NLRB Dismisses Northwestern University Football Players’ Petition to Unionize
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If I'm reading it right, the NLRB doesn't want to introduce an unfair scenario where players at some universities have some rights and players at other universities don't have these rights. But of course that could just be redirection.
The downside to this being fewer legal protections in the case of, say, a strike?
(for example the NFLPA can bring Tom Brady's 'DeflateGate' appeal to a federal judge for an appeal under federal labor relations laws)
I'm not a huge sports fan, but I like college football okay. I graduated from two schools with Division I teams (Georgia Tech and Northwestern) and football comes up in the context of a professional exchange at least once a month. Sometimes as an ice-breaker, sometimes to cement relationships with coworkers, sometimes to avoid what would otherwise be awkward silence. College sports is deeply embedded not just in American culture, but in professional culture.
If professors from a century ago could see us today, they wouldn't even care about all that. What would horrify them would be the primary focus on athletics found at most colleges and universities (and the large focus found at nearly every school). Admissions, funding, grading, leadership, etc.: every aspect of academics is in some way distorted by athletics.
I'm not saying that college athletics couldn't possibly be run in benign fashion. Not-inherently-dangerous sports could be played, for recreation and education, in a noncommercial environment, without problems. A careful examination, however, reveals that as currently instituted, college athletics is bad for colleges, bad for athletics, bad for college students, and even worse for college athletes.
College football seems to be pretty popular among both college students and college alumni.
The NFL is, despite the bone-headed direction by the league office, a money-printing machine, and that's with a season lasting less than half the calendar year. There's a big chunk of the sports year that is a complete waste-land, between the end of the NBA/NHL finals and the start of NFL preseason, and the American public is desperate for football. Just look at how the completely manufactured Deflate-gate "scandal" has pumped up football, for all its ridiculousness. The wear-and-tear on the athletes would be a problem for a late-spring/summer league schedule - particularly for any standouts that continued on to play in the NFL in the fall. But there's more than enough talent that's just at the edges of NFL-levels to provide an entertaining product.
Of course, the bigger issue is that NFL players have probably the rawest deal in pro sports. Mediocre veteran baseball players can command double-digit million, fully guaranteed contracts, while the average veteran NBA player makes something north of 4-5 million, also fully guaranteed. Meanwhile, even star NFL players have the bulk of their contracts non-guaranteed, and can be cut with little liability if their production dips due to bad luck or injury, in possibly the most violent and injury-prone major sport, which leaves many ex-players walking vegetables.
...with the possible exception of 4-year D1 college players who don't play "pro" ball. They've still had a decade of wear-and-tear on still-developing joints and brains, and the conferences, channels, and advertisers (not so much the colleges) have made bank off their labor, while they've seen not a cent.
That's about two months or so, and while regular season baseball and Major League Soccer may not be interesting to you personally, they still draw bigger crowds than the NBA or NHL and, at least on a regional level, get significantly more support.