Cade Haskins averaged just 0.9 points a game this season for one of the worst teams in all of Division I college basketball. And yet he may turn out to be responsible for triggering one of the biggest changes in the sport’s history.
Last month, in a small HR office above the only sports bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, Haskins and his teammates on the Dartmouth College basketball squad voted to form the first-ever NCAA players’ union. Their goal: to collectively bargain with the school for wages in exchange for playing basketball. Dartmouth had six wins and 21 losses this year, good enough for dead last in the Ivy League—itself not nationally competitive—and 334th out of 362 Division I basketball teams. No player on the current roster was alive the last time Dartmouth had a winning season; and the program hasn’t qualified for the March Madness tournament since 1959. The vote nonetheless drew reporters from national publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, because of its potential to disrupt NCAA athletics.
College sports generate billions of dollars in annual revenue, but the players putting on the show currently get nothing from that pot of money—even after a recent change allowing athletes to monetize their name, image, and likeness. They rely instead on advertisers, rich donors, and the pooled funds of loyal fans, who are themselves growing fatigued with propping it all up. The Dartmouth players’ union threatens to change that structure, opening the door for universities to pay college athletes directly. Some athletes could be in line for a huge windfall; the top college-athletic departments generate more in sports revenue than some NHL teams. If Duke men’s basketball players, for example, got the 50 percent share of revenue common in professional sports, they’d be in line for $1.5 million each, per year.
If schools are going to compensate players directly, the NCAA would like to control how. The Dartmouth basketball players have put that future in doubt, replacing it with one where revenue-generating athletes sit across the table from schools, negotiating their cut just like professionals.
Historically, even the greatest college athletes made no money at all. They might receive cash or gifts under the table, but in doing so they ran the risk of harsh punishment, no matter the size of the gift. In 2010, much of the Ohio State football team was suspended for nearly half a season for selling memorabilia in exchange for small amounts of cash (about $1,000) and discounted tattoos. That same season, the program generated roughly $52 million, of which the players got $0.
The situation has changed radically, however, over the past five years. In 2019, California fired the first big shot, passing the Fair Pay to Play Act, allowing players to earn money from the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL), as they would in endorsement deals. The law was set to take effect in 2023, but it never needed to, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in NCAA v Alston. In that case, the Court unanimously ruled that the NCAA was violating antitrust law through strict rules governing the circumstances in which players could be compensated (scholarships, but not internships; books, but not computers). According to the decision, by agreeing to not offer various benefits, universities were effectively conspiring to suppress the compensation of college athletes, rather than competing to attract those athletes. (The ruling described the arrangement as “horizontal price fixing in a market where the defendants exercise monopoly control.”) Nine days after the ruling came out, the NCAA announced that it would allow players to make NIL deals regardless of whether they lived in a state that had passed a version of California’s law.
Since then, NIL has become a billion-dollar industry, with some players receiving big payouts in exchange for Nike shoe deals, Pringles ads on Instagram, and Google commercials on TV. These endorsements make up only a small fraction of NIL spending, most of which is done by “collectives” of alumni and fans who pool their money to recruit and retain top athletes, nominally as compensation for using the players’ name, image, and likeness at, for example, a charity fundraiser. A collective formed by University of Texas football fans in 2021, for example, announced it would pay offensive linemen at Texas $50,000 a year in an initiative it called “The Pancake Factory,” named for when an offensive lineman blocks a defender so hard that they’re flattened like a pancake.
Dartmouth players don’t get lucrative NIL deals. Like all Ivy League athletes, they don’t even get scholarships for being athletes. (They can, however, get need-based financial aid like any other Dartmouth student.) According to the college, the basketball team loses money for the school. And the players are aware that they aren’t part of an economic juggernaut. They aren’t demanding a piece of some billion-dollar pie that doesn’t exist. As they told me and other journalists, they mostly just want the $16.25-an-hour minimum wage paid to all student employees, including their own student managers. Basketball, they argue, is their campus job.
According to Laura Sacks, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board who oversees much of New England, the basketball players are employees. As she put it in her ruling allowing the unionization vote to proceed, the players perform “work in exchange for compensation,” rendering them employees by definition—even if the team, like any number of businesses, loses money overall. “The profitability of any given business does not affect the employee status of the individuals who perform work for that business,” Sacks wrote.
The work is lifting weights, playing basketball, occasionally skipping class, traveling many weekends, schmoozing with alumni who might donate, and even avoiding taking classes in common periods that might conflict with practice. The compensation is expensive shoes, branded parkas, access to an athletes-only gym, regular free meals, a laundry service for their jerseys. Then there’s the greatest prize of all: access to what Sacks described as “highly coveted admission spots” for recruited players, which, for less academically qualified athletes, translates to a dramatically better chance of getting accepted into an Ivy League school in the first place. (I graduated from Dartmouth last year, but didn’t personally know any of the basketball players—perhaps because they were always doing basketball things.)
