Ivy League's Dartmouth Attacks Collapsing NCAA With Men's Basketball Players Voting To Unionize

The NCAA has suffered major legal losses in recent years and weeks involving major athletic programs, like UCLA and Tennessee. The victorious federal case of former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon against the NCAA in 2015 paved the way for millions of Name, Image & Likeness dollars to athletes beginning in 2021.

Last month, the NCAA lost a federal case involving Tennessee that resulted in the NCAA's enforcement powers regarding NIL rule breaking. And because of that, the NCAA's enforcement staff just last week ended investigations into NIL deals originally against NCAA rules.

But UCLA and Tennessee have histories full of breaking NCAA rules long before NIL. Just last year, the NCAA fined Tennessee $8 million and gave its fired football coach Jeremy Pruitt a six-year show cause because of 18 of the most serious Level 1 violations and over 200 individual violations in all. 

Pristine Ivy League Member Goes After NCAA Model

Now, the pristine Ivy League - where its eight members do not even award athletic scholarships and truly focus on academics instead of huge corporate-sized profits at places like UCLA, Tennessee, Alabama and Michigan - is taking a wrecking ball to the decrepit NCAA athletic model.

Dartmouth comes at the NCAA with significantly more credibility than, say, the football factories across the country seemingly printing NIL money. Dartmouth is not just trying to avoid NCAA penalties, like Tennessee and its NIL collective that the NCAA unsuccessfully tried to investigate and penalize recently for paying star high school quarterback Nico Iamaleava $8 million in an NIL deal after flying him in on a private jet. 

On Tuesday, the 15-member Dartmouth men's basketball team voted 13-2 in an election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to form a workers' union, which is unprecedented in the history of college athletics.

The players voted to join Service Employees International Union 560 that has long represented other Dartmouth non-athlete workers and begin negotiations with school officials for a collective bargaining agreement. This follows an NLRB decision last month that declared the men's basketball players employees of Dartmouth with the subsequent rights to form a union.

Dartmouth, established in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire, has five days to file an objection to the vote to the NLRB. The school could also take its case to federal court, which could delay the formation of the union and any collective bargaining agreement long enough to see all the current Dartmouth basketball players graduated or gone.

"We have teammates here that we all love," Dartmouth junior guard Romeo Myrthil of Solna, Sweden, told the Associated Press. "And whoever comes into the Dartmouth family is part of our family. So, we'll support them as much as we can."

Dartmouth Basketball Team Is 5-21 On The Season

Dartmouth (5-21, 1-12 Ivy League) ends its season Tuesday (7 p.m., ESPN+) at home against Harvard (14-12, 5-8 Ivy League).

Northwestern of the Big Ten attempted to unionize in 2014, but the effort failed. That was a year before the NCAA lost the landmark O'Bannon case. The NCAA finds itself in far different waters now, and drowning, as recent court decisions have torn apart the NCAA's framework of awarding players with only scholarships, room and board and cost of attendance.

Many athletes have been making hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions through NIL over the last three years.

The NCAA will not go down without a fight, or more accurately, not without repeated delays and more Congressional meetings until perhaps the inevitable - a complete restructuring.

NCAA president Charlie Baker has yet another fight on his hands - the first major college athletes' union in history at Dartmouth. (Getty Images).

"Don't forget how long it takes most NLRB processes to play out," NCAA president Charlie Baker told reporters in Washington D.C. last month when asked if Dartmouth's players would vote successfully to unionize. "They take a really long time."

Baker, a career Republican politician, took over the NCAA last spring after serving as governor of Massachusetts from 2015-23. 

"You have two levels within the NLRB, and then possibly at least two and maybe three levels of the courts," he said.

Baker has spent much of his young tenure with the NCAA trying to get Congress to help the NCAA among the mounting legal losses.

At a dozen Congressional NIL hearings last fall, he preached no unions.

Just  as news of Dartmouth's historic player vote to unionize broke Tuesday, an announcement of the NCAA's next effort for Congressional help was revealed. 

A subcommittee of the House Education and Workforce Commission will hold a hearing on March 12 called, "Safeguarding Student-Athletes from NLRB Misclassification" that is expected to focus on the Dartmouth unionization and other potential labor rulings.

More meetings and hearings.

So far, they haven't helped the NCAA.