John Calipari, the outspoken Arkansas head basketball coach and Naismith Hall of Famer, endorsed collective bargaining in an op-ed published in The Washington Post on Friday as a long-term solution to many of the issues causing turmoil in college sports. He and some of college athletics’ most prominent coaches proposed the idea to address growing problems, including player movement and confusion around amateur eligibility.
Calipari consulted with Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, Houston coach Kelvin Sampson and former Alabama football coach Nick Saban, along with other high-profile coaches, a source close to Calipari told The Athletic.
At the professional level, collective bargaining works when sports leagues such as the NFL or NBA negotiate with a players’ union — which represents player interests on a wide range of subjects, like pay and benefits — to create a contract establishing long-term rules for how to do business. That, in turn, creates stability and locks in standards. Comparatively, in college, there are so many discrepancies between different sports, divisions and conferences that organizing under a single body would be impossible.
“Can the NCAA implement a model that accomplishes this? If it can lobby Congress to provide antitrust protection and give it the ability to create effective rules, then probably yes,” Calipari wrote. “But is that a reasonable expectation? No.”
Calipari went on to say that “if a legislative solution isn’t possible, the athletic conferences should take the lead by forming an alliance.” That, he continued, could require collective bargaining with athletes as a special class of non-employees, who would be eligible for healthcare and retirement accounts.
The NCAA and many college presidents have been hesitant to embrace collective bargaining thus far, not only because of the uncertainty about what such a structure would look like, but also because the infrastructure to do so would be expensive for universities while simultaneously stripping the NCAA of much of its remaining power as college athletics’ governing body.
If conferences aren’t able to take the lead, Calipari argued, perhaps it’s time for sport-specific entities “that govern themselves and oversee rules creating the best environment for student-athletes,” to take charge. Calipari isn’t the first prominent coach to call for leadership changes in college athletics, with UConn coach Dan Hurley recently advocating for a college basketball commissioner to help oversee issues facing the sport.
“What works for football,” Calipari wrote, “doesn’t always work for swimming. These entities could negotiate broadcast deals similar to professional leagues. This would generate more revenue and keep conferences intact.”
In exchange for moving away from the NCAA’s longstanding amateur model — one that has already steadily eroded, thanks to the advent of name, image and likeness and a wave of antitrust lawsuits — Calipari and the coaches he consulted with are advocating for three major rule changes in the future that “bring stability and clarity to college athletics while protecting players’ rights.”
The first is restricting the proliferation of transfers in a way that several courts have already overruled: allowing athletes only one free transfer. (Additional free transfers would be allowed if a player’s coach leaves the program.) Without implementing collective bargaining, that tenet of Calipari’s proposal is almost impossible to enact.
The NCAA formally did away with its one-time transfer rule in April 2024, five months after a West Virginia judge first ruled against the governing body’s ability to enforce its longstanding bylaw preventing players from transferring multiple times and being immediately eligible. A month after that ruling, in January 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice joined the lawsuit, which argued that impeding players’ ability to transfer freely was a violation of antitrust laws.
“However,” Calipari wrote, “Congress could create a carve-out to address this legal obstacle.”
Calipari’s second priority is player eligibility, a hot-button issue after former NBA second-round pick James Nnaji was ruled immediately eligible by the NCAA last month, becoming the first player drafted by the NBA to play college basketball. Several former NBA G League players have also been ruled eligible, despite earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in the now-defunct G League Ignite program. That trend comes on the heels of dozens of former European professionals migrating to the United States this summer to play college basketball (and earn a share of the evergrowing NIL and revenue-sharing pie, which outpaces overseas earning potential).
While Calipari didn’t go so far as to support granting all players five seasons of eligibility in five years to eliminate waivers — a subject the American Football Coaches Association discussed earlier this week, but ultimately didn’t vote on — he did suggest only granting a fifth season to players who stay at one school for their first four years.
Regardless, a player’s “athletic eligibility clock should start ticking as soon as they graduate high school,” Calipari wrote. “If you don’t decide to come to college until you’re 21, your athletic eligibility shouldn’t be on the same timeline as a 17-year-old high school graduate.”
As with Calipari’s transfer proposal, player eligibility standards have become as much about court rulings as common sense or historical precedent. Players have used judicial decisions and injunctions to play five, six and sometimes even seven seasons of college sports. To that point, this month, football coaches voted to allow players to participate in up to nine games while maintaining their redshirt status.
That said, in a win for the NCAA, a Tennessee judge denied a request on Thursday for an injunction by a group of athletes challenging the NCAA’s redshirt rule and seeking a fifth season of eligibility.
Lastly, Calipari proposed incentivizing athletes to stay at their current schools. If a player has spent two semesters at a school, Calipari argued, their NIL collective deals should only be monitored by the school’s athletic department and not be subject to third-party review as they are now, something Calipari likened to incentive-laden deals common in professional sports.
“This change could result in the free market dictating that an athlete’s value is often highest at their current school,” Calipari wrote. “This could keep more athletes on a graduation track by not changing schools every spring.”
That stipulation also comes with its own legal pitfalls under the NCAA’s current parameters, though, especially related to further antitrust violations for potentially restricting athletes’ ability to maximize their earning potential.
“I don’t have all the answers,” Calipari wrote, “but we are at a critical moment that doesn’t allow us to sit on our hands.”
