Reaction to the National Labor Relations Board's (NRLB) Decision in Favor of NCAA Unionization (From March 27, 2014)

Northwestern University Football Program's Militant Propaganda Lithograph

Reaction to the National Labor Relations Board's (NRLB) Decision in Favor of NCAA Unionization (From March 27, 2014)

May 18, 2014 at 11:12pm

As a matter of coinciding conservative and libertarian ideological principles, I detest labor and trade unions and am strongly in favor of the outright abolition of the Wagner Act (1938) that legalized unionization since we could go into semantics by stating that in principle, this right was implicitly guaranteed due to the provision with the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights (1791) providing the American people for all time the right to peaceful assembly. This to me is the only reason why I am not at all opposed to today's NLRB ruling in favor of the Northwestern University football players in their victory in attaining the right to unionize. However, this does not entail that those who choose to strike are immune from the latent consequences which follow. Labor unions have far too great a mandate for bargaining power in the negotiation processes between labor representatives and the legal teams from the corporations against which the workers are striking.

The NCAA has been guilty for its entire existence of profiteering off of the labors of the players while they play their respective sports for nothing further than the scholarships they are granted and the meager stipends they receive for costs of living. And while no one is stating that to be paid to attend classes and to in theory and principle graduate is not to imply that there is not a major breach of the ethical standards of the academic honor code of conduct, a plurality of fans are aware that the two sports for which this will serve as the pivotal factor in what I believe is a fundamental shift of which schools are to not suffer the greatest hit to their programs while those that do may in the end fold wings and disband their athletic departments are football and men's basketball. And the greatest irony of all are the programs like Northwestern University which struggle to produce a profit and therefore contribute their fair cut of the budget to the university's war chest that will be the institutions whose athletic departments will be crippled to the point that not only will they be forced to their knees financially due to their inability to "keep up with the Jones'," but also cut out all athletic programs from the academic budgets due to the lack of any profitability nor simply to break even.

The next series of questions which will lead into a snowball effect that becomes an avalanche is what the pay scale standards are going to be slated in principle, if there will indeed be a base minimum wage or salary and a firm or soft salary cap, how the controversies regarding profit sharing within the athletic departments will be reconciled since the majority of intercollegiate athletics reside within the public universities, what the NCAA is prepared to do in order to protect the interests of private universities that do not have the large war chests of finances nor capacities to earn large revenues for their departments, and finally how this will affect the trend of early entries into the NFL and NBA drafts. More questions have now been raised than answers provided, and many years more of further litigation are bound to occur before the final settlement(s) are to be reached.

Today's court ruling in favor of the Northwestern University football players right to unionize has spelled the imminent death of the intercollegiate student-athlete. In a matter of a generation or less, the legitimacy and economic viability of the NCAA will no longer be a quantifiable nor qualitative entity nor presence in our culture. And this has not even attempted to reconcile the matter of how this diffuses to the NFL and NBA as of yet.

What I want to know is how this will affect the salaries paid in both the NFL and the NBA, plus the WNBA? I am prone to believe that the pay scale will not be as major a factor in the NBA since it already pays the second highest average salary per player behind Major League Baseball. It will hurt substantially the plight of the WNBA, which already struggles to fill arenas and accrue television audiences. The WNBA athletes do not earn even a sliver of what the average player in the all-male leagues do because of the low revenue margins inhibiting the capacity of the league's franchises are to pay.

The NFL, however, has just passed the $10 billion in revenue threshold and is only slightly ahead of Major League Baseball which is now well over the $9 billion total. The NFL has thrived upon raiding the colleges for players while not having to foot the bill to develop its own talent aside from the failed experiment with NFL Europe. Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, has already set his very ambitious goal of reaching $25 billion in total revenue within a few years. And while the league is experience steady profits and growth in revenues (the NFL was worth $1.3 billion in 1990; it is now at $10 billion today), he has failed to ameliorate the fans by doing next to nothing to decrease, and in most cases, dramatically increased prices on tickets league-wide,  NFL Shop gear and NFL Sunday Ticket season packages. Drinks at these events, as with all leagues, are extremely expensive, but the NFL's prices are the highest as I have been informed. He also is planning to expand the total days of the week in which games will be played by adding one game on Wednesday and Saturday. He has tried now for the entirety of his tenure as commissioner to add two additional games to the season schedules, and also is close to formally proposing adding a new franchise in London, England, while also in Los Angeles, the latter where no franchise has succeeded while the idea to add a team in London has proven to be very unpopular with fans especially when he is hell bent upon Wembley Stadium hosting a Super Bowl. Most of my friends do not have access to NFL Network because it is either not available through their cable or satellite providers or if it is, they cannot afford to pay the subscription costs; they therefore heartily despise the fact there are Thursday night games as it is. With this poor economic planning, the failure to decrease prices and instead to continue to increase them as he continues oversaturating the market with the NFL brand, and worst of all, the salary caps have been decreased rather than increased while revenues increase leading to lower average pay scales for players means nothing more to me than this new court decision requiring the NCAA to permit student-athletes to unionize which leads to paying living wages as part of the rights to work laws will fundamentally alter how professional football will operate and furthermore, to simply exist. They have lived off of sponging the talent from major college football programs for more than 90 years, and I dare say that not only will more scholar athletes opt to stay in school unless it is too lucrative to turn down early entry into the draft, but if the NFL chooses to aggressively pursue these player, they will be required to dip into the piggy bank and either increase substantially the hard cap total, or perhaps do as Major League Baseball has done for more than a generation: replace the hard salary cap with one that is soft and can be surpassed in total so long as the teams agree to pay a luxury tax.

We have not yet addressed the issue of the current barrage of litigation faced by both the NFL and NCAA regarding traumatic head injuries in which the NFL just recently was instructed by a federal court to pay more than $800 million (remember, the league's total revenue is $10 billion), and just a few weeks ago, a federal judge announced plans to increase dramatically the total restitution to be paid to well over $1 billion. When we consider that this was just the first major class action lawsuit of its type and there will be many more like it in the near future, the league is on the verge of authoring its own demise due to decades of mismanagement, living beyond its means while not awarding due compensation in correlative salaries nor post-career pensions and health care benefits. This is not simply a problem with Roger Goodell and the owners controlling the league as an absolute monopoly over the NFLPA, but also the NFLPA, especially under the late Gene Upshaw, that stifled and finally destroyed those efforts.

For more on the topic, read this editorial from The New York Times, 27 April 2014