Michael Lev: Turning NCAA student-athletes into employees is a bad idea; adulthood can wait

TEMPE — In the middle of a fairly serious discussion about the future of college athletics, Desireé Reed-Francois dropped a “Friends” reference.

“What is this FICA that they’re seeking?” the UA athletic director quipped during a special Arizona Board of Regents meeting Thursday.

Reed-Francois was talking about the importance of financial literacy — educating student-athletes on how to handle the money they’re going to receive via revenue-sharing, likely starting in the fall of 2025.

The reference was to the “Friends” episode in which Rachel receives her first paycheck from Central Perk. She’s extremely excited about it — until she opens the envelope.

“Who’s FICA?” she wonders. “Why’s he getting all my money?”

It’s a well-constructed scene in which the other characters look at Rachel’s check and assure her that she’s doing just fine. Then comes the punch line: They pull out their wallets to give her tips.

Student-athletes ranging in age from 17 to their mid-20s are about to experience something like this. Will their income from revenue-sharing be taxed by the federal government? Probably. Welcome to the real world.

Rachel has an actual job. She works as a waitress for Central Perk. It is her employer at that point in the show.

The people who run college athletics don’t seem ready or willing to go that far. There’s no appetite to make student-athletes employees — even though doing so could benefit their “bosses.”

That topic came up earlier as the ABOR Strategic Initiatives and Planning Committee heard Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and others discuss “the dynamics surrounding the professionalization of college athletes.” ABOR chair Cecilia Mata wondered whether student-athletes would be considered employees in this new world — a logical question given the theme of the presentation.

“I don’t have a crystal ball on that,” Yormark said. “But I will say a couple of things. There’s never been a better time than right now to be a student-athlete. ... And I’m a firm believer that with enhanced benefits, you can treat them like employees but they don’t need to be classified as employees.”

Wow. Talk about threading a needle.

Although Yormark’s view undoubtedly reflects collegiate leadership as a whole, I’m not sure he should have said the quiet part out loud. Lawyers, as always, are standing by.

Anyway ... Yormark continued:

“Because classifying them as employees comes with a lot of nuances that I’m not sure they are even aware of. And at least when I go on campus and I meet with our student-athletes — because I love to engage with our student-athletes — I’ve never heard from a single student-athlete that they want to be an employee.”

If you don’t have to, there’s no reason to rush into employment — i.e., adulthood. Put it off as long as you can, kids. Enjoy the time before car payments and credit-card bills while you still can.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Don’t get me wrong: I love my job. I’m one of the lucky ones in that regard, and I’ll never take it for granted.

That doesn’t mean I don’t look back wistfully on those relatively carefree college days. Don’t we all?

That time is finite (although with the COVID year and subsequent rulings about eligibility I’m not sure that’s the case anymore). Non-athletic professional careers can last half a century.

When it comes to student-athletes, employment also might fall under the category of “be careful what you wish for.”

As it stands now, student-athletes have a great deal. Many receive full scholarships and will never have to pay back student loans. Any can benefit from their name, image and likeness. With transfer restrictions almost entirely eliminated, they have access to unfettered free agency.

Regent Gregg Brewster expressed concern about the latter, in particular its potential impact on academics. Yormark said revenue-sharing and NIL license agreements — i.e., bringing them in-house — could make transferring “more sticky” and could “help discourage the type of movement” that goes on today in the portal.

“I can get on both sides of it,” Yormark said. “But when it starts to compromise the academic progress of our student-athletes, I do think we need to take a look at it and see if there’s a way to better manage it.”

One way would be a collective-bargaining agreement. Every notable professional sports league has one. Like FICA, it comes with the job when it actually becomes a job.

The initial impression here is that such an arrangement would benefit management, as is often the case.

With collective bargaining comes the possibility of reining in the freedom of movement that student-athletes currently enjoy. What if letters of intent were instead binding, multiyear employment contracts? What if signing an NIL deal bound you to the school you were attending at the time? What if, at any point, you could get fired?

You know who’d love a CBA? Coaches. The transfer portal and NIL haven’t hurt the product as much as many would have you believe, if at all. But it’s made coaches’ lives much more stressful. They’re constantly having to re-recruit their own players lest they be poached by deeper-pocketed rivals.

Would fans be happy about such a development? For the most part, yes. It can be extremely frustrating to invest in a player — emotionally, not financially — from the time they were a recruit only to have them transfer a year or two after enrolling. The term is “Wildcat for Life,” not “Wildcat for Three Semesters.”

Unless you believe that repeated transferring is bad for student-athletes — Brewster made that argument; I could too — a CBA wouldn’t necessarily benefit them. More likely than not, it would impose restrictions on movement and money-making opportunities that the plaintiffs in these court cases have fought so hard to lift.

The way this appears to be heading, student-athletes will retain the ability to transfer as often as they want while getting a chunk of athletic-department revenue on top of scholarships and whatever they can earn in the NIL space.

You can’t make that in tips, no matter how expertly you prepare a cappuccino.

Big 12 commissioner to Arizona regents on future of college athletics: Industry ‘reset’ is coming

Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, UA athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois and ASU AD Graham Rossini discuss the seismic changes coming to college sports in a meeting with the Arizona Board of Regents.

Big 12 commish Brett Yormark asks Arizona regents to keep investing in U of A, ASU sports

Pac-12 Hotline: The last sentence of the final slide of Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark's presentation Thursday in Tempe to the Arizona Board of Regents resonated loudly in imploring the regents, and U of A and ASU, to continue to invest in college athletics.