Athletes are now getting paid, what does this mean for THIS sport?

Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board's Regional Director declared Dartmouth men's basketball players to be employees. Nathan Kalman Lamb, who was a visiting professor at Duke when I met him, is now with the University of New Brunswick. He also does the End of Sport Podcast with his friends and he joins us for a couple of minutes on the Adam Gold Show. Thanks for the time and I know you have a book coming out very soon that you and I are going to discuss, but what did yesterday's news say to you? Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Adam. It's wonderful news for me as someone who has been advocating for a long time for the rights and protections of college athletes. I don't want people to think this is a surprise. In 2021, the general counsel of the NLRB, Jennifer Abruzzo, issued a memo in September of that year, essentially inviting college athletes to do exactly what these Dartmouth players did, inviting them to unionize. She then came on our podcast, The End of Sport, in November of that year.

If people want to listen to that, it's amazing. It'll explain everything people need to know about what happened yesterday because Abruzzo was saying, listen, college athletes, whether or not they even receive anything that might be construed as compensation. And of course, people will say Dartmouth, Ivy League, not even getting scholarships, right? These are the least compensated, supposedly college athletes.

What are they doing? Unionizing. But Abruzzo told us, it doesn't matter if you are performing a service for the institution and you receive any kind of anything that could be construed in any possible way of compensation, even in terms of gear, food, anything, that means that you're an employee of the institution. And so I'm not at all surprised about this news. And I actually think, because people are saying, listen, Northwestern tried to unionize, we've seen this before, right? We shouldn't take this seriously until we actually see what happens through appeal. Well, let me say, because Abruzzo has asked for this, because the Supreme Court has previously spoken soundingly about their concerns with exploitation in college sports, we have every reason to believe this is going to be upheld all the way up the chain.

I think this means if players are serious, we are going to see unions in college sports. Oh, I agree. To me, this is the game. It's not the game-ender.

The End of Sport podcast, actually, I retweeted, you had tweeted out the episode, so I retweeted the Jennifer Abruzzo episode. It's not about ending sports. It's about really ending the exploitation of college athletes.

And I thought you would be interested in this. Doug Gottlieb, of course, last night, everybody's favorite troll when it comes to compensating athletes, either with NIL or otherwise. Gottlieb tweeted out, if Dartmouth basketball players are employees, they should be fired. Their record is 5-14. They're last in the Ivy League.

They're one of the worst teams in men's college basketball at the Division I level. Somebody has to be. So, yes, he tweeted, they should be fired.

First of all, of course, you get a chuckle for a second, and then you realize just he's trolling. But wouldn't it be the head coach? Like, he's the one who chose those players. Wouldn't he be the guy to be fired? But what is your response to something as silly as that?

Yeah, I mean, here's the thing that people miss. This is a classic method, an instrument of union-busting anti-labor activism to tell workers who are trying to organize to improve their working conditions. Well, actually, you're safe right now. You have a benevolent employer. The real risk to you comes if you try to unionize, because then, then we have antagonism in the workplace. And it's a lie, not because the employer is antagonistic to labor. They are, and they will try to bust your union, and they will try to fire you.

But the lie is that they were ever on your side. The truth about college sports as it has currently existed is that players are constantly subject to coercion. Doug Dolly says, now players can be fired? No, players could always be fired.

Let's be crystal clear about that. There were no protections for college athletes, and if they ever ran afoul of coaches, they risked, A, obviously, a lack of playing time, which is right, a catastrophic for a college athlete, especially someone at the higher levels who's trying to make it to professional sports. But also the coaches have an awful lot of protection. They're not going to be able to play, the coaches have a million different tactics to take away a scholarship if they want to, to remove a player from the team. There's really no impediment whatsoever. So in the status quo, players are completely unprotected and subject to coercion. The whole point of a union is that it provides the prospect of actual meaningful labor protection. And that's why I absolutely applaud these Dartmouth players.

