Nathan Kalman-Lamb: "It’s fucked because everyone's saying, ‘These guys can get paid now,’ but we aren’t getting paid for football or the value we bring through football. We are getting paid for a side hustle." NIL is not enough. @derekcrim.bsky.social + I explain for @thedailybeast.bsky.social.

"It’s fucked because everyone's saying, ‘These guys can get paid now,’ but we aren’t getting paid for football or the value we bring through football. We are getting paid for a side hustle." NIL is not enough. @derekcrim.bsky.social + I explain for @thedailybeast.bsky.social.

This Is the Only Way to End College Sports Exploitationwww.thedailybeast.com College athletes are still not being paid for playing sports, while coaches and staff can earn millions. How is that remotely fair?

Thanks to a Tennessee federal court preliminary injunction, there is currently essentially no regulation of NIL in college sport, a development variously described as “gut punch for the NCAA” and “the clearest sign yet that NCAA amateurism is collapsing.”

This Is the Only Way to End College Sports Exploitationwww.thedailybeast.com College athletes are still not being paid for playing sports, while coaches and staff can earn millions. How is that remotely fair?

But here's the thing: the NCAA and universities continue to tenaciously cling to a system in which universities are not required to directly compensate campus athletic workers for their labor. A model predicated on exploitation, you might say.

This Is the Only Way to End College Sports Exploitationwww.thedailybeast.com College athletes are still not being paid for playing sports, while coaches and staff can earn millions. How is that remotely fair?

It is the developments in recent NLRB cases featuring Dartmouth College and USC that augur real possibilities for redressing the exploitation that suffuses college sport.

Dartmouth’s vote to unionize could help end college sports’ plantation dynamicswww.theguardian.com If the will is there, so too is the potential for unions to transform working conditions in the multibillion world of college sports

Whereas leaders of the NCAA contend that pay-for-play will make college sport economically unsustainable, we argue that the current model is already morally unsustainable because it is predicated on the relentless exploitation of college students.

This Is the Only Way to End College Sports Exploitationwww.thedailybeast.com College athletes are still not being paid for playing sports, while coaches and staff can earn millions. How is that remotely fair?

Based on interviews we conducted with former P5 college football players for our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (@uncpress.bsky.social, Fall 2024), players agree that NIL simply is not sufficient compensation.

This Is the Only Way to End College Sports Exploitationwww.thedailybeast.com College athletes are still not being paid for playing sports, while coaches and staff can earn millions. How is that remotely fair?

One former P5 college football player we spoke to for our forthcoming book told us, “The value I am bringing as a football player is worth way fucking more than college tuition and cutting me a check for rent.”

This Is the Only Way to End College Sports Exploitationwww.thedailybeast.com College athletes are still not being paid for playing sports, while coaches and staff can earn millions. How is that remotely fair?

Having a football program should require buying a health insurance package that pays out on degraded health over the athletes' lives and pays a death benefit for those who dies before age 67 years old.

It certainly should.

Yes. With specific provisions for cognitive impairment and dementia (due to the higher rate of CTE).

Absolutely

NIL doesn’t solve the problem of the players being unpaid labor, because it’s just hoping someone else will pay them.

Precisely

This is why I’m a strong advocate for players getting paid. The coaches don’t have to rely on NIL aspirations to become the highest-paid public employees in their state.

Couldn’t agree more

Somewhat-aside: you teach at UNB? The University of New Brunswick, in Moncton? When I was at McGill Canada didn’t have much of a college sports culture, is why I ask.

Yes, UNB (albeit in Fredericton). Not radically different in terms of Canada college sport now. I taught at Duke for six years and study US college sport.

Workmans’ Comp. The whole concept of student athlete was invented to avoid paying it, and NIL doesn’t make up for it.

It certainly doesn’t!

That’s one way. Another would be to end college sports altogether. And why not, people are supposedly there to learn.

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