March is typically the biggest month for college basketball. Yet if the members of the Dartmouth College basketball team have their way, the March Madness tradition of busted brackets could be changed forever.
On Tuesday, the 15 members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team took a historic step and voted 13-2 to become a unionized body and members of the Service Employees International Union Local 560. It is the first attempt by a collegiate sports team to unionize in a decade, and with support from the National Labor Relations Board, it could be the first successful one.
Now, anyone who is familiar with labor unions knows that (at least on paper) they are organized entities designed to help workers band together in order to more effectively advocate better work conditions and better pay. They are supposed to provide a unified voice for the employees against the employer.
So what does that have to do with college athletes who are not actually employees of the school that they attend? Until recently, nothing. There was no reason for college athletes to unionize because everyone understood that they are not employees; they are students who happen to play a game as an extracurricular activity.
Changes in name, image, and likeness laws and rules have allowed student-athletes to finally sign endorsement deals and profit from their athletic fame, but these are private contracts with individual companies. University athletic departments are not a party to them. NIL contracts did not at all affect the fact that college athletes are students, not employees.
Nonetheless, unionization enjoys support among some college athletes because college football and college basketball are enormous moneymakers for institutions. Big-time college sports collectively is a multibillion-dollar industry that is contained within individual institutions, athletic conferences, and the NCAA, but student-athletes who provide the lucrative product do not get a cut of the direct revenue they help generate.
But while that may seem unfair, the billions in revenue generated by college basketball and college football are actually what allow universities to have many other sports programs that do not command the daily attention of sports fans.
Sports such as rowing, swimming, diving, track and field, lacrosse, tennis, and wrestling have massive infrastructures at institutions that participate in the NCAA, and they all generally rely on the revenues generated by football and basketball to stay afloat. These programs allow student-athletes to dedicate themselves to the sports they love in the robust intercollegiate athletics program that we know. These programs are also why the U.S. dominates in so many sports at the Olympic Games: they are the training ground for Olympic champions.
“95% of colleges … probably spend somewhere between … $40 million and $5 million on college sports, and they lose money,” NCAA President Charlie Baker recently said. “They don’t have TV contracts and nobody can look at their income statements or balance sheets and conclude there would be a way for them to make money.”
This is why unionization is so ill-advised. It would require colleges to recognize student-athletes as employees, thereby entitling them to wages, employment benefits, and legal protections. They could even go on strike to demand higher pay and benefits. This would destroy college sports.
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Instead of reinvesting the revenue from football and basketball into other sports programs, every school (assuming it had the revenue to do so) would have to use those funds to pay student-athletes who are already getting paid from NIL deals and are receiving scholarships to attend the school. They might make out like bandits, but all the other student-athletes at the school would see their programs closed and their athletic dreams dashed. And for smaller schools, even basketball and football could be on the chopping block as colleges are forced to abandon athletics entirely.
Of course, that isn’t stopping a handful of basketball players at Dartmouth College from upending the entire system that has afforded them opportunities most people would only dream of. They don’t care that schools will have to close their swimming, track and field, wrestling, and tennis programs; they just want money. And if the March Madness we know and love suffers for it, so be it.
