Jason Stahl and his big plans for the College Football Players Association

The first introduction much of the college football world got to Jason Stahl, the executive director of the College Football Players Association, came during a Congressional hearing on NIL and college athletics in March.

What was supposed to be a chance for lawmakers to learn about the fledgling-yet-heavily-monied NIL marketplace turned into elected reps taking the chance to brag about teams from their state, among other things. Stahl, who straddled the line between “terse” and “fiery” in his testimony, took a distinctly different tact than the administrators, coaches and select former college athletes on hand.

While the likes of Washington State athletic director Pat Chun discussed the need for “guardrails” as NIL got out of control, Stahl argued basically the opposite: There’s really no issue here.

“All these conversations go right back to the heart of the problem. What’s the heart of the problem? The paternalism of the administrative class in college sports, right? That they’re just like, ‘We’re gonna decide everything for you and you’re gonna just sit over there in the corner and wait for our decision,” Stahl said in April. “That’s what has to end. We’ve gotta move to a future where the athletes are engaged through their players associations for the adults that they are.”

Stahl has put his money and labor where his mouth is, serving as the executive director of the College Football Players Association. The primary mission is to ultimately be the organization for college football that the NFLPA is for the NFL, including housing any sort of eventual union of college football players. But Stahl has a bigger vision, one where generations of college football players are brought together for the betterment of the sport. 

While these alumni members might not be in an actual union bargaining unit and sitting at the table, their institutional knowledge, connections and financial support would help not just the current crop of college football players, but create a CFBPA that can provide for them, too.

Think of it, then, as a sort of college football VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) or AARP (American Association of Retired People).

It also addressed one of the biggest problems a CFB union might face: Short-term membership in the actual union. At most, members will spend five years in it.

“That’s a real one. But what we wanna look at is, and we want to ultimately say is there’s only a subset of our members, the members of the players association and actually maybe even a small subset of our members, that will actually be unionized and in a union, but the rest of the members will be members of the players association,” Stahl said.

“If you do it like that, you can build a monster, right?”

Stahl and the CFBPA are currently approaching the tail end of the second of three main phases to complete “the vision” of the CFBPA. The first phase, ending in July 2022, involved outreach to current, former or future college football players and getting them involved in the org. The goal was to become a preeminent voice among the players, something Stahl feels the group accomplished. Additionally, the first phase involved the formation of the CFBPA’s leadership committee, which “will become the public face of the institution and will guide its direction and fulfill the CFBPA mission of being a member-led organization of, by and for the players.”

The current leadership committee is comprised of seven former college football players: Tremayne Anchrum, Alonzo Craighton, Justin Falcinelli, Edwin Garrett, Jordan Meachum, Troy Reddick and Kassidy Woods.

The second phase, which technically ends in July 2023 (the work certainly overlaps from one phase to the next), focuses on gauging the membership base to determine what the platform for the CFBPA will be and what specific planks might be within it. This is also the point where the group would start taking some real substantive action. 

The third, and final, phase, is rather open ended: Work with college football players to make their lives as football players better. This is also the point at which the CFBPA wants to start welcoming chapters at various institutions — much like Penn State football players considered last summer.

Recently, the CFBPA and Stahl made one of the biggest splashes to date when calling for a player boycott of the upcoming EA Sports NCAA football video game. It’s unclear if that will come to a head as an unrelated lawsuit around group licensing for the game has stolen headlines for the time being.

But Stahl saw it as a good test for the reach of the organization and the reaction. He knew there would be lots of fans of the game seeing red at the idea that they wouldn’t play with their favorite players. He also knew there would be plenty of people pointing out that the average player probably wouldn’t boycott it.

And even though the furor might’ve been surreal at times, Stahl was heartened at the scope of the response to the boycott marker being put down. 

