee status for Division I athletes and establishes collective-bargaining rights for them — something former Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick famously encouraged more than two years ago. Cavale’s plan works within the House settlement terms and leaves the revenue-share cap amount potentially intact.

Tim Pernetti, commissioner of the American conference, participated in one of Cavale’s presentations. “Collective bargaining may hold potential benefits and deserves to be explored like every other option available, including what’s controversial,” he told Yahoo Sports.

But these proposals have been met with pushback.

Ramogi Huma, the executive director of the National College Players Association and a longtime critic of the NCAA, rebuffs the notion of non-employment bargaining, calling it “disturbing.”

However, the greatest and loudest resistance has come from the four power conference commissioners, who have repeatedly and publicly spoken against any employment or collective-bargaining model.

“I’ve not heard anyone articulate that there’s the ability to create a segment of student-athletes that are employees and a segment that are not,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said in April during an event in Washington, D.C.

In fact, Sankey said, he believes that once employment and bargaining exists in one place within the NCAA, it will exist across all three divisions, including those schools with little to no resources to support it. At the power conference level, he estimates that schools spend $150,000-280,000 in non-NIL related benefits for each full-time athlete. “Now we’re going to make them employees with full taxation?” he asks, rhetorically.

Last spring at another event on Capitol Hill, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips and Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne told lawmakers that any employment model would result in the elimination of sports teams. If the profits from football and men’s basketball, normally used to subsidize other sports, are distributed as employee payments to football and basketball players, how do you fund non-revenue sports that, for example at Alabama, lose a cumulative $40 million a year, Byrne said.

“You can go from 28 to six sports in one fiscal year,” Phillips said.

White pushes back against some of these notions.

So does Cavale and Stahl.

Americans are “generally fearful people,” said Stahl, the leader of the College Football Players Association and someone who has frequented campuses over the last four years in an effort to rally for athlete rights and unionization. “I think it’s sad and it leads people to not do the right thing. Fear is the enemy. It is paralyzing.”

“They’re not taking the time to explore what it will look like,” Cavale said. “They are keeping this idea in their head that collective bargaining is the devil and will blow everything up and make the [rev-share] cap 10 times higher.”

Leroy, the Illinois law professor, believes that a non-employment collective-bargaining model may actually work — if Congress would agree to such, a long shot considering the body’s divisive state. He described such a setup similar to the Screen Actors Guild, where actors have a separate provision for NIL or publicity rights.

There may be an easier way, though. Schneider says schools could begin negotiating with a segment of players even if they have not been deemed employees by the National Labor Relations Board. However, universities lose the primary benefit of bargaining in this scenario: protection from antitrust lawsuits.

“Management does not get to decide to collectively bargain,” Feldman says.

There are many in college sports management — schools and conference leadership — who fear that any negotiation with players to limit the existing transfer and compensation freedoms will end in one way: a strike.

Said one SEC athletic director: “That will get ugly.”

Congress and collective bargaining

Within a California courtroom in early April, a federal judge said aloud a somewhat jarring statement.

Claudia Wilken, presiding over the NCAA and power conferences’ settlement of the House antitrust lawsuit, agreed with one of the objectors in the case, attorney Steve Molo, that the settlement’s compensation cap on players would have been “better,” she said, if it were collectively bargained.

In fact, deep within more than 200 pages of settlement documents, one can find a mention of collective bargaining. The settlement allows for the creation of a bargaining structure that may, during negotiations, provide athletes with “additional benefits” outside of the settlement terms.

Jeffrey Kessler contends that the settlement, in a way, is a collectively bargained agreement, as he and co-lead plaintiff attorney Steve Berman represented the athletes. For their attorneys fees, they are expected to receive more than $400 million.

Leroy, the Illinois law professor, describes the settlement as an “invisible union for an invisible labor market.”

But many, even those within college sports, contend that the settlement is only a temporary solution for a much more expansive problem — a Band-Aid over a gushing wound.

“I question everything and as I sit here as an AD,” Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey says. “Why do we continue to live in insanity? Until someone can tell me that collectively bargaining isn’t it, that’s where my mindset is.”

