Tuberville Says Dartmouth Union Will Kill NCAA ‘Golden Goose’
Former college football coach—and current U.S. senator—Tommy Tuberville railed Wednesday against the Dartmouth men’s basketball team’s historic vote to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act.
In an appearance on Fox News’s “America Reports,” the Republican senator, who last year proposed bipartisan college sports legislation with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W. Va.), said unionizing college athletes are now “going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”
More from Sportico.com
Tuberville told host John Roberts that he and Manchin had specifically kept any reference to unionization—or athlete employee status—out of their legislation, at the behest of Democrats in Congress.
“That’s the reason we haven’t gotten (the bill) to the floor,” Tuberville said. “But this will absolutely kill college sports. You know, the last time I looked, they’re not employees. These students are student-athletes. And if you want the federal government involved and ruin something, you try to make the student-athletes employees.”
Another member of Tuberville’s GOP conference, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), has proposed a bill that would prevent college athletes from being classified as employees while giving the NCAA its long-desired antitrust exemption.
On Wednesday, Tuberville recalled being a member of a union when he was a high school football in the late 1970s, concluding, “Unions have ruined our education system across the country.”
Since the pandemic, organized labor has enjoyed some of its highest public support in the last six decades. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans approved of labor unions, the highest percentage since 1965. A Sportico/Harris poll conducted last summer found that strong majorities of American supported college athletes’ rights to obtain employee status (64%) and collectively bargain (59%).
Tuberville’s comments highlight the increasingly partisan turn the political debate has taken over college sports reform, now that the most pressing issue has moved beyond whether athletes should have NIL rights to whether they should be recognized as employees.
“Coaches right now have a little bit of control of the football team or the basketball team or gymnastics,” said Tuberville, who was a head football coach at Mississippi, Auburn, Texas Tech and Cincinnati. “Problem is, [if] unions get involved, they will go on strike right before a championship game. They will hold hostage the people that are paying the bills.”
Tuberville argued that while NCAA Division I sports generates billions of dollars of revenue each year, much of that money is reinvested “back into the business.”
Best of Sportico.com
