One month ago – when it emerged that the NCAA and colleges in the United States were raving about football this fall – critics (including some players) pointed to COVID-19 infection rates spiking across parts of the country and took aim.
This was scandalous, some said, more proof than ever that college footballers needed a union.
One month later, with multiple college conferences grabbing the plug on the entire football season they were happy about playing, a very different set of critics (including some players) hit back.
Now, at least both sides can attack the decision from opposite directions and come to at least one agreement: college footballers deserve to have a voice – and maybe even a voice – in what happened last month. For whatever reason (tradition, mostly), a few costly brokers cost virtually every decision about the well-being, responsibility, and earning of a workforce that produces a collective economy of small countries.
It’s shamateursim at its best. And again, these would mean that you have to spend for these processes.
But there is something that would have made this whole debacle easier to swallow, even if a resolution had not yet been reached. A mechanism that could have sent out the grievances, concerns and motivations of the group that had most significantly affected. That mechanism is called a player union. And if college football had one, an element of public opinion and a football season could be driven by the workforce marginalized in every part of this process.
The NFL Players Association played a key role in keeping the 2020 season on track, at least as it stands now. (Rich Graessle / PPI / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
That’s right, a player union. Like those in the NFL who somehow managed to team up with the most horrible team owners in professional sports to create the common ground needed to pull off a 2020 season. The same union that navigated the major fears of its players and at the same time created opportunities for them not to decide with the decision to play through the pandemic (and even take it away).
This is what trade unions do. They streamline the collective voice of membership, fight for what that membership considers important, and then take some of the responsibility (and guilt) out of the hands of a one-sided set of decision-makers who typically act out of their own self-interest.
That’s what conference commissioners, college presidents and NCAA executives are doing at the moment, by the way. They operate in their own interest and paint the actions as what is safe and best for their labor. And all in all, they maintain the status quo of how NCAA schools work collectively – through a cynical process of control and inhibition disguised as education or amateurism. A well-known process that keeps a very small pair at the top by dictating what is best for the whole numbers below.
The basis of that model is cracking. Whether it’s legislation that compels the NCAA to accept that players deserve “Name, Image and Likens benefits”, or the players themselves realize that they have a voice in matters ranging from social justice to forms of employment, the ground shakes under this system. And the decision to wipe out an entire college football season without even consulting the players that make that season possible … that could be the shockwave that delivers a paradigm shift.
Regardless of which side you take with the 2020 college football season – whatever data state you also accept as the one claiming your point is good – there is not much to be gained from the fact that a union would have made a huge difference in how all of this was hashed out. If only for the fact that it would have given the players a chosen, collective voice at the table, and a uniform stage at the front of public relations.
That’s exactly what it did in the NFL, where not every player was ready to blow a path forward without answering some important questions. There were hot talks, meetings, emails, conference calls, social media exchanges, internal voices and external statements. And what finally came to the other side was this:
NFL players drifted through their own democratic process in their union, then went on to work with the 32 franchise ownership groups and the league office to satisfy what was ultimately needed to play a football season. Whether the audience agreed with it or not did not matter, because it was the collective choice of the players. And those who disagreed were given the opportunity to deviate from the final decision.
It would be much easier to feel good about all the decision being made in college football if we actually knew what the total workforce would do if it got its own democratic vote. Perhaps the college football season will be much more palatable if a union of college players had reconsidered what the NFLs were doing, arguing for a season with the right collectively negotiated measures and protections in place.
For college players to achieve that choice, the NCAA must first recognize the players for what they are – a large workforce that produces billions in revenue that is considered worthy of having rights to a negotiating table. And we all know how the NCAA feels about it. The historical value of a century has spelled out exactly how much volume the NCAA is willing to allow when it comes to the votes of its workforce. Very little. And when it comes to power to choose how and when to play, even less.
That’s a big part of the reason why the season 2020 college football is dictated without so much as one player influencing it. Tradition, mostly.
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