Should College FB move to collective bargaining

[DyedBlue]

Rick Neuheisel, CBS Sports Analyst, former Washington, Colorado, and UCLA Head Coach, and co-host of College Sports Today on Sirius Channel 84 has been loudly advocating for a universal, binding collective bargaining agreement for college football. This would set salaries or salary ranges for every position I presume. I am not sure how he proposes to handle total budget variations in rosters where one team has 12 offensive linemen on the roster and another has 13, but that is a detail.

This, to me, seems like a ploy to re-establish the traditional power structure of college football and lock the Ohio States and Bamas of the world back into unassailable positions. With a salary range for a position, the schools will no longer be in danger of being outbid for key talent and no longer have to make tough money decisions. Just gather up the NIL donors and use the house settlement money to get everybody to the same top of the range. You again have a third string better than 90% of your league, and you are in no danger of losing more than one game a year.

This would squash emerging teams like IU, SMU, BYU and others who would lack the cachet to get top-tier recruits for the same money.

While I may not really like the Old West feel of no NIL limits, but does mean that schools must make decisions about how much cash to collect and throw at top players and recruits, and that has already proven to be a way to cause very good players to migrate away from these programs to others with cash to spend.

Thoughts on collective bargaining???

 

[jturner38]

Don’t care for college football. However if you’re going to have a collective bargaining agreement then you’re going to have to have a union that represents the players. Possibly for each position if salaries goes by position. Then again that may be more for an agent to navigate.

 

[Jason Svoboda]

Simply not possible. To have collective bargaining, you need to have a union as @jturner38 said. With that comes employee status. There have been numerous labor orgs and union boards that have written statements saying they simply do not see how you can classify college athletes as employees.

Moreover, now that some schools have signed with third-party firms to the tune of hundreds of millions, those lawsuits would be nasty.

The NCAA and schools had their chance to organize this but chose not to and now it appears to be completely out of their control.

 

[BrokerZ]

No, but college football needs to go to a relegation model similar to English football. The conferences mean nothing and historical rivalries are pretty much dead except for a select few. Just have a 40 to 50 team premier league with relegation and promotions possible at each level.

 

[Jason Svoboda]

No, but college football needs to go to a relegation model similar to English football. The conferences mean nothing and historical rivalries are pretty much dead except for a select few. Just have a 40 to 50 team premier league with relegation and promotions possible at each level.

Football simply needs to break off and be its own entity. It's asinine that the CFB revenues are outside of the NCAA but the structure and rules aren't.