Even Wilken, in her approval of the settlement, paved the way for certain concepts to be challenged, including the revenue-share cap and new enforcement clearinghouse.

“We’ve said all along there is only two obvious solutions: federal intervention or collective bargaining,” Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said. “Maybe the settlement is a thread-the-needle approach, but you’ll probably hear people talk about collective bargaining until we have some semblance of a structure.”

Federal intervention is perhaps more likely to come directly from the Trump administration instead of a congressional bill over a topic that, while at first described as bipartisan, has been anything but. More than five years and millions spent on the NCAA’s lobbying effort has resulted in 14 congressional hearings and more than a dozen bills introduced. No bill has been raised on the House or Senate floor.

That said, progress is being made of late. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is expected to move a bill this summer that grants college sports’ primary requests: limited liability protection to enforce rules; a clause deeming athletes as students and not employees; and the preemption of state NIL laws.

But whether it can garner the necessary votes in the Senate — 60 to avoid the filibuster, which would have to include at least seven Democrats — seems like a long shot. Separate negotiations have been unfolding for months in the Senate over a bipartisan bill, led by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and Democrats Chris Coons, Cory Booker and Richard Blumenthal. No agreement has been reached.

“You have this bottleneck of different philosophical differences,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said. “The idea they’d come together and say, ‘They can collectively bargain!’ You’re losing half of Congress. If you say, ‘Well we want antitrust protection,’ you’re losing most of the other half.”

In fact, at the last congressional hearing over college sports, New York Democrat Yvette Clarke said aloud, “There needs to be some kind of legitimate collective bargaining between college athletes and the NCAA and its member institutions.”

In addition to the pushback, there are also the dozens of more significant domestic and global issues ongoing — tax bills, confrontations in the Middle East, tariffs.

“You have to step back and say, ‘Is this what voters want us to be working on right now?’” said Lori Trahan, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

Given the uncertainty on Capitol Hill and the constant litigation, “the best longer-term scenario” for college sports it to collectively bargain, said Brendan Boyle, a Democrat congressman from Pennsylvania. “The sooner we get to a place where both sides collectively bargain the issues, the better off we will be.”

Joe Castiglione, the athletic director at Oklahoma and one of the most respected leaders in college sports, does not necessarily disagree.

He recalls a meeting among athletic directors more than 10 years ago in which he argued to create a “licensing consortium” where athletes could share in benefits beyond their scholarship.

“You should have seen how they looked at me,” he said. “It was sacrilegious.”

And now? Here the industry sits.

“We need some path on getting the sides together to create a competitive environment where both share in the upside,” he said.

Is collective bargaining worth pursuing?

From the site of the Final Four in April, Stu Jackson, commissioner of the West Coast Conference and former executive vice president of the NBA, advocated for college athletics to deeply explore a bargaining agreement with athletes. While he’s against an athlete employment model, Jackson points to his days with the NBA as an example of the structure that college athletics needs.

“Our existing system around revenue sharing, the transfer portal and NIL … there is no real system,” he said. “The NBA has provided a system of sharing of resources, timing of player acquisition and I think that would be something that college basketball would truly benefit from.”

A handful of power conference football general managers share a group text message chain where the two words — collective bargaining — are a common response when something goes awry with a player contract, transfer situation or compensation rate.

“You know what would solve this?” the general managers often write to one another. “Collective bargaining.”

Charlie Baker, the NCAA president, hears very loudly the push for a collective-bargaining setup within his organization and from his individual member schools. But, he says, it’s “not as simple as a lot of people alleged.”

For one, 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.

“I had 65 unions I negotiated with when I was governor. I’m quite aware of the complexity to this,” Baker told Yahoo Sports in a recent interview. “Before everybody says, ‘Stop! Let’s do something else!’ Let’s see if the settlement works.”

On Tuesday, the college sports industry will begin a long march toward learning that answer.

Will the settlement work as intended and survive certain legal challenges? Or will college sports’ new endeavor fail the legal test and, in the end, arrive at a place so many believe is inevitable?

“At some point, collective bargaining is going to be what happens,” Boise State football coach Spencer Danielson said.

“I don’t know why we just don’t call them employees,” said one sitting FBS university president. “There is an old maxim: Something that must be done eventually must be done immediately.”