Would the Big Ten share revenue with its football players? Penn State could be the first test case

INDIANAPOLIS -- Penn State has become ground zero as another hot-button topic takes center stage in college football, that of players organizing and looking for revenue sharing in the Big Ten and the other biggest-money college leagues.

The head of a group called the College Football Players Association said he met this month with as many as 100 Penn State players, looking to have them be the centerpiece of a group trying to further shake up the structure of the Power 5 college sports leagues.

CFBPA founder Jason Stahl said discussions this month with Penn State players began through a connection made with Nittany Lions quarterback Sean Clifford, but Stahl said Clifford has since “flipped” after Penn State and Big Ten officials became aware of CFBPA discussions with the players.

Clifford himself characterizes these events as a continuing educational process. Tweeting out a statement this past weekend, Clifford wrote, ”In the last 90 days, the CFBPA presented interesting ideas to me and my teammates with the goal of joining their college football players’ association. However, at this time, I along with many players are committed to working at the campus and conference level to address the complexities of collegiate athletics for student-athletes.”

Stahl said that half of the 14 Penn State players who had agreed to act in leadership positions have since withdrawn from a group text he had with them.

“Now, what has happened?” Stahl said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “Half have stayed.”

Of that meeting itself, where players got him into the football building without the knowledge of any Penn State employees, Stahl said, “This is the first program visit I’ve done. I’ve been waiting for it. We spent one year building this for just this moment.”

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Before an assistant coach walked into the team meeting shortly before it ended and quickly informed the entire Penn State coaching staff of what the meeting had been about, Stahl said, “we had a plan in place” to go public last week. They were planning to inform Penn State head coach James Franklin a day or two ahead of that unveiling, Stahl said.

“Maybe it would have happened the same way,” Stahl said. “Maybe it would have gone off the rails, just in a different time.”

Stahl said 24 Penn State players originally had signed up to be members but some have since withdrawn, and none have paid.

Stahl, who had spent eight days in State College mostly talking to players in smaller groups, provided the slide show shown to the full group on July 14. It showed a list of three “demands” the group was looking to negotiate for, starting with “independent medical care enforced by a CFBPA representative.”

Number 2 was “post-football health protections.” The final “demand” was the hottest-button one, “a percentage of media rights revenue for the players.”

The aim was a huge one, to get all this hammered out before this week’s Big Ten media days, held Tuesday and Wednesday here in Indianapolis, with Penn State representatives, including Clifford, speaking on Wednesday.

In the long run, the slide show asked the question: “Long win; what does it look like?” The first answer: Official unionization, with a goal toward negotiating a collective bargaining agreement by the spring of 2023.

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As for other schools, Stahl said he has members signed up “at least one school in every Power 5 conference, except the Pac-12 -- we’ve had conversations with players from two different teams in the Pac-12.”

Stahl said he had an hour-long phone conversation with Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren last Thursday that Stahl termed as “pleasant,” with Warren fully engaged and asking questions about the health and safety aspects. “He was taking notes,” Stahl said.

“When we turned to the revenue sharing, it got a little -- not as much of a give-and-take, let’s put it that way,” Stahl said.

The two talked about Stahl and other CFBPA leaders coming to this media day to engage with players and Warren himself. Initially, Warren was receptive, Stahl said, but later changed course saying it wouldn’t be possible.

About UCLA and USC planning to join the Big Ten, Stahl said, “From my perspective, I’d say that showcases the abandonment by the Big Ten of any pretense that college football has anything to do with educational or academic values. Now, they’ve shown us -- it’s about money, branding and marketing. That’s it. In some ways, they’re doing us a favor. They’ve not even trying to say it’s about educational values.”

While talking Tuesday at the two-day Big Ten media day, Warren said he is a proponent of Name, Image and Likeness compensation for players, but not of a “patchwork” of state laws governing it. “We need federal legislation to help put in some guardrails.”

Warren was asked directly about how “as you increase your revenue, how much are you anticipating and preparing for the day when you will directly share that revenue with players? Are you willing to talk to players at this point about that idea and start maybe pushing that forward?”

“One of the reasons why we’re forming our Student-Athlete Advisory and Advocacy Committee is just to be able to have discussions not only about money but about environment,” Warren said. “I’ve already started some dialogue with our student-athletes. We’re going to amplify that committee here quickly. I want to hear it from them. I want to be a great listener to figure out what is important to them. It’s so easy to talk about money and share money, but what does that really mean? I want to make sure that I listen and learn to be able to have big ears and a small mouth to truly understand what’s important to them.”

Sports economist Joel Maxcy, a Drexel professor, said that given the allowance of Name, Image and Likeness “and the Alston Supreme Court ruling from a year ago, the logical next step was that the players ask for direct compensation -- and the PSU players bringing it forward are basing it on the [salary-capped] pro leagues that use revenue sharing to determine the gross amount to players.”