Nathan Tomlin- Lamb is a joke. Well, of course. And a well-paid one, by the way, and a former college athlete, which gives him credibility in the space, even if he's coming at this from an extreme, I'm not going to say right or left, but an extreme anti-player point of view, because that's what he's doing.

Basically, I had to deal with this, therefore you have to deal with this in perpetuity. You can make arguments about what college sports does provide the athlete. I'm not even going to call them student athletes. It's sort of ingrained in everybody at this point. But you can make the argument that college sports provides a lot for student athletes, for athletes, even those at Dartmouth, because for some of them, they wouldn't have gotten into Dartmouth otherwise.

That was part of the decision from the NLRB that its academic exceptions are made for athletes, whereas they might not have been made for a musician or an artist or somebody or something like that. So there is there is something given the other way. But it's it's really all about control. And you you specifically talk about health care. Yeah, health care is a huge factor.

And I would be I mean, remember, we're talking about basketball players here and not again slightly kind of Mr. X. But, you know, football is at the core of the financial side of the college sports system. We all know this. We all know the system is radically changing overnight because of football dollars.

And we know that football players are the ones who are human sacrifices. Right. When it comes to the health and well-being of these students who are producing all the value in the system, value for the corporations that employ Doug Gottlieb. Right. Yeah.

And and so we have now seen, given our understanding of the harm of a sport like football and also the harm caused by any sport, basketball, long term harm. Right. That in the U.S. health care system, which doesn't exist, it's a private system, as everyone who's listening to knows all too well, sadly.

Right. These athletes, whatever harm they suffer in college, they are on the hook for that for the rest of their lives. And, you know, Americans know how expensive those costs are.

Those are life changing. All the claims that the universities will make about how much of value the players get. Honestly, it's all being sucked up by health costs alone. You're really paying to participate in college sports just because of the health fees you're accruing.

They don't even realize you're going to have in the future. But collective bargaining would allow players to push, let's say, lifetime health insurance. Right.

Yes. Schools should be on the hook for those costs for life. That's a bare minimum. But you know what? If you leave it to the schools, they're never going to put the bill. That's why we need unions. The NFL, which makes us what it's like a 16 or more than that, like almost a 20 billion dollar industry. They have tried to get out, get out of it, like with the 10 cents on the dollar in paying the former players, their former players who helped them earn all of these billions. Before we let Nathan Kalman Lamb go from the University of New Brunswick at NKA Lamb on Twitter, because we don't have a lot of time.

I'll just give you a couple of seconds. Is there anything else that jumped out to you that might be a positive outcome of this other than the potential unionizing? Yeah, well, I mean, I think one thing we just want to think about with this is actually a fascinating question that none of us are really considering. We probably consider what Dartmouth men's basketball union. Actually, what the players themselves specifically said last night is their ambition is an Ivy League wide union. Yeah. Right. Which is to say that they'd all be members of a union negotiating against all of their universities as joint employers and the conference, potentially the NCAA.

So that's a fascinating winkle to watch because what Jennifer Abruzzo told us is basically she does not conceive of any one specific pathway. Her position was, look, you form whatever bargaining unit you want. You folks do deserve employment rights. Like she looked at the case and said, you look like employees to me, but you determine if you want to be a team based union, if you want to be a conference based union, if you want to be broader than that. Right.

So I think that that's a really interesting question because the way in which players choose to unionize is going to have a huge impact moving forward on what college sports look like. Nathan, I appreciate your time. We'll talk again. When does your book come out? By the way, books supposed to come out in hopefully September 24 with UNC press. It's called the end of college football. Co-authored with Derek Silva. The subtitle is the human call on the human cost of an all American game. Thank you so much. I'll talk to you, but I'll talk to you before then, but I appreciate your time. Thank you, Adam. You got it. Nathan Kalman Lamb, University of New Brunswick. But again, he spent a few years as a visiting professor at Duke.