The Dartmouth Basketball Union

On carrying the torch after 2014's Northwestern football push

AP Photo | Ben McKeown

Hold on — didn’t we say no newsletters for a while? Well, sometimes, these things are out of our hands. It’s like Paulie says in Pine Barrens. It couldn’t be helped, Ton.

The Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize this week, following in the memorable footsteps of Northwestern’s football team a decade ago.

This is big news, particularly for an independent podcaster who just so happened to put out a docuseries on the NCAA this week:

It’s good to feel seen. And yes, this will be in a later episode. But not for a while! So for now, I write.

First, a small point of order. You may have seen headlines this week calling Dartmouth the first team in U.S. history to do such a thing. To clarify, what they really mean is that this is the first team for which we know they had the votes.

Northwestern’s football team tried to form a union in 2014. Much like Dartmouth, they filed a complaint with a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, who gave them the green light to move forward.

Northwestern then appealed, and when the NLRB declined to assert its jurisdiction — legalese for “sorry guys; pass” — the union push died on the vine. The players’ votes, which were cast on secret ballots, never ended up being officially counted.

I think we can reasonably presume they had the votes then too, but you know what? You’re right. That was pedantic. Get over it, man. Let’s move on.

Big Green

People are not wrong to call this Dartmouth vote significant. It is. I don’t want to totally downplay this.

And my tone on this may surprise listeners of the first episode above, so, trigger warning hereby issued. I’m just not convinced that this matters nearly as much as it might seem at first blush.

Allow me to poke a hole or two. Not to be mean, just to be real.

First, Dartmouth is not an especially salient example of where the collegiate athletics model goes wrong. Frankly, it’s among the worst you could come up with.

Dartmouth is an Ivy League school, none of which award athletic scholarships. When the college fires back and says — in their own self-interest, I will absolutely grant — that their players are students before athletes, at Dartmouth, that’s probably actually true.

It is decidedly not true at many programs around the country. But Dartmouth, in my view, isn’t one of them.

With all due respect, this is not exactly a blue-blood program. The one game they played against a Power 6 team, they lost 54-92 to Duke.

Dartmouth’s quality as a basketball team is not relevant to their ability to unionize. I don’t want to do that thing where you dunk on the team/athlete when they decide to speak up.

I’m just pointing out that while the Ivy League is technically Division I, it’s also pretty obviously not the Division I that we’re talking about when we talk about inequity in college sports.

Counterpoint to the counterpoint: I’m sure Dartmouth’s players are not unaware of that. They’re more hoping that this has, in the words of one player, “a domino effect on other cases across the country, and that could lead to other changes."

So maybe Dartmouth isn’t the best place to start, but their thinking is that somebody’s gotta do it. Fair enough. Be the change you want to see. I get that.

I personally don’t think they have an especially strong case to be classified as employees, but we’re about to find out.

Private v. Public

What’s more, we have a point of order with respect to the institution. Dartmouth, like Northwestern, is a private university. It’s not subject to New Hampshire state law to quite the same degree as say, UNH. In a state like New Hampshire, that’s not that big a deal.

But in Ohio? Michigan? It is.

Both states’ legislatures passed laws in 2014 that specifically ban college athletes from unionizing. They didn’t like what they were seeing in their Midwestern backyard. Wonder why.

So that’s one approach, but there are others. In five states, all of which are home to Power 5 (it’s 6 in basketball and it’s 5 in football; stay with me, you’re almost there) state schools — Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and both Carolinas — it’s actually prohibited for any public employees to collectively bargain with employers.

Essentially, even if athletes at Rice, or Emory, or Vanderbilt, or Davidson, or whichever other private university in any of those states had decided to do this before Dartmouth, it would not have gotten the players at Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, or UNC any closer to following suit.

If athletes at a public university wanted to take that step, they wouldn’t be going to the NLRB. They’d need the approval of the state legislature to get it over the line.

No state in the country has passed that statute. First, until very recently, the established precedent directly contradicted it. Prior interpretations of the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), which, unlike the NLRA, does govern standards for public employees, have long viewed college athletes as another category.

Second, it remains a very high bar to get all the requisite stars to align.

You need athletes at a big public school, then you need the political will on that team to go forward with the idea — and to keep it, through many months of procedural hurdles — and then, finally, you’d need a sympathetic legislature, likely a left-leaning one, to seal the deal.

In most states today, that’s not happening. And the ones where it plausibly might are, for the most part, not the ones where these college sports powerhouses are plying their trade. California’s your best bet. My guess is, if we see this at all anytime soon, it’ll be there. Just don’t necessarily count on that being a sweeping domino either.

There are many chips yet to fall here, more than we have time to discuss today, but you’ll get a couple more this coming Monday. Stay tuned.

Also, This

• 10,000+ players have already opted in to the EA Sports deal we talked about last week. Texas QB Arch Manning is not one of them. His team put out some incredibly vapid statement about how he was “focused on playing football on the field.” Ugh. Same, dude.

  • I don’t blame anybody for not nodding along to $600, especially somebody of his stature. But let’s not pretend like this is suddenly a “distraction.” Please.
    

• Is it just me, or did the Bills release everyone on their roster this week? Not encouraging to this new convert. I already had abandonment issues after the Rams left! Thanks a lot, Laura.

  • Tyler Dunne
    seems less worried though, which I find reassuring.
    

• 40,000 is a lot. Like, a lot a lot. So let me be the millionth person to point out that LeBron continues to stave off the undefeated Father Time. To be this good, for this long, is patently absurd.
  

• He’s no Dean Wade though. Nobody is.