Sporting News: Undoing the Northwestern Union Decision

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Cut Back on Athletic Time Commitment. The NCAA allows schools to have 20 hours per week of required athletically related activity during the season, with one day off required each week. But as Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby pointed out, that number is at least stretched by coaches if not falsified outright. To that, athletes add another 20-30 hours of extra work that runs the spectrum from truly voluntary to strongly suggested. This could be cut by eliminating the tricks used to extend the 20-hour limit, limiting athlete’s access to facilities for voluntary workouts, and cutting back on offseason and summer workouts.

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Reduce Control by Coaches. The way coaches control the lives of student-athletes, through teams rules, curfews, class checks, and monitoring hurts the argument against employee status in two ways. First, it makes them look like bosses rather than coaches. And second, it shows that they — not the faculty — are primarily overseeing the players. Outside of the(potentially reduced) amount of time players spend on athletics, coaches should have little or no control over their lives. Any team rules that are established should be created by or with faculty members who can sign off on their academic benefit.

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Guarantee Scholarships. Athletic scholarships are always going to be awarded based on athletic skill. But once they are, athletics should be removed from the equation. Scholarships should only be canceled for the same reasons that academic scholarships are taken away. The NLRB’s decision takes this very far though. It may mean preventing institutions from canceling aid even when athletes fall academically ineligible (but not kicked out of school) and allowing athletes to keep their scholarships even after they quit the team.

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Create an Athletics Major. An athletics major, either in athletics performance or athletics education (i.e. coaching), wraps up all the elements of the previous solutions. An athletics major reduces the overall time commitment and gives an academic nexus to athletic time demands. It turns coaches into faculty members, meaning they are directing students rather than controlling players. And it ties an athletic scholarship more closely to a athlete's education. In short, an athletics major both solves some of the problems raised by the NLRB while at the same time provides a justification for avoiding other radical changes to college athletics.

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