Taking the stand this week, Elijah Higgins detailed the similarities between his experience last season as a rookie tight end for the Arizona Cardinals and his four years as a football player at Stanford University.
Five to six days a week at each level of play, he immersed himself in football activities, including weightlifting, practices, film study, physical therapy, and games. He also travels by chartered jet. Free tickets for friends and relatives. A strong coaching staff that sets the rules.
Higgins allows for some differences. In the National Football League, there are no classes to attend, but at Stanford University, academics take a backseat to football, so he still has several classes to take before earning his bachelor's degree in psychology. he said.
The only other difference is that he is now being paid a salary, as opposed to Stanford. He made the NFL's minimum salary last season at $750,000.
Higgins said that at Stanford, in an environment where critical thinking is encouraged, he began thinking about how money drives what he calls the “system” of college football. Even at elite universities like Stanford University, academic pursuits were encouraged on their own. As long as it doesn't interfere with soccer.
“I agree with the fact that college football players are employees without status,” he said.
Higgins is one of about 20 witnesses who have testified over the past five months in National Labor Relations Board hearings that have far-reaching implications for the narrow question of what should happen to the University of Southern California's football and basketball players. He was the last one standing. Will I be classified as an employee?
The case may not be decided for months. However, because the case will almost certainly end up in the Court of Appeals, there is a vast record of 3,040 pages of 21 days of testimony and more than 150 exhibits.
The record is so extensive that Eleanor Laws, the chief administrative law judge who decides how national labor laws apply to these players, has given her nine additional weeks to file closing arguments. The deadline for submitting closing arguments is July 31st.
The complaint was filed by the NLRB's general counsel on behalf of Ramogi Huma, executive director of the National Collegiate Players Association, which advocates for the rights of college athletes. The defendants are USC, the Pac-12 Conference, and the NCAA, which may require athletes at member universities to be classified as employees, even though the boards only have jurisdiction over private institutions.
Testimony was often dry, with numerous attorneys (as many as 16) at the hearing that concluded Thursday, detailing Picayune's management and compensation, as well as the fact that athletes actually handed over the University of Southern California's student-athlete handbook. It received little attention as it was debated whether it had been done or not. . (However, USC generated $212 million in athletic department revenue in the 2022-23 fiscal year, but that has nothing to do with this case, just that there is compensation and control.)
At times, the resilience of rational argument was tested.
For example, University of Southern California marching band director Jacob Vogel spent more than three hours discussing the intricate details of the program, such as how band members should dress before football games, with boundless enthusiasm.
The claim that playing football is little different than playing the tuba was cross-examined by the general counsel's lead attorney, Amanda Laufer, who asked how many of the band's 300 members had no musical experience. .
“About 10 to 15,” Vogel said.
“There are no more questions,” Laufer said, satisfied with the difference he brought to the football team.
This incident is one of several on the forefront of assaults against amateur models in college athletics departments. Emboldened state attorneys general have chipped away at the NCAA's rule-making authority. An antitrust lawsuit that could force universities to pay billions of dollars in damages is pending in court. And last month, Dartmouth's men's basketball team voted to unionize after winning the right to be classified as an employee, a decision the university is contesting.
The NCAA is seeking relief from Congress, but any hope of antitrust immunity, if any, is unlikely to materialize until after the presidential election.
The arguments before Judge Laws offered contrasting visions of what college sports would be like if athletes were employees.
One is apocalyptic. The other is optimistic.
Teresa Gould, the new commissioner of the Pac-12 Conference, has lost 10 of her member universities to other conferences by August, including USC, which is aiming to join the Big Ten. A star high school football player also testified that he could be subject to punishment. draft. She also argued that poor play, such as a point guard committing too many turnovers, could result in the player being fired rather than being benched.
Sonja Stills, commissioner of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, testified that the district, which is home to historically black and historically underfunded colleges and universities, “cannot afford to pay tuition to students.” Their scholarships were taxed as income. She predicted Olympic competition would be canceled if funds needed to be redirected to athletes. Women's sports could also be at risk, she said.
Anastasios Kavrakis, the founder of a company that helps international athletes find opportunities to play in U.S. colleges, also said how many athletes will be affected by having to obtain a work visa in the United States. He said he would be shut out.
Those damning assessments were dismissed by another witness, Stanford distance runner Liam Anderson, who characterized them as “fear-mongering.” He said not all athletes should be considered employees and that universities would make adjustments as well. Just as market forces influence high-profile college sports through payments for so-called name, image and likeness rights, they often do so through groups funded by boosters.
And what if you could pay college football players and men's and women's basketball players as employees?
“I want to celebrate that outcome,” said Anderson, who served as co-chair of Stanford's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee for two years.
Anderson's testimony was one of the most powerful at the hearing, held in a conference room in a nondescript office building in West Los Angeles.
Anderson said he stayed at the same Las Vegas hotel as the Arkansas men's basketball team during last year's NCAA Tournament. The security guard told Anderson that his job was to keep the players from leaving the room. He said this is a sign of control, corroborating testimony from former University of Southern California football players who said they were required to check in with fingerprint scans and send photos via text message during meals. An anonymous attendance checker that proves he attended class.
A loophole in the board's Byzantine rules allowed Mr. Anderson and Mr. Higgins, neither of whom attended the University of Southern California, to testify even after the general counsel had exhausted its list of witnesses. Because the NCAA had asked athletes from other universities to testify, the general counsel was able to call rebuttal witnesses who were also not present at USC.
Lawyers on the other side did not know who would testify until they took the stand, a procedure designed to protect witnesses in fair labor cases from intimidation. For this reason, lawyers often begin extensive computer searches when they have only 30 minutes to cross-examine.
In Anderson's case, that led to pressure from the Pac-12's lead attorney, Daniel Nash, to explain statements that contradicted his testimony in the Stanford Daily. In a 2021 op-ed, he said the idea of paying college athletes is “clearly economically unfeasible.”
“My views on this have evolved,” Anderson said.
Lauren Herstick Contributed to the report.
