In Reply to: Best news so far today: Shirt stays on, Calipari says * posted by mh on April 14, 2024 at 10:44:00
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.