What I like (and dislike) about the first draft of a college football CBA

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

We’re in the middle of #PORTALSZN here in college football, which means we’re likely to see more headlines from coaches, athletic directors and others in the industry about chaos. The calendar doesn’t make any sense. Athlete labor costs are skyrocketing, and recent attempts to get anything passed in Congress have failed.

That means you’re also likely to see more folks start talking about collective bargaining with college athletes as a potential solution. Like in this story from ESPN last month:

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Players and coaches are frustrated with the current system, wanting to negotiate salaries and build rosters with a clear idea of what rules will actually be enforced. [Boise State athletic director Jeramiah] Dickey says fans are frustrated as they invest energy and money into their favorite teams without understanding what the future holds. And athletic directors, who want to plan a yearly budget and help direct their employees, are frustrated too.

"It has been very difficult on campus. I can't emphasize that enough," [Tennessee athletic director Danny] White said. "It's been brutal in a lot of ways. It continues to be as we try to navigate these waters without a clear-cut solution."

The potential benefits of a CBA are clear: it would come with built-in antitrust protection, the very thing that Power 4 and NCAA leaders want from Congress. But it’s also complicated and expensive, seeing as there’s nobody for schools to negotiate with (yet) and the law doesn’t grant full antitrust exemptions to CBAs without employee status, among many other potential roadblocks.

We can talk about those until we’re blue in the face. But in December, somebody did the hard and difficult work of at least coming up with a first draft.

Athletes.org released its own potential college athlete CBA, one that explains what sorts of things could fall under the purview of a CBA, how to structure a it and comply with current law and what the end results of such an agreement could look like.

Is it a final draft? Of course not. But I’m glad an organization did the difficult work of completing the first and most challenging part of a brainstorm: getting something on paper.

I wanted to dig into this more before the holiday break, now might actually be a better time. I’d encourage all of you to give the draft a read, but here were a few things I liked (and a few I didn’t like so much) from the first effort:

What I really like

It’s very specific about what sorts of questions a CBA can address

A lot of the conversation around college sports CBAs have centered on restrictions of athlete compensation and movement — I.e., salary caps, transfer windows/limitations, etc. Those are certainly examples of issues that would probably fall under the purview of a CBA. But they aren’t anywhere close to the only issues athletes would want to negotiate over and that would probably fall under the jurisdiction of a CBA. This is a useful graphic:

As the document states a few times, it is a first draft, not a final product. But laying this out would be useful not just for an athlete who isn’t sure about whether they want to be involved with a players organization, but also for reporters and fans who want to engage with labor issues more fully.

Just about everything on this list is dictated to players, rather than meaningfully crafted with them … from gambling policies to biometric data ownership to anything resembling a standardized grievance process. Some of this stuff might be spelled out in an athlete rev-share agreement or an NIL contract, and others are the products of NCAA and conference staff meetings.

When any of us talk about CBAs, I think it’s important to think holistically about what that entails. This graphic (and first draft) do a great job of that, IMO.

There are a few concrete policy proposals worth discussing