TCU Horned Frogs head coach Sonny Dykes is reading the tea leaves in college football.
It’s expensive to field a winning team. He took his Horned Frogs to the national championship game just a few seasons ago, but so much has changed in college football since 2023.
For one, the College Football Playoff has gone from four teams to 12. It may even go to 24 soon enough. TCU’s conference, the Big 12, has also seen a major overhaul. The Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners are now in the SEC, and programs like Cincinnati, UCF and Utah are now in the Big 12.
Things look a lot different.
And then there’s the money. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals became official starting in July 2021, but they’ve really exploded over the past few seasons. Now, schools are even revenue-sharing with athletes, and the cost of doing business as it relates to winning over recruits on the recruiting trail and players in the transfer portal continues to get more and more expensive.
“When revenue sharing happened, everybody goes ‘$22 million is a lot of money, but we can live with that.’ Well, now it’s $22 million — with 15 for football — and another 30 [million] if you want to be competitive,” Dykes said on the most recent episode of “Andy and Ari On3” (h/t On3). “Now it would be much more of a bargain to collectively bargain.”
Sonny Dykes makes the case for a collective bargaining agreement in college sports
The NIL space is essentially the Wild West. Players are getting millions before even stepping onto the college football field as recruits, and there’s also a ton of money being thrown around to attract established stars via the transfer portal.
Dykes is essentially advocating for players to become school employees, which would then allow them to form a union. From there, much like in the NFL, there would be two sides: The school’s side and the players’ union.
Whatever they negotiate, they negotiate, but according to Dykes, the reason most schools wouldn’t want to do that is that along with employment status come benefits like health insurance and a 401K.
That gets expensive, but Dykes believes it would actually be the most cost-effective way of doing this for the universities and teams.
It would also bring order to the chaos that has become college sports.
“What you can get is a model that has proven to work for the last 100 years: the NFL model. They have collective bargaining,” Dykes said. “Everybody understands what they’re getting into. There’s no lawsuits. There’s no finding a judge you know is going to be sympathetic to your cause. There’s none of that stuff. You have somebody that’s in charge and somebody that says yes or no, and there’s rules.”
A national governing body for college sports? A national collegiate athletic association?
It’s an interesting concept.
