Over five days last month, much attention was focused on a federal hearing room in Chicago, where football players at Northwestern University challenged one of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s longstanding principles: that big-time athletes are students first and not employees.
In the coming weeks, a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board, which is deciding the case, will rule on the players’ attempts to unionize, a move that could alter the economics of major-college sports. Legal analysts are divided on which side presented the stronger case. In the court of public opinion, the university appeared to hold its own. But one former NLRB official disagrees.
When the players announced their intentions, Kain Colter, Northwestern’s senior quarterback, made headlines by describing the NCAA as a “dictatorship.” At the hearing he testified that, even at one of the country’s elite universities, football was essentially a full-time job, requiring a commitment of up to 60 hours a week.
According to Mr. Colter, the university often required players to put football ahead of education, foiling his pre-med plans and forcing him to abide by a strict schedule over which players had little say.
He also took shots at Northwestern for failing to pay for a medical procedure (a lawyer representing the university rebutted that claim, saying Mr. Colter had been reimbursed). A main impetus of the players’ unionization efforts is to gain additional health benefits for athletes after their playing careers are over.
William B. Gould IV, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, believes that the players established sufficient evidence to be deemed employees.
“I think they did—whether they can convince the hearing officer is another matter,” said Mr. Gould, an emeritus law professor at Stanford University. “They made out the basic characteristics of being employees—of being under the direction of coaches who are not involved in the educational process and receiving remuneration and other benefits for performing these services.”
Academics or Athletics
Northwestern officials disagreed at the hearing last month, presenting evidence that football players often take rigorous majors and play their sport on the side. Testimony of three former players supported their case.
Over several hours, the players chipped away at Mr. Colter’s assertions, describing Northwestern as a place where the head coach moved practice times to accommodate players’ classes and relaxed team rules to help them prepare for tests.
Doug Bartels, a former starting offensive lineman, said that coaches had supported his decision to take courses in biochemistry and physics, and that he had had the opportunity to shadow an anaesthesiologist and an orthopedic surgeon. He is now a medical student at Rush University. Other former players described how they had studied for hours on road trips, spending more time on their academic pursuits than their playbook.
Football “gave us life skills needed to be successful,” said Patrick Ward, a former starting tackle who graduated with a 3.94 grade-point average in mechanical engineering. (He now works for the Boeing Company.)
Stories like those led some observers to say that the College Athletes Players Association, which is leading the unionization efforts, might have tangled with the wrong university.
“There may have been better choices than Northwestern,” said Howard M. Bloom, a management labor lawyer at Jackson Lewis, a major workplace law firm.
Mr. Bloom, who helped lead a webinar about the case last month for more than 60 college and university officials, has doubts about the players’ bid to unionize.
“Did they prove they were employees? No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think they had the best facts available to them in this particular case.”
The University’s Control
Ramogi Huma, president of the College Athletes Players Association, disagreed, saying that his group had established, among other things, that players receive payment for providing a service—a fact that he said was not disputed by Northwestern—and are under the control of the university, which has the power to determine if a scholarship is renewed.
“The structure of college football at Northwestern and other schools across the nation is the same—football comes first,” he told The Chronicle. “Players are there to play football, they’re recruited to play football, and if you stop playing football, the scholarship won’t be there.”
Mr. Gould, the former labor-board chairman, said whether some athletes had a true academic experience was “fundamentally irrelevant” to whether they should be deemed employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“It has long been possible to be both students and employees,” he said. “We know lots of students who are employees.”
As the labor board weighs the case, he said, it will probably distinguish the athletes’ situation from that of graduate students who have previously petitioned to form labor unions.
“These players are clearly much more on the employee side of the equation than teaching assistants,” he said. “Their work is not related to the main mission of the university, which is education.”
