A Player's Union Begins With Players

This is a free online newsletter for Jason Stahl, Executive Director of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA). If you are a past, present or future college football player, I ask that you consider becoming a member of the CFBPA. For a short YouTube introduction on the CFBPA, click here. Members of the general public who would like to support the CFBPA can donate at this link or volunteer at this link.

A few newsletters ago, I outlined what I saw as the three biggest threats to continued college athlete empowerment. One of these threats was the so-called SCORE Act: a piece of legislation designed to thwart athlete labor organizing and give the NCAA unquestioned power once again to make rules and regulations against athletes’ best interests. Thus, it is with great excitement that I am happy to report that the legislation seems to be dead in the House of Representatives after failing to generate the necessary votes for passage. Michael McCann has a great roundup in Sportico and I very much buy his argument as to why the bill will most likely not come up for a vote again.

This is great news and allows us to focus on what I have been in my most recent newsletter series: athlete employment, unionization and collective bargaining as the solutions to a more sustainable college sports ecosystem and player protections. In Part I of the series I focused on how moving away from the idea of non-employee collective bargaining makes sense for the current moment. In Part II, I discussed how the pending court case Johnson v. NCAA provides a good pathway for some college athletes to be given a limited employment classification that would make collective bargaining easier. Today, in Part III, I’ll focus on how players, and players alone, need to initiate the process of unionization and collective bargaining if this is something they desire.

In my many conversations with players, I have found that most have not thought about unionization one way or the other and certainly have not thought about the steps it would take to get to a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). When you have the chance to discuss the protections they would be afforded by a CBA, most love the idea, but still are unclear how to get there. I think this lack of clarity has also been present in the media and in the general public—particularly this past week where there was confusing and wildly premature talk of “CBA negotiations” in college athletics on social media. So today I thought it would be useful to outline the six steps that would be necessary to get to a legally-binding CBA which would provide immense collective protections for players while bringing sustainability to college athletics.

1. It may seem strange that this needs to be said, but the first step is that players have to get organized themselves independently of administrators. Many coaches and athletic directors have declared the need for collective bargaining, and this is welcome, but only players can independently come together and initiate the process. More importantly, administrators cannot pick how and with whom they choose to organize with. We hope football players pick us as we think our fraternal model which brings together past, present and future college football players is an excellent platform from which to eventually unionize. It focuses on the individual athletes who each will be necessary to form a union. As members of our fraternity, we can better educate them directly about how this process would work.

2. From there, players would need to decide to move from getting organized to unionizing. In our model, players can simply stay in our fraternity of past, present and future college football players. In a fraternity, we can continue to do advocacy on behalf of our members and to add more and more benefits to being a member of the fraternity. We intend to do this in 2026. However, for some of our fraternity members, it might make sense to also unionize and we would guide them through that process.

3. The next step in that process would be to choose a union. Fraternities, websites and other entities cannot engage in legally-binding collective bargaining, only unions (labor organizations) can. So, we would guide our members through the process of deciding on a union. With that union and CFBPA leadership, players would then need to decide how they want to compose their bargaining unit—that is who they would want to be covered by any negotiated CBA. Again, this is up to the players. They would have to decide if it should be done by team, sport, conference, school, and/or some other composition.

4. At this point, a core group of players would then need to gain significant support among the other members of their proposed bargaining unit. To do this, they would need to get individual athletes within the bargaining unit to sign cards indicating that they were authorizing the union to collectively bargain on their behalf. They would want a significant portion of the chosen bargaining unit to sign union cards. These would be individual decisions by every prospective member of the bargaining unit.

5. Once player leaders, the union and the players association leadership decided that they had enough support among proposed members of the bargaining unit, they would then move to get the unit legally recognized. Such a process might take awhile depending on several factors including the bargaining unit composition and whether or not the employer(s) were going to challenge the existence of the union or not.

6. Once athletes had their union authorized, collective bargaining could begin. Legally, collective bargaining would need to be an adversarial process where players themselves, their union and their players association would negotiate with their employer(s) over the terms and conditions of their employment. It wouldn’t be a “partnership” where union leaders and management made a back-room deal at the expense of players. For college football, this means that negotiations would include everything in our CFBPA Platform for Change as well as numerous other workplace issues. After negotiations, a CBA would be hammered out and then voted on by members of the bargaining unit. If the bargaining unit voted majority “yes,” then the CBA would take effect. Players would garner immense new benefits from a well-negotiated CBA. The employer(s) would get binding and enforceable rules provided by the CBA. I think fans would benefit as well given that college football would become less chaotic than it is right now.

Although these steps may seem daunting, I think they are possible with patience and changing sentiments among those in college athletics. However, players need to be wary of those pitching shortcuts. Writing a CBA is the last step, not the first. Those supposedly performing CBA negotiations before steps 1-5 are done do not have players best interests at heart. Such media performances sow confusion among players and neglect the slow, grinding, patient work of building a union and getting to a first legally-binding CBA in college athletics. Moreover, when such media spectacles are done without the consent of athletes and without athletes in the room, one wonders who is really going to benefit from such a process? Is it the athletes or is it entrenched for-profit industry stakeholders all acting in a paternalistic manner as if they know what’s best for college athletes? College athletes need an authentic grass-roots movement which patiently builds through the six steps I’ve just outlined. There are no shortcuts. If you’re a past, present or future college football player who would like to build such a movement, I ask that you become a member of the CFBPA today.