Joe’s Notes: Dartmouth Basketball, a Union, and Employment in College Sports

Yesterday, a National Labor Relations Board official deemed Dartmouth men’s basketball players “employees” of the school. I don’t think anyone knows what this will mean.

First, the Dartmouth basketball specifics: This was a decision made by a regional board. Dartmouth can appeal it to the national board. In 2014, it was the national board which ruled Northwestern football players couldn’t unionize. This specific case is not over, and all it is deciding is whether the players can hold a vote on whether or not to form a union.

Second, the national implications:

I don’t know the extent to which the NLRB dictates who is or isn’t an employee. My impression/guess is that it, like most of our federal bureaucracies, holds the delegated power to make policy decisions like these, but that Congress can overrule it, that the courts remain in charge of interpreting laws, and that individual states will have their say. In a sense, if my impression/guess is correct, this NLRB official set a little sign on the metaphorical table saying, “Dartmouth men’s basketball players are employees.” Maybe others will now set more signs upon the table, broadening the claim. Maybe someone else will come along and remove the original sign.

Regardless of how it happens, a decision needs to be made on the employment status of college athletes. To some extent, this decision can be made by the schools. The Big Ten and SEC are already reportedly working towards settling various employment-adjacent lawsuits and figuring out revenue sharing in big-money sports. If the schools—through their conferences and the NCAA, all of which are simply governing bodies created by and for the school administrations—create a solution that works well enough, it won’t be legally challenged, and we’ll go on our merry way with football players receiving a cut of revenue or basketball players allowed to be paid ten grand apiece on top of their scholarships and stipends.

The problem—and the thing Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team illustrates so well—is that while many college football players are generating economic value for colleges, and a lot of college basketball players are too, not all college athletes are worth any money to their schools. Dartmouth doesn’t award athletic scholarships, and basketball is a net drain on the school’s budget within its own silo. Any profitable value basketball generates for Dartmouth comes through nebulous, indirect paths, like marketing the school to donors (example: keeping a few specific basketball boosters engaged) and marketing the school to prospective students (example: looking good in an admissions brochure). Nonetheless, at least some legal experts believe Dartmouth men’s basketball players are employees. They answer to their coaches in the same way employees do. They receive benefits in exchange for their work, like employees do.

Must an employee make their employer money? I’d guess you and I both know a few who haven’t, yet were certainly employees anyway. At least I, though, am uneasy about how wide-ranging the definition of employee might be, and on what happens if various groups of college students (thankfully not a notoriously idealistic group with time on their hands, or anything like that!) try to form a bunch of unions. A question some legal experts have asked (including Gabe Feldman in the initial AP report on the ruling) is whether this NLRB official’s interpretation of employment would also apply to music students.

The NCAA propaganda wasn’t lying when it said most college athletes go pro in something other than sports. It was, however, sugarcoating an uncomfortable truth. There are a lot of college athletes who generate money for their universities, sometimes millions and millions of dollars. There are many more—vastly more—who do not, who are playing their sport in the same way other students join a choir or play in a marching band. That’s a tough circle to square.

What’s going to happen? Practically, my interpretation/guess is that we’ll proceed forward with lawsuits and unionization efforts until enough uneasy truces are formed that no one is upset enough to sue. Scenarios exist where certain athletes will unionize and see their sport cut in response, as the school doesn’t find it financially prudent to give them the treatment their union demands. Scenarios exist where certain athletes will unionize and win some big victories for themselves, sometimes in that they’ll capture economic value they’re creating and other times by seizing an opportunity in which public relations and employment law have their school cornered. Ultimately, I think we all want college sports to continue to exist—both big-money sports and money-losing sports—and the industry will, with some sort of input from various bureaucracies and governments, keep them around. The question is how that happens, and in what form it leaves college sports, and what collateral damage and benefit comes alongside it.

There is not an easy solution to college athletes and employment. A recreational activity became hugely economically valuable, and we haven’t yet built the societal system in which that can work fairly enough to satisfy all parties. That doesn’t mean we won’t, though.

More to come, I’m sure.

