There was a big upset in the NCAA this week — but it didn’t come on a March Madness basketball court.
It took place in Chicago, where a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, Peter Sung Ohr, said what anyone following college sports knows: Too many players are athletes first, students second.
Ohr was addressing claims by members of Northwestern University’s football team. He said the players who brought the claim were de facto paid employees of the school and thus entitled to unionize.
He based his decision on the hours the athletes put in, the big bucks generated and the control the university has over its scholarship athletes, which he likened to that of an employer over an employee.
Though Northwestern was the target of this litigation, and though Ohr’s ruling applies only to private schools, everyone knows that if the ruling stands it will change the face of college athletics. That’s why colleges and universities are so stunned.
Nor is it the only challenge. Another lawsuit questions the NCAA’s right to profit from the images of college athletes. Still another claims the NCAA violates anti-trust law by preventing athletes from earning more than their scholarships.
Unionizing college athletes or forcing schools to pay them wages, of course, would likely make things worse. But the legal challenges will continue to come because of the yawning gap between the pretense of amateur competition and the reality of colleges and universities making millions off “students” who either never graduate or leave with bogus degrees.
Unfortunately, the money gives schools an incentive to turn a blind eye. And so long as universities refuse to tame this multibillion-dollar monster they’ve created, they are just inviting the courts and politicians to intervene and do it for them.