Dartmouth disagrees with the characterization of the players as employees, and its legal team, which includes the former chair of the NLRB under Donald Trump, is appealing Sacks’s decision. According to Dartmouth, athletes are just like any other student. If the basketball players are employers, the school argues, then “it would be impossible to distinguish these student-athlete-‘employees’ from other students at Dartmouth or any other university or college (or even those in high school) that are engaged in extracurricular activities that require their time, talents, skills, and efforts, and for which they receive no monetary compensation but do receive university or activity branded apparel.”
Now is probably not a great time for Dartmouth to be arguing that players aren’t workers. A small group of legal scholars have insisted for decades that the NCAA is an illegal cartel in which universities get together in private and set the terms upon which they recruit, retain, and compensate talent, without the talent present at the table. The Alston ruling, by holding that the NCAA wasn’t immune from antitrust law, opened the door to a flood of lawsuits testing that theory. In February, a federal judge in Tennessee issued a preliminary injunction against the NCAA enforcing any rules surrounding NIL, which led the NCAA to announce that it would stop doing so. Meanwhile, a coalition of seven states is suing the NCAA over its rule requiring athletes who switch schools multiple times to sit out for a season before playing for their new team. The judge in that case has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the transfer policy from being enforced.
The NCAA has signaled its openness to direct compensation of players, clinging to its right to make the rules even as that power gets stripped by the courts. The NCAA president, former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, recently proposed a new subdivision of Division I schools that would pay at least $30,000 a year per eligible athlete into an “educational trust fund.” Schools would still have to vote on such a proposal, and it could take years to implement. But the NLRB ruling recognizing the Dartmouth union, if it holds up on appeal (along with a related NLRB complaint against USC), is poised to render these sorts of schemes moot. If players are employees, they must be paid—not through trust funds or NIL collectives, but rather actual wages or salaries from their employer, the university. As the sports-antitrust-law professor Marc Edelman, who has studied this issue for years, told me, if the players are “deemed to be employees, Dartmouth has to give [at least] the minimum wage. That’s not even something that would be bargained for.”
The days of the NCAA unilaterally decreeing the terms of athletes’ compensation appear to be numbered. So what comes next? The sports- and entertainment-law professor Michael McCann has observed that any school could just go ahead and start paying players now, giving itself a competitive advantage and daring the NCAA to try and stop it, knowing that the courts would likely rule on the school’s side if push came to shove.
Alternatively, athletic conferences could bargain with players. This is what union leaders at Dartmouth envision. In February, Cade Haskins and his teammate Romeo Myrthil announced that they would form an Ivy League Players Association to advocate for the interests of all Ivy League athletes. Haskins told me that players in the top basketball conferences have reached out to him to see how the unionization effort has gone, perhaps a sign that players in bigger, better programs would be interested in this outcome as well.
Or perhaps college sports will end up looking a lot more like the professional-sports landscape. In the major pro leagues, a players’ union negotiates with owners on compensation rules such as a minimum salary and the share of overall revenue set aside for the players. This might be the most attractive option for college sports, because it doesn’t put at risk the type of inter-conference tournaments that fans crave, like March Madness.
The difference between college and the pros is that, unlike in big-time professional leagues, most college-athletic programs report spending more money than they bring in. If they suddenly have to start sharing revenue with the athletes, that might force some tough choices. Money-losing programs might have to accept going deeper in the red; profitable ones might see their margins shrink. Or they could come up with the money by cutting other costs, such as coaches’ salaries. But some schools will probably eliminate certain sports programs entirely—or replace them with versions that look more like optional extracurriculars and less like student jobs.
At Dartmouth, for example, if the basketball players are employees, so too are the squash players, rowers, and field-hockey players. With its $8 billion endowment, Dartmouth can probably afford to pay them all minimum wages. But it might prefer to get out of the niche-sports business altogether. If the unionization of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team led to a future in which star college athletes are fairly compensated but, in return, already privileged applicants no longer receive easy admissions or scholarships in exchange for playing an obscure sport few people care to watch, that might not be such a bad outcome. (Revenue-sharing could be even more costly for colleges if the courts interpret Title IX as requiring strictly equal payment for men and women. Dartmouth argues that paying the men’s team “could raise compliance questions under Title IX.” The union disagrees, pointing out that Title IX does not require equal pay for athletic-department employees, such as coaches; according to the union, of course, players are employees too.)
Haskins and his teammates did not set out to change college sports. According to Haskins, he and his teammates in the junior class came up with the idea of unionizing after seeing the student-dining employees unionize, and the resulting rise in wages not just among the dining workers but among all student workers on campus.
The players are hoping the unionization effort follows a similar pattern: benefiting first them, then the rest of the Ivy League, then all college players. “It’s definitely not about bringing down the whole NCAA,” Haskins told me. “It’s more about change for the next generation of athletes.”
