While I certainly think the term "union" is misplaced here as is the term "employee", I see nothing wrong with CFB players banding together to try to gain a little of the megamillion dollars that big-time NCAA schools and the NCAA itself rake in basically on their backs and sweat.
Is it fair to lose your scholarship when a new coach comes to town and your skill set doesn't fit his philosophy? Yet you try and transfer and they want you to sit out a year.
Should you lose your scholly due to an injury which occurred in the performance of your obligation for that scholarship?
Should your likeness be used to profit the NCAA and its institutions without compensation, even after you no longer attend the university?
Is it fair that because you are on scholarship, the NCAA prohibits you from working a part-time job? If you want to go work a summer job you can't because the coach wants you to stay all summer and "work out" and bond with your teammates?
The NCAA brags on the "student-athlete" and indeed, a full scholarship is a handsome reward for obtaining an education. But part of being the "student" part of "student-athlete" is more than books, registration, room and board and a meal ticket each semester. There is the social interaction with the regular student body, participation in non-athletic activities. Those things cost money too, money a poor country boy from Louisiana or the streets of LA doesn't have.
Yet the college is building yet another bigger, badder weight room, adding a bigger, flashier Jumbotron, paying the head coach an extra $2 mil so he won't threaten to break his contract and jump to the NFL.
Sorry but this lamenting of the end of college sports as we know it is misplaced. The NCAA and its institutions created the monster they now have before them by being stubborn, pigheaded, greedy bastards.
Screw 'em.