“Number one, first and foremost, we’ll educate the players because we at least want them to give informed consent, I guess is what it comes down to, if they’re gonna opt into this game. But to do that, you also have to create some type of news, right? I mean, here’s just so much out there, how do you break through, right? And so, yeah, we basically said ‘OK, the players should boycott the game.’ Well, use that word, ‘boycott,’ people really get up in arms,” Stahl said with a chuckle. “And so it’s good because I think, look, we got blowback, but it was necessary.”

When he’s not calling for a video game boycott, Stahl, at his core, tries to spend his time as an organizer. Much of the current work for the CFBPA is texting and talking with college football players. 

Oftentimes a player is hesitant or doesn’t want to talk with Stahl, which he’s fine with. Even those interactions usually lead to a few phone numbers of some teammates or peers who might. 

For all the posting and lobbying the group can do, Stahl is most concerned with having the most comprehensive, far-reaching network of college football players actually thinking about this issue. That, he points out, is where all the power lies.

“What we’re exposing here through this campaign, I would argue, is the fact that many people just think of the players as interchangeable bodies,” Stahl said. “And the video game particularly highlights that as opposed to, you know, the players are the game.”

Stahl offered a stark example to illustrate his point: If one stripped away the coaches, the stadiums, the facilities and the media but kept the players, college football would still happen. If you kept the rest but got rid of the players, it’s an act with no headliner.

“The players are the game,” Stahl reiterated. 

To that end, Stahl isn’t mainly making arguments about labor solidarity or improving working conditions for the next generation of players to current college players. It’s all about the money.

Much like the $500 reportedly being offered for a player’s likeness in the EA Sports video game, Stahl wants players to be conscious of that fact that they’re being shortchanged and egregiously so.

The players, more than any coach or administrator or media personality, are where the value of the sport stems from, and Stahl would like them to be treated accordingly. 

Stahl also doesn’t think players need to wait for the courts, NLRB or state legislatures to pave the way. In any number of places, a college football team could decide that they want to form a campus chapter of the CFBPA and force some change to their working conditions.

Amid the stochastic professionalization of college football, the stage is set for a team to make the push to get organized and demand a fair share of the value they create. Multiple state legislatures are considering measures that will make college sports far more professional or eliminate barriers to unionization, the NLRB is currently working through a complaint with USC and the NCAA to classify athletes as employees and Johnson v. NCAA in the federal courts could establish that college athletes are deserving of financial compensation for their hours worked.

“I think it’s what Kassidy Woods, a member of our leadership committee said on Twitter recently. I think it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be the athletes putting into place something new. They have the power, you don’t gotta sit around and wait,” Stahl said. “I mean, and we have to break through with that message and we have to break through with the message that athletes have all the power and they don’t have to sit around and wait for any of those things.”

And the above legal proceedings and proposed bills are no guarantees, even if prior outcomes from those realms have been good for college athletes recently. And the timeline for them is murky, at best.

Mit Winter, a sports attorney at Kennyhertz Perry LLC, didn’t have a hard prediction on when the tides might fully shift, other than to say it will be a good while.

“Obviously to have a real union, they have to be employees. So that’s the first step. And, you know, I think that’s gonna happen, definitely at some point. The question is just when? Is it the Johnson case? Is it the NLRB proceeding that gets things there first? So it’s hard to say when that’s gonna happen, but I dunno, a couple years,” Winter said. 

Carrie Rheingans (D-Ann Arbor), who introduced Michigan House Bill 4497, which would allow public school athletes in Michigan to unionize, had a similar years-long prognosis for any sort of action in the Michigan legislature.

Despite current majorities for Democrats across the board in the state, her bill is unlikely to pass as a narrower bill in the Michigan Senate has a better chance to succeed.

“I’m not sure mine would even pass with only all-Democratic votes. So I think — I’m introducing this now for us to open up the conversation about student athletes and what they might be able to do to advance themselves as working people down the road,” Rheingans said.

Wherever these state bills, federal court cases and NLRB complaints end up, it’s a safe bet that Stahl will be there, too, plotting his next move to get college football players the seat at the table he’s certain they deserve.