The "Big Green" May Change the NCAA Forever
Unionization is another step toward the demise of college sports.
St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are upon us. It’s a spring time, Irish-American tradition of wearing green, eating corned beef and cabbage, and drinking a Guinness. When our daughter was young, the leprechaun would make his annual visit causing mischief, making messes, and leaving behind green footprints as evidence of where he’d been. No matter how many traps we set, the little devil was able to get in and out without being caught.
The most indelible leprechaun is Notre Dame’s, of course. And if you look in Notre Dame’s football past you will find one who found the gold at the end of his rainbow. The film Rudy tells the story of Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, based on fact filled with Hollywood. According to accounts by football great Joe Montana, a former Notre Dame's quarterback, no fans really chanted Rudy’s name, the team didn’t throw their jerseys on the coach’s desk in solidarity with Rudy, and it wasn’t unusual in the 1970s for the coaches to play every senior. But does it matter?
The crux of the true story is that Rudy came from a large working-class family, and he dreamed of playing football for his favorite team Notre Dame. After serving in the Navy, Rudy used the G.I. Bill hoping attend Notre Dame, but his grades were poor. Through hard work and determination—even with his dyslexia— Rudy increased his grade point average enough at Holy Cross College that on his last try, he was finally accepted to Notre Dame. The next step was to make the football team. At 5’6” tall, it was not inevitable that he would make the cut. However, Rudy did make the practice team before becoming a walk-on. With just 27 seconds of playing time in his Fighting Irish career, the legend was born with one sack of Georgia Tech’s quarterback in a game Notre Dame was destined to win regardless.
Still, before every new football season, Rudy is shown on the jumbotrons at “the house that Rockne built” for students attending Notre Dame, Holy Cross, and St. Mary’s. It’s a comeback-kid story that especially rallies the spirits of young college freshmen away from home.
But a lot has changed in college and professional sports. As more money gets pumped into the systems, the less loyalty there is between teams and players. Equally, this disconnect means the less likely a Rudy story would happen again.
On a collegiate level, once sponsorships from Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas started pouring dollars into teams, the less amateur teams became. Add to that the millions provided for college coaches, and the teams are less about heart and more about a college’s bottom line—as well as a boon for gambling. As soon as players had the opportunity to earn bonuses off of the use of their names, images, and likenesses (NIL) in 2021, it was only a matter of time before the next step would be to unionize.
Dartmouth basketball players aren’t the first to attempt unionization, but may be the first to succeed. Northwestern football players aimed to unionize in 2014, but their failure was well before the Supreme Court got involved in a ruling against the NCAA regarding antitrust law in 2021.
So what is it that Dartmouth basketball players want that they aren’t getting? First and foremost, they want to be recognized as employees of the school. As such they want pay and and a say in scheduling. There will most likely be negotiations over health care, too. Times have changed since Northwestern’s defeat, and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) already ruled last month that Dartmouth players are, indeed, employees of the school, which is a leap toward a total reworking of college sports.
Like everything else nowadays, this is causing a rift between Republicans and Democrats. In yet another committee most Americans have never heard of, the House Education and Workforce Committee, the lines are clear. Republicans are against unionization and Democrats are for unionization. Representative Burgess Owens argued, “The increased costs of unionization and administrative headaches would threaten to make low-funded programs economically unviable, including many women’s sports and small-school athletic programs, resulting in fewer teams, fewer scholarships, and fewer opportunities for young people” (Inside Higher Ed). Opposing this train of thought is California Representative Mark DeSaulnier who states, “Unionization or the opportunity for unionization is not the end but the beginning for an equitable system and treatment for people who frequently get the short end of the stick especially in a multi-billion industry”(Inside Higher Ed).
The fight for the right to a college education doesn’t seem to be the focus on anyone’s list, and that is the fault of both the university system and the NCAA who prioritized sponsorship, ticket sales, TV rights, and merchandising over the student-athletes who are supposedly gaining an education while proudly playing for their college/university of choice.
According to a report by PBS News Hour in 2019, men’s football and basketball are the cash cows of collegiate sports. However, most schools run their athletic programs in debt even though the consistent recipients of wealth are the NCAA (a nonprofit) and the coaches. For example, on February 7, 2024, Front Office Sports ran an article “Colorado Athletic Department Suffers $9.9 Million Budget Deficit Pre-Prime Time.” In it, writer Margaret Fleming notes the slow death of the Pac-12 Conference and the amount of monies still owed to coaches who were fired as key to understanding the Colorado Buffalos’ debts.
The complicated network of lucrative coaching contracts and business deals meets the reality of budgets. Student-athletes complain that they just want their fair share and are willing to become SEIU members to get what they think they have coming. Dartmouth’s “Big Green” doesn’t come to mind when you think of greatness as a college basketball team, which is why this story will be one to watch.
The bottom line is unionization will cut lesser observed college sports’ programs and will certainly be a deficit to students reliant on athletics to get them accepted into a college where receiving much needed Division I and II scholarships is a must to afford tuition, room and board, and miscellaneous costs. Since televised sports, we have been witnessing the Chinese water torture of Division I; and, perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. Money has corrupted playing for the sheer love of the game and college pride.
With the inevitable problems surrounding unionization of college athletes, we may finally be able to get back to what going to college is all about: learning and receiving a useful degree. You know, those days of being a college student first and an athlete second. With any luck, the bloat and controversies surrounding college sports will force an implosion, encouraging a charmed new beginning like an Irish spring.
Big name college coaches, abetted by the NCAA & to some degree the colleges they work for are the foundation of this problem.
Preventing players from leaving programs, after being recruited by coaches who bolted for “Greener” pastures shattered any integrity that remained of big time college sports.
Not allowing meal/pocket money to many athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds was another forerunner to the NIL & now unionization stances being advanced.
Colleges & Mega conferences are now reaping what they sown!
If I were the school's i'd shut down the althelitics dept. College is to learn to think not throw a football.
Get the f.....g priorities straight.
Only morons watch college sports