Stanford football players have formed the first chapter of the College Football Players Association led by active athletes, the CFBPA announced Monday, an initial step toward creating a body that could develop into a collective bargaining unit.
An initial step, but with a long way to go.
Though collective bargaining with athletes is an idea that has gained some traction within major college sports as it becomes more professionalized, there is no real framework to do so and no clear answer to the key question: With whom will the athletes bargain?
CFPBA founder and executive director Jason Stahl, a former faculty member at the University of Minnesota, believes the answer eventually should be the conferences.
“We are very optimistic that other chapters will be announced soon,” Stahl told The Athletic.
The CFBPA was founded five years ago as an athlete advocacy group, with a goal of organizing players at the major college level.
Stanford athletes have been communicating with Stahl for more than a year.
The CFBPA declined to provide an exact number of players who officially joined the chapter, but in late June, Stahl held a voluntary informational meeting with Stanford players at the school’s Palo Alto, Calif., campus that was attended by more than 50 members of the team.
Fifth-year offensive lineman Fisher Anderson and fifth-year linebacker Ernest Cooper were elected as player representatives by their teammates.
“We (at Stanford) have always had a pretty tight relationship with the NFL Players Association,” Anderson said on a podcast produced by the CFBPA. “Last year when this opportunity came about, it made me think if this is something that has had such a benefit on the National Football League, could it be done on the college football level?”
“Whenever I leave those meetings (with the NFLPA) I think, ‘Why don’t we have one of those?’” Stanford third-year defensive lineman Benedict Umeh told The Athletic.
As a bipartisan bill intended to bring national compensation standards and antitrust protections to the NCAA and college conferences struggles to get through Congress, some college sports leaders have suggested collective bargaining with athletes as a way to stabilize the industry and become compliant with antitrust laws without government intervention.
“Standardization is necessary,” Umeh said. “The congressional bill could serve toward that purpose, give us the legal scaffolding to get everything in place. The issue with a congressional bill, in my eyes, is the players don’t get much of a say at all.”
College athletes’ unionization has been an ongoing discussion for more than a decade, and every previous movement has sparked a national firestorm and then petered out one way or another.
In 2014, Northwestern football players tried to form a union. Led by college athlete advocate and former UCLA football player Ramogi Huma, an organization called the College Players Association filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago on behalf of football players at Northwestern.
The players said they were effectively employees of the private school and should be permitted to unionize. The petition was eventually rejected by the NLRB.
In 2020, another athlete organizing movement arose, initiated by Pac-12 players who were concerned about conference leaders’ decisions on whether college football should be played during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stahl was active in that movement and started the CFBPA in 2021.
Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team voted to form a union, saying — like Northwestern football players — they should be treated as employees of the school. Dartmouth and the Ivy League tried to thwart those efforts, disputing the athletes’ claims.
The movement ended in 2025 when the petition was withdrawn by the Service Employees International Union, citing the anticipated change in leadership at the NLRB under the Trump administration. Republican leaders have generally been less sympathetic to unionization efforts of all types.
In 2022, Stahl tried to organize players at Big Ten schools in the hope they could negotiate for improved long-term medical benefits and, possibly, a share of conference revenue. Some traction was made, notably at Penn State, but ultimately nothing substantive came from it.
Another group, Athletes.org, has also been working in recent years to organize athletes and created an online platform where athletes from similar sports can connect.
The question of whether college athletes, especially those who compete in the revenue-generating sports of football and basketball, should be treated as employees remains open, especially with schools now permitted to directly pay athletes as part of a revenue-sharing arrangement implemented last year.
Still, technically, athletes are not being paid to play. They are being compensated for their name, image and likeness and treated as independent contractors.
“The schools are paying us to play,” Umeh said.
State labor laws vary widely, so a model in which athletes bargain with their schools would likely fall short of creating a national standard.
Stahl and the CFPBA have acknowledged that and said ideally players who compete at the highest levels of Division I football would form local chapters and collectively bargain with their conferences.
“College football players deserve a meaningful voice in the decisions that shape their athletic, academic and economic futures,” Stahl said. “Stanford football is the first of what the CFBPA envisions as 17 ACC football chapters, creating the framework for conference-wide player representation and, ultimately, collective bargaining.”