“Maybe it would have happened the same way. Maybe it would have gone off the rails, just in a different time.”

In his opinion, Maxcy said, “Ultimately, I think this will need to be a union collective bargaining process. Although similar to 1950s pro sports union, the group wants to be an ‘association,’ not a union. But I don’t think any sort of agreement of this sort will stand without labor law as a foundation for negotiation.”

Maxcy added, “The players have and need that leverage. That said, forming an actual union across multiple states, private and public institutions, and maybe sports, will be complicated.”

“The conversations went very well,” said Jordan Meachum, a La Salle College High graduate and member of the CFBPA leadership committee, who was involved in one discussion with a group of Penn State players in State College. “Everybody was responsive and receptive to what we wanted for the future.”

Meachum, now an accountant in Philadelphia, played his college football at Sacred Heart and then transferred to South Dakota State. He’s not saying that those levels of football should get a revenue split.

“It wouldn’t work,” Meachum said. “It should be for the conferences that can generate billions of dollars. For the smaller Sacred Hearts of the world, it’s not possible.”

Stahl noted that he had first met Clifford “about six weeks ago … Over the next month, Sean and I spoke several times by phone and Zoom about what we were trying to do at the CFBPA. He had never heard of us but he seemed interested in becoming a member and getting involved with us in some way.”

In his own newsletter published Tuesday, Stahl wrote, “At first glance, Sean appeared an unlikely candidate for such a role. He had no association with the player empowerment movement during the summer of 2020 and really no knowledge of the history of athletes’ rights organizing. Moreover, Sean was a star player who seemed to benefit from the current arrangement of college football. In creating the CFBPA, I always knew some of these star players might present a problem. Some would support a players association because it would benefit all the players of the game. However, some might actively work against us because they might perceive reforming college football as being personally bad for them.”

This was a big deal, Stahl made clear.

“In Sean I thought I had found the first type of star player,” Stahl wrote in the newsletter. “Sean spoke poignantly about his friend and teammate Journey Brown who was forced to take a medical retirement thus ending his NFL aspirations. He spoke of increased demands and coach oversight during summer practices which all of the players despised. He seemed fired up and ready to go and so I left for an eight-day trip to Penn State to talk with Sean and the team in person.”

Stahl had been a part-time faculty member at the University of Minnesota and said he was let go from his job as the university’s director of first-year experience program in the college of education and human development because of what he termed his role as a whistle-blower against Minnesota’s football program. He said he discussed that briefly with Warren.

In Clifford’s own statement he put on social media on Saturday, he started with his own “very positive and open discussions with Coach [James] Franklin, Director of Athletics Pat Kraft and Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren about the changing landscape of college sports and how those changes are, and will continue to, impact student-athletes.”

Clifford then said it was important to note that the discussions “were conducted as a student-athlete. To characterize my dialogues as being on behalf of a union or as a union member would be inaccurate.”

Kraft, the former Temple AD who moved to Penn State from Boston College this year, issued his own statement through the school: “Over the course of several conversations in recent weeks with Sean Clifford, he has shared with me his desire to explore pathways, to improve the student-athlete experience for all student-athletes in the Big Ten. Sean is a tremendous young man who is educating himself on some of the major issues in intercollegiate athletics. Last week, I suggested that I connect him with Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren to have a broader conversation on the student-athlete experience, and I hope they both have found those conversations to be beneficial. I am supportive of -- and take great pride in -- student-athletes using their voices to affect positive change in all areas of life.”

In his newsletter post, Stahl characterized what had happened in different terms.

“The campaign to turn our star player leader against the players association kicked into overdrive,” Stahl wrote. “Commissioner of the Big Ten Kevin Warren personally lobbied Sean telling him that they were creating a Big Ten reform committee that they wanted him to sit on. Such committees have a long track record of being ineffective but Sean was swayed in this direction in the week after I left Penn State. I had inklings this was happening but thought that what might actually be happening was Sean and I were working to bring Kevin Warren to the table to negotiate with player leaders for the CFBPA. I did not know for sure which was the case until Sean posted a statement to his Twitter [account] confirming that he was distancing himself from the CFBPA and joining the Big Ten committee. This was obviously disheartening as our first CFBPA leader had now been flipped.”

Stahl said Clifford had called him last week to read him the statement he was putting out. Stahl said in earlier conversations with Clifford, they had talked about leverage points. Stahl had brought up that one option was to threaten to not report to fall camp.

Stahl said Clifford responded, “There’s going to be no appetite for that.”

“The backup threat would be, we would unionize,” Stahl said.

And now?

“We’re waiting for things to settle down -- we’re essentially gathering evidence for who is still with us and who isn’t,” Stahl said. “That’s just the reality. … We raised our profile, but kind of in this really clunky way.”