University of Michigan football head coach Jim Harbaugh suggested the university's athletes should form a union after his team won the national championship on Monday night.
“What I want to change about college football is give more and more revenue to talented people,” Harbaugh said. Said at a press conference on Tuesday. “We're all doing the same train robbery. It's not just football players and student-athletes who are in the position of doing the hard labor, risking their lives and putting their limbs on the line on the football field. It's tachi.''
Harbaugh and the Wolverines defeated the University of Washington Huskies 34-13 on Monday night to win the national title.
The coach also questioned how schools, conferences, the NCAA and others involved in the business of college athletics benefit from the system.
“For a long time, people have been told that unionizing is a bad thing,” Harbaugh said. “If people aren't going to do it, if they're not going to do it out of their own good intentions, if they're not going to do the right thing, then that's probably the next step.”
Debate continues over how college football and other sports should handle the recent ability of players to monetize their name, image and likeness (NIL). Lawmakers generally agree that new NIL reforms and regulations are needed, but so far there is no consensus on what they should look like.
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