Is Tony Bennett a Good Coach?

On the actual court:

Big win for Tony Bennett last night!

Or was it?

Last night, Virginia beat Miami in an ACC basketball game, holding the visiting Hurricanes to 38 points. It was Virginia’s seventh straight win, enough to keep them alone in second place in the ACC and likely shove them back on the NCAA Tournament side of the bubble, at least for now. Of those seven wins, though, only one—Saturday’s at Clemson, by one point—came against a team that’s also likelier than not to make the NCAA Tournament. Virginia would be a firm kenpom underdog right now against Villanova, Xavier, and by a wide margin Gonzaga, among other bubble teams. This, after finishing ranked 34^th in kenpom in 2023. This, after elimination in the NIT quarterfinals in 2022.

There is no question about how good a coach Tony Bennett will have been when he retires. The man turned in some of the best seasons in Washington State history in his short time in Pullman, and he turned Virginia into a national power for six whole years. Those teams were not a flash in the pan. Still, his recent results probably owe more to the woefulness of the current ACC than to his own adaptation to the NIL era. Tony Bennett was a great college basketball coach in the 2000s and 2010s. I’m not sure he still is, even as he pulls off this intense turnaround. We need to see more.

The Rest

Other college basketball, including Iowa State:

• Kansas State needed that win over Kansas in a bad way, but it might reflect more on the Jayhawks than the Wildcats. Is it understandable that a team might come out flat two days after an emotionally charged victory against a national title contender? Yeah, but not if that team’s a national title contender themselves. Kansas was on the road against its biggest rival. That’s not a letdown game. If it is, good luck to the Jayhawks in the second round, the Elite Eight, and theoretically the national championship, all of which would also be letdown games under this definition.
• With the Kansas loss, there’s no longer a question of whether Iowa State would have preferred Houston or KU to win Saturday’s game in Lawrence. Heading into tonight in Austin, the Cyclones are tied in the loss column with Houston, Baylor, and Texas Tech atop the Big 12. Iowa State should be an underdog, but it’s noteworthy that Texas has struggled so much this season at home.
• In other big ones, Texas Tech and Baylor play one another, Clemson’s at UNC looking to breathe some life back into their sails, BYU visits Oklahoma in a high-quality matchup in the middle of the conference standings, and the Mountain West gives us two tournament-quality matchups. Mississippi’s at South Carolina. Butler’s playing in Hartford. Michigan State has a dangerous game at Minnesota. Dayton has to deal with Saint Joe’s. It’s a packed night of college hoops, even with the week’s bigger action coming later on.

Chicago, the Packers:

• There’s a fresh wave of content noting that the Cubs don’t stack up well in statistical projections of the 2024 season, and that should come as no surprise. They outperformed projections last year and are still expected to sign one of last year’s core pieces, one who does not appear in those projections so far. What should also not be a surprise is that even if Cody Bellinger does sign with the Cubs, the projections are going to be bad. He’s a player who played like an MVP for a few months last year. He’s not an MVP-caliber player on paper. The Cubs don’t have one of those. They’re relying on outperforming the projections again this season, or on the Cardinals falling short while the Brewers and Reds both don’t perform. That’s going to be true of them whether they sign Bellinger or not, though he’d certainly help close what’s currently a three-game implied gap in FanGraphs’s Depth Charts. (Related: Are there any MVP incentives in MLB contracts? If so, what did Shohei Ohtani changing leagues do to their value?)
• The Bulls play the Timberwolves tonight, and I’m seeing the T-Wolves listed sixth in NBA Finals futures odds despite being tied for the lead of the Western Conference. They’re only half a game up on the fourth-place Nuggets, so that’s some of it, but there’s also probably some regression in store for one of many surging young teams. Oh, to be a surging young team with regression in store.
• The Packers hired Anthony Campanile from the Dolphins to be their new linebackers coach. Campanile had been on the radar for some defensive coordinator jobs, including the Giants’ gig, for which he interviewed. Connecting dots, then, it would seem like another good hire for the Pack. Are they winning the offseason? That should be a good thing. Why does it make me feel dread?