Reviewing the Tape III:
What We Learned from the First CFBPA Action (Part 3 of 3)
This is a free online newsletter for Jason Stahl, Executive Director of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA). If you are a member of the general public who would like to financially support our efforts at the CFBPA you can do that here. If you are a past, present or future college football player, I ask that you consider becoming a member of the CFBPA.
As regular readers know, we’re in the process of reviewing the lessons and successes of our first action at Penn State University. You can read Part 1 of the series at this link and Part 2 at this link. Today, we present our third lesson learned and our third success:
Lesson #3: We need to develop innovative ways to reach current players. It’s no secret to those in the college athletics reform movement that college athletes are overworked and often isolated from normal day-to-day campus life. This is especially true for college football players. My go-to story to explain this fact to the general public is this one from a few years back. In it, then-LSU quarterback Joe Burrow, in his second year on the team, talks about meeting other LSU students for the first time after a game at the end of the season. As it turns out, Burrow had taken only online classes and basically devoted every other moment of his time to football. This isolation and overwork were so intense that after three semesters “on campus” he had yet to meet a single other student not on the football team.
In our first year as an institution, this isolation and overwork are the biggest challenges we have to overcome in organizing current college football players. College athletes, per NCAA rules, are only supposed to be engaged in “athletically-related activities” 20 hours per week in-season and 8 hours per week out of season. However, any college athlete will laugh when you tell them this. Every single one knows this rule is routinely violated. I used to frequently give athletes a PDF of the NCAA FAQ sheet regarding work hour limitations, but the NCAA decided to remove it from their website awhile back. It used to be on this page. I have uploaded the PDF that used to be there from when I first printed it out in 2017, so the information may be out of date.
However, even I misunderstood just how bad the overwork and isolation had become for college football players until my trip to Penn State. One of the main reasons I was brought to campus was that players were angry over new, more intensive and more surveilled summer workouts. I have found very little reporting on this, but apparently this summer was the first time football programs were allowed more summer practice time and more coach-run practices. Here is one (largely laudatory piece) on how this has changed things for football players at UTEP. Apparently extended summer workouts were also allowed in basketball with some speculating that this is the reason we’ve seen a rash of basketball players getting injured in the summer.
Because of these changes, it was hard for me to meet with players in person even in the dead of July when I was on campus for a week. My guess is that Penn State players were blowing by their 8 allowable hours of “athletically related activities” by midweek every week. Additionally, opportunities previously given to senior players to lead practices in the summer were now lost. No one was happy with the arrangement and it was why we recently added a simple new plank to our Platform for Change — a real off-season.
This intense overwork even in the summer exacerbates the isolation from leisure, normal campus life, friends, family and information that college football players were already feeling even in the offseason. I include “information” to make another point about another challenge we’re up against. Before heading to Penn State, I knew from talking with players from other institutions that most did not understand some of the realities of the changes in their own workplace. Matt Brown has a great post from awhile back detailing the ways in which this lack of basic information leads to players misunderstanding the NIL marketplace.
I found out at Penn State that this same lack of workplace knowledge extends to the now finalized Big Ten media rights deal. Only two players on the team knew of the coming deal and even those two did not realize that the new package would garner over $1 billion per year. One hopes that word is now getting out, as we saw in the case of Ohio State quarterback CJ Stroud, but I wouldn’t assume this is happening. Players needed to be educated on the realities of their workplace and we need to find innovative ways to do this in the coming months.
Success #3: Given the experience at Penn State, we believe our strategy of organizing players through a non-union players association continues to be the correct one. I have written on this topic, and done interviews on the subject, but it is worth repeating once again what we’re trying to accomplish organizationally. We are a non-union players association that is seeking to organize college football players past, present and future from all levels of play. In doing so, we seek to create an institution which improves the lives of these individuals and implements our Platform for Change through all possible means. To read more about our mission, values and vision, click this link.
Although some of our critics disagree with this organizational outlook, we think our first action at Penn State showed it to be the correct one. When you organize actually-existing college football players in real life, you have to meet them where they are. When you talk to these players individually, in small groups and as a team as I have you come to realize that they may not be ready to jump headlong into a union drive. This is why, at Penn State, we developed a carrot/stick approach whereby we gave Big Ten and/or Penn State administrators a chance to talk about our demands first. If they were willing to make concessions, this may have been enough for those members and we would have had to be fine with that. However, we had a unionization backup plan as well which is detailed in this CBS Sports article.
By continuing to organize players in this supple way, we keep open all possibilities for change. As a non-union players association, we can and will work with any administrator or coach on implementing our Platform for Change in whatever way we can. We firmly believe that coaches and administrators will benefit from our platform changes as well. However, as we continue to organize players and add new members, we will be the only institution in the country that can also make a fast shift — when members are ready — to a traditional union drive, election and collective bargaining.
Implementing our Platform for Change through unionization and legally-binding collective bargaining at Power Five football programs is only one way to improve the lives of college football players. We believe that locking ourselves into this goal, and only this goal, is simply too narrow of a vision. Additionally, it is elitist in that it disregards the vast majority of college football players who will not play, do not play or have not played at the Power Five level.
Finally, when you see things this way, it should become apparent that it has another benefit — namely, we cannot fail. Even our first action at Penn State—which did not go as planned—certainly did not fail as I’ve tried to outline in the last three newsletters. Additionally, our institutional model means that we will have many successes. Some will be in organizing Power Five players into a union. But, this will be a subset of our victories heading forward and the other victories will be made possible by the fact that we are not a union.
In closing, to all the current college football players reading this newsletter, I just want to say that I am looking forward to this coming season. I pray for the safety of each and every one of you as you labor to entertain us fans.