So, if athletes at Ohio State are employees, then athletes at Ohio Wesleyan and Tiffin and so on will also be considered employees.

At Tiffin, for example, more than half of all students are student athletes. At Ohio Wesleyan, it’s 39%. Mt. Union 50%. Heck, even Oberlin is 20%. Oberlin! 🎻

(OU, in comparison, is 2.5%)

Paying those kids salaries will crush the D2 and D3 schools financially so expect major cuts across the board. I can’t even guess how many students will lose opportunities and coaches that could lose jobs over this, barring an act of Congress.

Dark day.

From what I heard on the radio this morning, under the settlement, if approved by the judge handling the case, athletes will be employees.

That potentially opens up a whole can of worms:

1.Is the money an athlete makes "tax able income" ?

2.Can athletes unionize and strike ?

3.Are athletes entitled to Overtime ?

Very definitively, no. D2 and D3 sports will not be killed by this decision.

There are clear definitions of an employer/employer relationship, and D2 and D3 sports will easily find ways to operate that don't run afoul of that.

To me it seems that the most obvious path forward is to go back to the distant past, where sports were all based on a club model, rather than as a "varsity sport" controlled by the university.

Does anyone know exactly what's in the agreement?
According to the NYT and CBS sports the details are still being worked out.

What I don't understand is how if school doing "revenue sharing" and paying
athletes directly, they wouldn't be considered an employee.

Lawyers are going to have a field day with this.

Also seems the G5 are "on the outside looking in".

If you're asking about the P5 -- they don't want to. They make too much money in the current system to make it remotely logical to do so.

As for the G5, many of them will do exactly this. What people seem to be missing here is that every D1 school has full agency over their own athletic department and operations.

I'm not sure why it's such a hard concept for so many people to grasp, but if D1 athletics changes and requires a financial burden that a school can't afford, they can opt to participate at a lower level.

The anti-trust cases are specifically about the restriction on player earnings in a system that generates such massive amounts of revenue. An amateur system that doesn't generate revenue will have basically no scrutiny.

I mean, Vassar isn't part of this settlement for a reason.

The reporting has been very consistent that this agreement does not make the athletes employees, the the statements from the NCAA and P5 commissioners echo that, as well as lay out the strategy I mentioned above.

There are many ways to pay people without their being employees. Half the faculty at any given university aren't direct employees of the university. Michael Jordan wasn't an employee of Gatorade.

But more to the point -- all parties involved here are incentivized to find a solution that doesn't involve direct employment. Legislation can be written to do what it needs to do. Folks insisting that this will fit into a framework that already exists (whether that's a labor policy framework, or NCAA framework) are missing the forrest for the trees.

I think you're missing my point. The NLRB ruled that under the CURRENT relationship college athletes are employees.

The relationship has to change, and will. We all know what college athletics has become, the demands on athletes, the control coaching staffs have over their time, their majors, and everything else. All of that factors into the NLRBs decision.

Like I said, it's not a coincidence that these rulings are focused on D1 schools and not Vassar or whoever.

Edit to add: the vast majority of NLBR actions are triggered by workers, and worker reporting is a huge part of how the NLRB, Department of Labor, state level agencies, etc. enforce policy. The NCAA/P5s path here is about satisfying athletes with a revenue share based on a negotiable percentage of revenue annually, and legislative policy that creates a special class for college athletes that is not employment and reduces school employment burden, while still letting athletes share in profits.

For everybody asking "why would college athletes get an exception" -- haven't they had an obvious exception for the last 3 decades? It's an industry that's been treated with special circumstances for a long time now. Everybody knew it was in violation of anti-trust policy for a long, long time and nobody did anything about it until it became such a massive organization and massive revenue creator that it was egregious not to. You think a system that let that exist for decades isn't equally incentivized to create a middle of the road option?

And are there other examples of massive industries that are huge sources of entertainment and cultural institutions in the US that have been legislated out of existence? Why do people think anybody wants that to happen here?

They can parse language however they want, and try to pretend athletes wouldn't be employees.

Several years ago several of my employees wanted to switch from "at will"
to contract employees.

But, their job duties would be almost the same.

Our corporate attorney said "no way".
"If it walks like a duck ..."
Never happened.

That sounds a lot like the needle the NCAA is trying to thread with this.

Like I posted , lawyers are gonna have a field day with this.

The courts will be the final arbiter of this whole thing.

If there a college's entire model depends on convincing 60 D3 baseball players to pay 80k to "live the dream" and the only way that's feasible is through a schedule and level of control that clearly runs afoul of any reasonable definition of amateurism, isn't that a pretty massive problem? Honestly, man, you make D2/D3 athletics sound pretty exploitative. I know that's not the intention, but you're basically saying that the schools sell them an athletic dream -- one that's not super realistic -- and charge them a whole lot of money for it in the process. If academics aren't the point even at D2 or D3, then you're absolutely right, these should be employees and the system will crumble.

Maybe I'm the one that's hopelessly naive, but my sense is there are plenty of people who'd be willing to play baseball at Tiffin even if it functioned more like a club with far lesser time demands, control, etc.

My guess is that D2 and D3 will find ways to continue functioning, and all these new rules won't apply at those levels.

That's 1.4%

I hope you're right, but allow me to put this list here:

Total reported student-athletes per college or university:
Ohio State 1,000*
Tiffin 1,000
Ohio Northern 904
John Carroll 820
Findlay 780
Ashland 779
Wooster 733
Baldwin-Wallace 713
Mt. Union 697
Miami 675*
Case Western 655
Youngstown State 643*
Wittenberg 613
Ohio Wesleyan 601
Marietta 543
Lake Erie College 517
Ohio University 509*
University of Cincinnati 500*
Bowling Green 495*
Dayton 478*
Xavier 388*#
Cleveland State 387*#

*-D1
#-no football

Is there any reason John Carroll has more student athletes than Xavier and Dayton combined? The reason is these athletes provide a steady tuition-paying revenue stream to these schools that are placed into future enrollment projections. Schools then use these projections to do things like hire staff, take on debt and pay presidents handsome bonuses. If these projections fall short, there will be more financial emergencies like the one that closed Notre Dame College after more than a century. For the record, Notre Dame College added football in 2010 and went completely bankrupt within 13 years.

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2024/04/a-new-era-enrollme...

Also:
https://www.statenews.org/news/2024-02-21/ohio-universiti...