Today, the week of the Super Bowl, I’d like to talk about one of America’s sports obsessions – Dartmouth men’s basketball. Not that you don’t already know this, but Dartmouth is currently in last place in the Ivy League and is highly unlikely to make the Ivy League tournament, much less the NCAA Tournament. For the record, Cornell and Yale are tied for the lead in the Ivys – go Big Red. But Dartmouth may have a bigger impact on college basketball, or perhaps all of college sports than any team the country this year, from Kansas to Kentucky. That’s because the National Labor Relations Board just decided to allow the Dartmouth Men’s Basketball team to unionize, something that has never been permitted in the 117-year history of the NCAA. The Board’s Regional Director said they were allowed because Dartmouth University both controlled the team’s work environment and because the players worked for compensation – even though that compensation amounts to free uniforms and travel. So even though the Ivy League doesn’t award scholarships and the fact that Dartmouth basketball loses money every year doesn’t change the decision that these players can in fact be considered employees. That is a seismic shift that goes beyond any past NCAA ruling about name, image, and likeness or the transfer portal, both ways that college athletes are empowered to take advantage of their talents and success. This isn’t just about how much money a college athlete can make. It’s about the entire nature of their being.
To be clear, this ruling is definitely getting appealed, and it could take a long time before anything actually happens – measured in years and likely ending up in the Supreme Court. But playing this out, it’s pretty easy to find the existential questions and quandaries. For example, can every school afford this? The answer is probably not, at least not the way we’re currently set up. Alabama and Texas and Florida can find the extra millions to employ their athletes over the course of practices and travel and games and film sessions and so on. Lower tier Division I Schools with budgets in the tens or teens of millions probably can’t. And since this ruling doesn’t care whether your sport makes money or not, that puts a whole lot of non-revenue sports in harms way. At some point, it’s going to be on a college president to decide whether they want to spend a couple hundred thousand to keep a swim team, especially when you’re also hoping to keep your English department. Or whether some sports are part of an enrollment strategy and perhaps worth paying for – something less important to an Ivy League school where it’s not hard to find kids to fill your freshman class. And this is without even considering women’s athletics and Title IX, where laws and finances may have significant areas of dispute.
So what does that all mean? It’s really hard to say, other than it’s entirely likely college sports as we know it is going the way of the dinosaur, at least beyond the high-profile football and basketball programs where you won’t notice much difference. But it’s hard to imagine other sports and schools won’t find a new way out, perhaps using a club sports model to replace varsity athletics. Which also means all those families investing thousands in youth sports in hope of either a scholarship or an elusive spot in a high-ranking college might want to change course. In other words, get ready for some turbulence.
But perhaps what’s lost in the mix, at least from my dated perspective as a former non-revenue college athlete, are the intangibles that made college sport worth doing. From my experience, and mind you I was a marginal contributor, but the thing I really loved about college sports was the singular pursuit of collective excellence, at least to the best of your abilities. That may have been the only thing that stuck from four years of trying really hard to run fast enough to make the travel squad. This idea that you worked at something you really loved for the sake of that pursuit. That doing so was a valuable exercise onto itself – especially for those of us that knew we cost our university a lot of money, not the other way around. And it’s not that paying athletes will ruin that pursuit – it’s that those sports may simply go away, at least in the scale they are today.
But at least for now, Dartmouth Basketball has gotten a big win in the court. Certainly bigger than any they’ve gotten on one.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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