Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh says college athletes should unionize. What would that look like?

University of Michigan head football coach Jim Harbaugh after his team’s championship win last week said college athletes should be able to unionize, one of the biggest endorsements the idea has received in years.  

Discussions on college sports unions are not new, but with the rise of name, image and likeness (NIL) deals and revenue-sharing for athletes, some think it is only a matter of time before at least some student-athletes organize.  

“I think the cultural winds are shifting here with a lot of administrative stakeholders and coaches are going to be moving in the direction of coach Harbaugh,” said Jason Stahl, founder and executive director of the College Football Players Association, pointing out the Wolverines leader is the first head coach to come out in support of unions.  

The basic idea of student-athletes sharing in the sometimes tremendous revenue they bring in has broad support, but how organized labor would work in university locker rooms is unclear. Some experts say the changes would have to start with the top.

“I think it would have to be smaller groups if you tried to do it. You know, with every college athlete or with every Division 1 college athlete — that’s too big, too unwieldy. … I think it needs to be much smaller,” said Mit Winter, a sports attorney with the law firm Kennyhertz Perry.  

Others say that it’s important all college athletes can unionize if they want, regardless of what sport or division they are in.

Stahl, however, says different unions would have to have different demands depending on the school and what type of revenue is brought in from their team, pointing to the Ivy League Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball players filing a formal petition for a union election.

“When we think of Dartmouth men’s basketball, we don’t think about high-level NCAA basketball, right?” he said.

“You look at the situation of an Ivy League athlete, I think the two things that come to the top of my head is an hourly wage,” Stahl added, saying the team in its hearings for unionization noted its student manager makes an hourly wage but players do not.

He said another thing Ivy League students might try to negotiate is athletic scholarships, which none of the elite schools currently offers.

If athletes get themselves into a position to bargain, bigger football programs would likely see deals that are smaller but similar to those in the NFL.  

“I think the first labor agreement would be simple in its structure and cover basic topics such as a pay scale and revenue sharing and the definition of a season,” said Michael LeRoy, professor and expert at sports labor law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

Harbaugh, who has played and coached at the college and professional levels, made his organized labor pitch after Michigan’s 34-13 victory against the University of Washington Huskies, the team’s first national title in more than 25 years.

“The thing I would change about college football is to let the talent share in the ever-increasing revenues,” Harbaugh said. “We’re all robbing the same train, and the ones that are in the position to do the heavy lifting, the ones that risk life and limb out there on a football field are the players and not just, not just football players, student-athletes.” 

“For a long time, people say that unionizing would be bad,” he added. “If people aren’t gonna do it, if they’re not gonna do it out of their own goodwill, and do what’s right, I mean, that’s probably the next step.” 

While momentum is moving for revenue-sharing between players and teams, the current structure makes it difficult for players to officially unionize.  

Jim Cavale, co-founder of athletes.org, a nonprofit aimed at helping players organize and make their voices heard, laid out conditions that he said make unionization “impossible,” including that athletes are not considered employees and the laws against public state employees unionizing.  

“I do think, generally that athletes can already organize, and that’s what we’re working on at athletes.org,” Cavale said. “And it doesn’t have to be through a union. It can be through a trade association, which is what athletes.org is, that doesn’t require athletes to be employees and doesn’t have to red tape legal wise that prevents athletes from organizing.” 

Talk of unionization comes amid growing interest in NIL deals among college and high school athletes.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing last fall about how compensation for college sports and NIL deals should be addressed, with lawmakers looking at legislation to codify rules on these issues.  

“To enable enhanced benefits while protecting programs from one-size-fits-all actions in the courts, we support codifying current regulatory guidance into law by granting student-athletes special status that would affirm they are not employees,” said Charlie Baker, the president of the NCAA, in his opening remarks at the hearing. 

Another hearing on the topic will be held Thursday with Baker coming back in to lobby that students should not be considered employees.  

The push to find a legislative solution and get the rules changed comes as two court cases are now considering whether some college athletes are considered employees under the current laws.  

“I think right now is the perfect time [for change] because [of] the urgency due to the sand timer set around these cases. It’s getting a lot of the leaders in college sports to think about solutions in the interim, and the athletes need to be organized to do the same,” Cavale said.