OpEd: College football kicks off over Labor Day weekend, but players are still not employees

As the college football season gets underway over the Labor Day weekend, the U.S. Senate is contemplating a bill called the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA). It offers, against all logic, an unprecedented antitrust exemption to the NCAA, its conferences and member colleges and universities, which have demonstrated in word and deed that they are serial violators of federal antitrust law (NCAA v. Board of Regents, 1984; O’Bannon v. NCAA, 2015; NCAA v. Alston, 2021). If the PCSA passes, it would be quite a reward for organizations that have engaged in blatant illegal behavior over decades, marking a miraculous transformation of bad actors into victims. To be clear, the NCAA and its conferences are no victims. They have done nothing to warrant the legal protections they seek from the federal government in this bill.

What ails the college sport system is its unwillingness to recognize athletes as employees and to engage in forthright negotiations where athletes are represented by an independent players association. The Protect College Sports Act does nothing to address the fundamental imbalance in collective power and lack of meaningful representation that would advance the interests of athletes and create room for an effective and more humane 21st century model of college sport. Such an outcome could be achieved if the NCAA and its conferences devoted their resources and energies to earning an antitrust exemption the way the NFL did, through legitimate negotiation with their players and collective bargaining.

The reality behind the $2.8 billion settlement

Facing massive damages from college athlete allegations of price fixing, the NCAA agreed in 2025 to a $2.8 billion settlement in House v. NCAA. The settlement provides backpay awards to some athletes who suffered financial losses as a result of NCAA rules barring them from entering endorsement deals and a provision moving forward for athletes to share in the revenue they generate.

While the settlement has often been referred to as “seismic,” its backpay provisions consider only athletes who competed in 2016 through 2024, as if college athletes did not suffer economic harms prior to 2016 or that revenue sharing should not have been in effect decades before or that the settlement isn’t structured in such a way to suppress athlete value in the future.

It is true that $2.8 billion is a big number. Of course, it doesn’t seem quite as big once the $750 million that went to legal fees is taken into account. Nor does it adequately capture the harms done to young adults confronted with a corrupt system that publicly makes something as fundamentally American as being paid fairly for your work sinful and worthy of punishment. It is notable that the people in charge not only profit off the labor of college athletes but use the revenue athletes earn to control them. The NCAA and conferences, which are funded by the revenue generated primarily by football and men’s basketball players, have used that money to wage legal battles against them at every turn and invested millions of dollars since 2014 lobbying congressional leaders for federal legislation to undo the modest gains athletes have made through court challenges.

Distorting academic and financial values

Significantly, college sport executives have the audacity to engage in this conduct under the umbrella of higher education, a critical pillar of U.S. constitutional democracy. In what finance class in America is there a lesson instructing early career adults that they should only work for free, allow employers to suppress their wages without contest, say nothing when their health and safety is at risk, stay put in a job where they are mistreated or undervalued, that they shouldn’t negotiate, and crucially, that they should be ashamed for wanting to be paid for their labor? Such lessons are routinely normalized in the multibillion-dollar industry that is college sport.

For all of the rhetoric around college sport being aligned with educational values and the mission of higher education, it must seem confounding to smart young adults to be asked constantly to engage in the duplicity required to participate in the college sport system in America while being lectured about the importance of academic integrity. College athletes are clearly recruited for their athletic ability or there wouldn’t be public player rating systems with five-star valuations.

They are offered athletic scholarships as “compensation” but not for their “athletic ability” (which in a recognized employment arrangement would be referred to as a tuition benefit). College athletes are then told they can accept endorsements only as long as those endorsements are not “pay for play.”

They are told at the age of 18 that they are obligated to comply with a 418-page manual that legal scholars and federal judges have difficulty untangling and decoding. And college athletes are then asked to pretend that the demands of their athletic work requires no more than 20 hours of their attention and energy per week achieved through an elaborate hourly accounting scheme that tells them which activities associated with their athletic work is “countable” and “not countable.”

