… I love you “ultimately create a college football players association”.
I’m sure a few conference commissioners and school administrators got stiffies when they first heard about prominent players like Lawrence and Fields expressing a strong desire to play ball in 2020.
The fine print is a bitch, though.
“The beautiful thing is now we’re all on the same page,” said Stanford defensive lineman Dylan Boles, one of the players who organized Sunday’s message. “We made history tonight.”
Boles said he received a direct message on Twitter at 5:30 p.m. PT Sunday from Clemson running back Darien Rencher. The two had never talked before, but Rencher wanted to discuss the Pac-12 players’ unity movement with which Boles was involved. Boles is one of the leaders of a group of roughly 400 players in the Pac-12 who published a list of demands early last week and said they planned to sit out of practice and potentially games if conference officials were unwilling to meet with them and address their concerns. Players from the Big Ten and other conferences made similar demands thereafter, and others showed their support with the hashtag #WeAreUnited on social media throughout the week.
Rencher was one of dozens of college football players — a list that included his Heisman Trophy-candidate teammate, quarterback Trevor Lawrence — who shared the hashtag #WeWantToPlay this weekend as college football administrators met to debate the merits of a 2020 season. Rencher and others felt that fans and commenters were unfairly pitting the #WeWantToPlay contingent against the #WeAreUnited group, Boles said. Rencher, Boles and Lawrence talked briefly on a FaceTime call before deciding to loop in more players from around the country.
“We got down to talking and agreed that both of our goals are aligned with each other,” Boles said. “We all want to play this year. We just want to make sure players have a say in this thing.”
Larry Scott strenuously objects. And I bet that will be a subject for the next commissioners’ meeting, too.
Get The Picture 
I’m sorry but I don’t understand how an athlete can request to sit out without losing a year of eligibility. I have no problem if a student-athlete opts out, but there has to be some cost associated with it. If a player wants to take a voluntary redshirt and has it to give, I don’t think the coach is going to stand in the way (the recruiting optics would be horrible). If the athlete decides to take a year off after having a redshirt, I don’t think the athlete should get the year back unless the NCAA is going to make an allowance for the scholarship limitations.
If the season gets canceled, sure, give everyone their year back.
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It’s all a matter of what the parties agree to, or, in the absence of that, what gets imposed on players by the higher-ups.
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I agree … I’ll admit this part of the sausage making is making me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
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I was hopeful last night seeing all the #WeWantToPlay tweets. Then I woke up this morning and saw that same graphic about forming a national players union. And my heart sank again. The schools would absolutely sacrifice a season in order to kill the momentum of a union forming.
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I’m not sure how they can form a union if they aren’t employees. I also don’t think these new union members are going to like paying dues for “representation” and the future players eventually being subject to a college draft (I guarantee you the schools will mandate it in the name of competitive balance).
You give away your negotiating power to another body. That body will start looking to protect itself (and those who run it) over what’s good for the represented.
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For sure it would eliminate the service academies from being part of the whole thing.
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What would his value be if he was playing at Arizona Western instead?
Would it be exactly the same or does Oklahoma Sooners have anything to do with it?
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The only way out of this for the P5 is to leave the NCAA. They need to nuke the season anyway. Even though it’s all about money, COVID is muddying the waters.
Leave the NCAA, and form your own organization. If the NAIA can do it with their paltry funds, the P5 conferences can do it. Take Notre Dame, take a few G5 schools individually, and form your own league. Make NIL rights universal, allow representation, change the draft rules, maybe provide some sort of stipend upon graduation, whatever you can do to push right up to the line of making them employees without stepping over it.
It’s been made abundantly clear that major college football under the 2019 rules is over, so just scrap 2020 and create something new in 2021.
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To believe this would make a difference, you’d first have to think that, when it comes to player rights, the NCAA has different goals than P5 schools do.
SPOILER: They don’t.
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They don’t currently have different goals, but they will have to acquiesce. There is already movement on NIL, as you’ve already posted. When Dabo is talking about paying the players upon graduation, I think there is more individual sentiment for this sort of change than you believe. Not so much because they want to benefit the players out of fairness, but because it is the only way forward. Once the players have organized, even informally, the conferences will have a lot of work to do trying to appease the players with no guarantees.
Maybe I’m giving the schools/conferences too much credit. If you don’t think a new league will happen, how do you see it playing out?
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If the schools really wanted to work towards an equitable solution, they would want a players union. It makes a lot of these issue so much easier to manage.
But what they want to is to maintain control and they would risk everything to maintain that control.
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Who’s the president of the players union? How much are dues? If the union says strike, do they strike and lose their scholarship? Does the union represent all schools at all levels? All sports?
This is a ridiculous concept.
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Is it going to be a closed shop like the NFLPA, the NBAPA, or the MLBPA? In other words, if you want to participate in Power 5 or D-1 sports, do you have to join the PA and have the dues withheld from your checks? If this organization forms, does the value of the scholarship become taxable as a 1099-ed independent contractor or as a de facto employee?
All of this sounds good, but when the implementation details get worked out, will the student-athlete be better off?
Why the NCAA doesn’t embrace the Olympic model is beyond me …
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Or will it be like the standard Minor League Player Uniform Contract? (Which cedes the players NIL to the ball club)
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It’s like yall just spit out your union talking points anytime you see the word.
Fox news has you trained real good.
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Wow … you convinced me.
You could make the case that every economic problem in college sports right now can be tracked back to the eligibility provisions of the collective bargaining agreements between pro sports and their players’ associations. Football players who don’t want to be students can’t go pro and get paid for 3 years. Basketball players have to wait a year to declare for the draft.
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Why would I want to try and convince you. You clearly have strong opinions about unions. So strong that it simply took mentioning unions for you to ramble on about problems. Not a rebuttal to my statement about a players union making it easier for schools to negotiate withe the players, not that you wanted to have a discussion about if it would make it easier for the schools, but you just needed to get your talking points about unions out there.
You just want to scream into the void about the problems with unions.
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I’m not the one who’s screaming into the void. You’re the one who made the blanket statement that a players union would be the panacea that would solve all of college sports’ problems. Then, you make some lame Fox News reference in it when I asked some questions about how it would work.
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Tribalism and no nuance, you has it.
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Poor AD’s. Frantically counting their money, checking TV and cupcake game contracts, cutting small sports programs on campus, and seeking new accounting techniques to hide the truth when this news hits. “Why is this happening?”
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