Josephine (Jo) R. Potuto, Richard H. Larson Professor of Constitutional
Law & Faculty Athletic Representative, University of Nebraska.
Northwestern football players have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for union certification. From most published reports, you’d think all-out war has broken out between athletes (or some of them) on the one side and campuses and the NCAA on the other. Not so, or at least not yet.
The athletes clearly want financial support above tuition, room and board, and books; better health benefits; better treatment of concussions; and enhanced medical assistance if needed once they cease competing. Match these with the proposed agenda of the Group of Five Conferences (Big Ten, SEC, PAC-12, ACC, Big 12), which includes providing scholarships covering the full cost of attendance and insurance and other financial support for medical and safety needs above what currently is provided. The Group of Five also wants to explore how to lessen time demands on student-athletes and to provide scholarship aid if they exhaust eligibility before graduating.
Other concerns of the athletes may focus on transfer restrictions and the ban on their ability to exploit their name and likeness value. Although there are substantial, legitimate issues attendant on such changes, they clearly are topics for serious discussion, where, I think, substantial movement should be possible.
The world of college athletics changed, and the money started rolling in, when the Supreme Court stopped the NCAA from controlling the TV appearances of major football powers. One result is multimillion dollar coach salaries. Another, infrequently mentioned, is a dramatic increase in the total money going to support student-athletes because of increases in the number of student-athletes and teams that compete. And, although not commensurate with the increased flow of money elsewhere, there nonetheless also have been increased benefits and services to individual student-athletes. One such is that universities may cover all student-athlete medical expenses, whether or not caused by athletic participation.
I don’t know whether the Northwestern football players want to reconstitute their relationship with their university, seeking status as employees and not students, no matter whether reforms are implemented that answer their particular concerns. If so, then they want a major paradigm shift that dismantles the collegiate model and threatens the collegiate mark. But it sounds like what they seek is a recalibration of benefits and services to provide more to each of them within the collegiate model. That, I think, is eminently doable. Common ground then, not battleground. (For more about all this, see my co-authored article, “What’s in a Name: the Collegiate Mark, the Collegiate Model, and the Treatment of Student-Athletes, at http://ssrn.com/author=39738.)
