Will Stanford’s Player Union Effort Actually Change Anything?
OPENING STATEMENTS
Earlier this week, Stanford football players formed a campus chapter of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA), a player-advocacy group that has spent five years building toward the idea that college football needs something resembling a union. CFBPA executive director Jason Stahl was upfront about the ambition: this action was meant to be a first domino, with other ACC schools following their lead and conference-level organizing as the real target, not one sweeping national union.
It remains a voluntary membership chapter, not an NLRB petition, and it doesn't obligate Stanford, the ACC, or the NCAA to do anything. Still, it is the clearest sign that collective bargaining has stopped being a theoretical debate among law professors and started becoming something current players are actually organizing around.
Let’s take a look today at how we got here, the significant obstacles that remain, and what the likely paths may be.
This didn't come out of nowhere. The legal groundwork goes back more than a decade, with the following marking the key milestones.
In 2014, Northwestern football players petitioned the NLRB to unionize. A regional director agreed players fit the legal definition of "employee," but, in 2015, the full Board said no, mainly around concerns that unionizing one private-school team in a sea of public universities would blow up the competitive balance.
In 2021, the Supreme Court's NCAA v. Alston's decision, which struck down NCAA limits on education-related compensation, reopened the question with Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence calling the NCAA's compensation rules circular and self-serving.
In 2024, an NLRB regional director found Dartmouth's men's basketball players to be employees, and the team became the first to vote to unionize while the Third Circuit's Johnson v. NCAA ruling let athletes' FLSA wage claims move forward. But sensing a hostile Trump-appointed Board on the horizon, Dartmouth players pulled its own petition at the end of 2024, and by February 2025 the NLRB had rescinded the memo that classified athletes as employees in the first place.
Here's the core problem: federal labor laws simply weren't built for an industry like this. The NLRA only covers private employers, so any Board-supervised union vote only applies to a small slice of schools. The public universities that dominate major-conference football answer to a patchwork of state public-sector laws instead, some of which flatly bar public employees from bargaining, others of which just don't say anything about athletes at all. Throw in right-to-work laws common across major college-sports states, and there's currently no single legal path that gets you to one uniform bargaining system across NCAA membership.
The bigger problem remains with the NCAA, which, along with its member schools, spent years building an enormous revenue machine - TV deals, playoff expansion, now direct revenue-sharing - only to have the courts recently and repeatedly find the underlying rules (amateurism, compensation caps, transfer restrictions) violate antitrust law. The enterprise grew by treating athletes like a workforce without ever calling them one.
Nobody has clean authority to sit across the table, either. The NCAA is a rulemaking body, not an employer. Athlete representation is split between rival groups like the CFBPA and Athletes.org, and neither has any formal bargaining status. Add in wildly uneven athletic department budgets, shifting roster limits, and plenty of Olympic-sport athletes who likely have zero interest in employee status, and a single national framework starts to look pretty unrealistic.
All of that said, I see three plausible future outcomes:
Football-only bargaining. It’s the narrowest, most legally realistic near-term option. It would likely start at private schools, where the NLRA already applies, and spread through CFBPA-style chapters from there. The catch is scale: without new legislation, public schools (most of major-conference football) stay outside the tent, creating an odd two-tier system within the same sport.
Conference-level bargaining in revenue sports It’s the model CFBPA and pending federal legislation are aiming for, built around a multiemployer bargaining unit spanning an entire conference. This would target football and men's basketball specifically, where the money actually justifies it, while leaving lower-revenue sports alone. But it needs either sweeping federal legislation that overrides state right-to-work and public-sector laws, or every school in a conference voluntarily signing on, neither of which has any real precedent yet.
A mixed, state-by-state patchwork This is probably the most realistic outcome given where the law stands today. Bargaining rights would exist only where state law and school posture allow it, while everyone else keeps operating under the current NIL and revenue-sharing setup. It's messy and uneven, and it would likely invite more lawsuits and pressure on Congress to finally act — but it doesn't require the legislative or judicial leap the other two scenarios do.
Every one of these paths runs into resistance - from the NCAA, from universities trying to protect non-revenue sports, from state lawmakers defending right-to-work laws. None of them points to a sudden, sweeping transformation. But Stanford's chapter proves the organizing energy is real, even if the legal machinery to turn that energy into an actual contract is still fragmented and years away.
EXHIBIT A
The Protect College Sports Act appears to be nearing collapse, with the Senate adjourned for the week and increasingly slim odds of a vote before lawmakers depart for August recess next Friday. The bill’s broad scope, which included attempting to address NIL, antitrust, and governance in one sweep, may have ultimately undercut its viability. A narrower approach may have stood a better chance in a divided Congress. The moment also underscores growing skepticism around federal intervention. As Tennessee AD Danny White told On3, “I think it's another example of why we shouldn't be asking Congress to solve a problem that we could solve ourselves.”
EXHIBIT B
The NCAA reportedly has spent nearly $300 million on outside counsel over the last five years. That, and common sense, would seem to make for an easy decision in grandfathering the ‘26 class into its new 5-in-5 eligibility rules. Consider that multiple courts have already signaled skepticism, with plaintiffs winning injunctions in Ohio, Texas and Missouri. And this week about 50 athletes filed a lawsuit seeking emergency relief in North Carolina. In practical terms, the NCAA is turning a policy transition into a nationwide test case over retroactivity, arbitrariness and irreparable harm. If the NCAA loses again, the grandfathering issue could become the de facto rule anyway.
ON THE DOCKET
Ole Miss’s breach-of-contract suit, filed this week against former football players Devin Harber and Princewill Umanmielen who both transferred to LSU, will be a notable test of how far schools can enforce revenue-sharing and transfer-related commitments in the post-settlement era. The university is signaling that these agreements are not just recruiting tools but potentially enforceable civil contracts, which could push other programs to litigate buyout-style language more aggressively. The bigger legal question is whether courts will treat these provisions as ordinary contract terms or as an impermissible restraint on athlete mobility, especially when a third-party school refuses to pay.
FOOTNOTES
$10 million
The new minimum needed for funding a top men’s college basketball roster, according to a New York Times survey of high-major coaches
