I have paid tangential attention to these developments but glanced through portions of the Supreme Court opinion when it was issued and the assumption in the opinion was that players are employees (which is a key assumption).
Was that issue actually decided by a lower court and not appealed, or by the Supreme Court and I missed it? I'm more interested in a court's analysis than an NLRB decision.
If that assumption was never fully challenged, why wasn't it? When does a college athlete become an employee versus engaged in an extracurricular activity? Only for lucrative sports or is a freshman fencer an employee of the school? How about a tuba player? What are the limiting principles in this unusual context?
Attached article has a lot of good information. A quick re-scan...I don't think he actually uses the term "employee" but he talks about labor, provides examples of other industries (restaurants, hospitals, law firms), and uses terms like "business model" and "massive money-raising enterprise."
So that may answer part of your question as to limiting principles, etc.
but I never saw a full discussion of the issue and thought it odd that he seemed to be simply assuming the employee status.
and that they are hoping to bypass that question with this particular settlement. I'm not sure how much luck they'll have, but we'll see. Kessler is a really good attorney.
It will be interesting to see how fast this scales and if the big boys' entire football rosters do the same.
Up to this point, The Athletes Organization was a collection of individual student-athletes.
So the "labor" side of the equation appears to be making plans as well.
field of participating schools/franchises down to only those that have commercial value.
just rode off into the landscape.
Where shall we go? What shall we do?
He slithered off into the landscape.
I don't think that they rounded up that money from those donors for the purpose of building a 100 million dollar fencing center.
I'm not an alum, so I don't have standing to really comment here, but if one were to ask me to guess, I would say that ND is all-in for football, be it in a superconference, status quo, or some other similar setup.
ND is probably looking at least $125M to $150M a year in football-related revenue. I find it doubtful that they give that up especially if it only costs ~$20M a year to compensate players.
They can probably even find a few dollars to fund women's sports.
If you look at the anticipated CFP revenue of $2B by 2027 (and the likelihood of fewer teams sharing that nut) combined with what we already know about ND football-related revenues....
ND sports-related revenues (in millions):
FY ending 6/30/23
FOOTBALL: $141
MBB: $10
ALL OTHER MEN: $9
ALL WOMEN: $6
“NOT ALLOCATED BY GENDER”: $58
FY ending 6/30/22:
FOOTBALL: $137
MBB: $10
ALL OTHER MEN: $6
ALL WOMEN: $4
“NOT ALLOCATED BY GENDER”: $59
Projected football revenue for 2027…$220M?
$141M +
increase in Under Armour revenue +
increase in NBC revenue +
ND's cut of $2B CFP revenue (1/40 share would mean $50M)