Creative accounting and the 20-Hour myth

This conscious act of obfuscation is aided by the NCAA’s singular assumed authority to redefine the concept of an hour. There is a provision in the manual that distills a full day of competition, which can take a whole workday (8 to 10 hours), and collapses those hours into a neat “3-hour” block of time. Together with rules that do not recognize travel time, time spent in the athletic training room, any meetings athletes might wish to initiate with their coach, attendance at “volunteer” team activities or “captain’s practices,” designating them as “non-countable,” this creative method of accounting allows the NCAA to claim that it only requires athletes to participate 20 hours per week in their sport despite everyone in the system knowing that athletes are generally working 40 to 60 hours per week.

An industry in high demand, not crisis

Assuredly, because the NCAA system of accounting for hours was already rigged to begin with, the additional work athletes do in order to earn money from their NIL deals is not a part of this calculation. The NIL era has done many things, among them expanded an athlete’s workday in its insistence that athletes provide a service of value apart from playing on the field within a system that hides hours. This level of dishonesty has persisted despite the open admission of former NCAA president Mark Emmert in January 2012, remarking that the athletic scholarship model adopted in the 1950s was put in place at a time when college athletes “weren’t putting in 40 to 50 hours a week working on their sport and competing at the highest levels.” So not only are athletes required to abide by these rules, they are also enlisted to participate in the coverup.

Since college athletes had their rights as citizens restored to enter into endorsement agreements to profit from their NIL and to move more freely through the transfer portal, college sport executives, members of the U.S. Congress and sport journalists have been unrelenting in claiming that the system is in “crisis” and “chaos,” demanding that the federal government intercede to correct a manufactured problem to help college sport officials remain in control and to deny athletes employment status while profiting off of their labor. As a matter of record, the Sport Business Journal reported that viewership for college football hit a high in 2025, with the College Football Playoff alone generating $1.3 billion per year. These are hardly indicators of an industry in crisis.

Framing college athletes as “greedy,” “ungrateful” and “disloyal,” college sport executives have employed classic management messaging in making athletes the problem. Addressing the racial implications of this messaging directed toward a workforce in college football and basketball dominated by Black athletes, Delgreco Wilson in The Black Cager notes it is no more disloyal for a college athlete to leave a program for better prospects than it is for a coach to do so. As Chris Corr, a professor of sport leadership at Clemson and director of the College Sport Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, points out, the rate at which college athletes transfer reflects rational labor market decisions.

Members of the U.S. Senate should be wary of the implications of what they are doing if they approve the Protect College Sports Act. The intention is in the name. This is not about protecting college athletes, it is about protecting the college sport industry and those who are in control of it. The veracity of claims being put before the Senate and who is making them should be tested.

The push for unionization and true representation

NCAA President Charlie Baker testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023 that in conversations with more than a thousand college athletes, he hadn’t met one who supported being recognized as an employee. How is it that he could have engaged in meaningful dialogue with athletes on this matter when Northwestern football players signed union cards in 2014; the National College Players Association on behalf of football and basketball players filed with the National Labor Relations Board against the University of Southern California, PAC-12 and the NCAA alleging unfair labor practices (2023); the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to join the Service Employees International Union in 2024; the Stanford football team organized a chapter of the College Football Players Association in 2026; and 100 Division I women’s basketball players, with the team from Oregon State supported by the Oregon Federation of Labor and the AFL-CIO, signed union cards in 2026.

And whatever would the plaintiffs in Johnson v. NCAA (2025), a lawsuit originally filed in 2019 where athletes are actively seeking their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act, make of such a disingenuous comment. It takes concerted effort to summarily ignore players who speak truth to power whether they are doing it in federal or state courts, in front of the NLRB, or in the union hall. And it says all that needs to be said about the business Congress is contemplating giving an unprecedented antitrust exemption to.

The PCSA awards the NCAA and its member conferences and institutions antitrust immunity without any obligation to negotiate with players, it preempts states from challenging NCAA rules and narrowly limits an athlete’s private right of action. Although the bill’s proposers claim it is neutral on employee status, the legal apparatus it sets up to control athletes’ lives places that possibility much farther if not entirely out of reach. If this bill passes and the NCAA and its members get what they have spent millions lobbying for, their bad faith will be on full display for the nation and Congress will have betrayed the interests of college athlete workers who are citizens deserving protection.

Michele Roberts is the former executive director of the National Basketball Players Association and the first woman to lead a major North American professional sports union.

Ellen J. Staurowsky is a professor of sports media (retired) at Ithaca College and co-author of “College Athletes for Hire” and “Exploitation of College Profit Athletes.”