This week, Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders pushed many of his players into the NCAA transfer portal, effectively cutting them from the team when they were supposed to be guaranteed their scholarships. It’s a controversial move, and it’s led to a new debate about whether or not players should be considered employees.
This week, NCAA President Charlie Baker insisted that student-athletes don’t want to be employees.
“I don’t think you’ll find very many student-athletes who want to be employees,” Baker said during a Q&A session Monday at LEAD1 meetings according to On3. “I haven’t found many, and there are a lot of really good reasons for that. Obviously, there’s a lot of traffic in the courts at this point about this issue these days, which is going to limit what I would choose to say about it. But I think student-athletes want to be student-athletes. And it’s up to us to figure out how to make that work for them in a variety of environments and in circumstances that are different.”
But as sports business attorney Mit Winter points out the irony of this statement coming the same week Sanders pushed several players out of his program against their will.
“It’s very interesting timing, right?” said Mit Winter, a sports business attorney based in Kansas City. “Because you have Charlie Baker, telling everyone, ‘Oh, they, they can’t be employees. They don’t want to be employees, then they would get fired. Nobody wants that.’ Almost the exact same day he makes those comments. You have all these players from one school, hitting the portal and stories coming out, telling them that the coaches said, ‘You’re cut.’ Firing them, which is just ironic timing.”
It’s certainly a compelling debate.
[On3]
