Don't expect some player from Arizona to carry a bullhorn amid a chaotic strike scene at the Final Four, yelling, Hoffa-like, "Brothers! Brothers can you hear me?"
They're asking for more insurance, more money for room and board. So it's a long way from an International Brotherhood of College Hoopers.
But recent news that the United Steelworkers Union has joined with current and former UCLA football players to organize the Collegiate Athletes Coalition should send shivers down the spines of college sports administrators and highly paid coaches.
Scoff if you want, but it is believed to be the first time a major union has tried to organize college athletes. Does anyone think NCAA president Cedric Dempsey wants these guys sticking their hardhats into his business?
Be assured the union has a different idea than the NCAA for student input in the system. This is not some powerless NCAA committee of do-gooder athletes from all sports and divisions daintily discussing peripheral issues and waiting for a pat on the head.
This is not that toothless committee of major-college basketball players funded by, of all people, the coaches' association.
This is the United Freakin' Steelworkers Union.
No doubt the union has motives other than altruism, but it has latched on to sentiment that has been building for years. Consider what George Raveling, former coach at Iowa and Southern California, predicted in 1994.
"I said to the (Pac-10) athletic directors, 'I'll bet you a year's salary that in the next five or six years, you're going to see the student-athletes rise up about this,'" Raveling said. "You won't let them get a stipend. You won't let them work to earn money. Yet they're providing this tremendous income."
Raveling, now with Nike, might have been off by only a year.
"I am not at all surprised," he said Friday. "I think it'll take a strong united effort on the behalf of the athletes to get it done. But if anything, I'm surprised it took so long."
The only thing that has changed is that players can work to earn money, but no more than $2,000, and even that isn't a viable option for many athletes during their season.
Then there's the question of whether they should even have to work for routine spending money. Football and basketball players know they foot the bill for the whole athletic department, and that a small fraction of the money they generate is returned to them in the form of scholarships. The rest goes to pay for coaches and administrators and the scholarships of golfers and tennis players, who are, generally speaking, more affluent than athletes in revenue-producing sports. Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker once called that "a strange form of income redistribution."
The players also know that the NCAA men's basketball tournament brings in billions. They can see that roughly 20 football coaches make $1 million or more per season. In the case of Florida's Steve Spurrier, the coach makes more than the value of all 85 scholarships combined.
And the scholarships are, as economists say, merely "payments in kind."
Trades, not cold cash.
A comment from former Southern California linebacker Jeff Kopp sticks in the mind.
"Something's got to change when you see guys out on the field on Saturdays and they're on top of the world, and then you see them during the week, and they're like, 'Hey, man, you got some money I can borrow for lunch?'" Kopp said.
It's not the first time somebody has tried to organize college athletes. In the mid-1990s, former Duke basketball player Dick DeVenzio sent videotapes to college players carrying a label that said Do Something. The label also had a toll-free phone number.
The video established DeVenzio's credentials as a player and included clips of interviews he did on 60 Minutes, Crossfire and the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. He said in the video that he wasn't trying to make money on an athletes' organization. He exhorted players to think big, comparing them to people in other unions, including those in pro sports.
"None of these groups got what they were entitled to by sitting around and saying, 'I think a stipend would be nice,'" DeVenzio said.
Would players ever go on strike? It isn't unthinkable. The Black Coaches Association almost shut down some men's basketball games in 1995 to protest what it considered unfair initial eligibility requirements.
If players refused to show up for some games, would schools that are supposedly so concerned about education immediately kick them out of school and onto the street? What kind of public relations mess could that create?
As for players having too much to lose, the best athletes will find their way to the pros no matter what. The others would have to decide if acting on principle is worth it.
Several factors make the time ripe for this kind of thing. Players -- and their would-be union representatives -- see increased television money, growing coaches' contracts, the NCAA's lousy record in court, the Olympics having shed amateurism rules, underclassmen leaving school earlier and more often.
Meanwhile, the NCAA dawdles. A headline in the most recent issue of the NCAA News, talking about reform, said, "Division I delegates say more con than pro on amateurism package. Members worry about unintended consequences."
How about this for consequences?
Picket lines.
