2013 was not a good year for Marc Emmert and the NCAA Commissioner’s office and 2014 is not shaping up to be any better for the embattled leaders of college athletics. This may well mark the end of an era.
Already taking heat over its handling or mishandling… of the mess down at the University of Miami, the NCAA was the recipient of more bad news last week when athletes at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois announced that they were filing with the National Labor Relations Board a motion to unionize the student athletes at Northwestern.
The movement is being led by Wildcat quarterback Kan Colter but has the weighty backing of the United Steelworkers Union which scares some people and gives hope to others. This could be the beginning of something really big.
As on prominent administrator of a top level university, “It would be the end of college athletics.” Well, perhaps that is a bit of an overstatement, but change is surely in the wind in the NCAA. The organization lost a lot of ground in the public eye when they made the startling announcement that the NCAA was ‘not responsible for the safety of student athletes’ even though the original purpose of the organization was supposed to be just that.
Of course this was just a form legal maneuvering called ‘covering your butt’ by the NCAA in anticipation of the deluge of lawsuits they see coming their way in the near future. Emmert’s office was already on shaky enough ground before any of this came up and new calls for him to step down are sure to follow.
At the NCAA Convention earlier this year, Georgia Bulldog receiver Chris Conley of the NCAA’s own Student Athlete Advisory Committee asked the 800 folks in attendance ‘why does the restructured governance model they were showing up on the large screen for the NCAA did not include a spot for the student athlete.’
The most obvious problem as many see it is that there is just too much money in the system today. College athletics that is, and way too little attention paid to the ‘unpaid’ labor pool, the people actually down on the field playing for the school.
The situation has gotten to the point that if the NCAA is not able to take better control of the current situation and demonstrate that it is still capable of leadership in the future, then the membership, the courts or the union is going to step in and change it for them.
