College sports could be moving toward a CBA. Tennessee just gave a glimpse of what it could look like

The movement toward collective bargaining with major college athletes picked up a bit this week.

The University of Tennessee, in conjunction with college sports players association Athletes.org, negotiated a proposed collective bargaining clause with its men’s basketball team in a mock exercise – a move intended to pave the way for this concept in the future.

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One of the strongest supporters of collective bargaining nationally, UT athletic director Danny White fully supported and participated in the exercise and he hopes it will provide a path for discussion on “more substantive solutions leading to binding contracts and a CBA,” he told Yahoo Sports this week.

The school has released details of an agreement it negotiated with three elected representatives of the basketball team’s players as well as Athletes.org (AO) management. The term sheet aims to provide college leaders with a prototype that can be extrapolated to other schools and sports in what White hopes will be a future national negotiating agreement with major college players — his solution to the unregulated state of the industry.

“We’re going to be in a CBA at some point. My position from the beginning has been that the sooner we can get there, the better college sports will be,” White said. “Giving student-athletes a voice doesn’t have to be something we’re afraid of. They want many of the same things we do.”

The basketball team elected the three representatives – graduate student Tyler Lundblade, junior Campbell Duncan and freshman DeWayne Brown II – to negotiate the entire roster. During a series of meetings with AO leaders, players discussed and debated the various categories of the agreement, ultimately arriving at outcomes that AO leaders brought to school administrators. In this theoretical exercise, both sides conducted “multiple rounds” of negotiations to arrive at the final list of terms, much like how a collective bargaining agreement might be reached.

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“This shows that it can be done. It can happen,” said Brandon Copeland, the executive director of Athletes.org who, along with AO founder Jim Cavale, contacted White about setting up meetings with the men’s basketball and football teams to kick off the exercise.

The released term sheet addresses concepts such as contract compensation, salary cap, performance bonuses, rookie/freshman salary scale, guaranteed health and medical coverage, transfer portal duration and timeline, an enforcement system and agent policies.

The agreement is intended to ultimately operate under a single employment model that White said avoids problematic issues often cited by critics of collective bargaining, including state anti-labor laws and unionization at public universities. Under White’s model — described in detail in a June 2025 Yahoo Sports article — major college athletes would be employed by a national, for-profit agency rather than the universities, state or conferences in which they play.

Brown, one of Tennessee’s player representatives, said he hoped the exercise would serve as a “stepping stone for more college athletics to replicate our process at their own schools.” Duncan, another player representative from Tennessee, says a CBA would “solidify” athletes’ seats at the bargaining table to ensure “our voices are heard when decisions are made about our livelihoods.”

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Tuesday’s announcement comes amid what administrators describe as a “chaotic” environment in the industry, where court rulings and state laws have hamstrung NCAA rules and created a landscape of free player movement, with mostly uncapped compensation and even uncertain eligibility standards — something many claim is the fault of college leaders not adapting quickly enough.

For some, the solution lies on Capitol Hill, where college leaders have spent years and millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers to pass a congressional bill, the Protect College Sports Act. The legislation attempts to bring order to an unruly environment by restricting athletes’ movements, establishing eligibility standards and granting the NCAA and College Athletic Commission an antitrust exemption to regulate athlete compensation in a way that many say is unfair.

However, the law, while overwhelmingly passed by the Senate in strikingly bipartisan fashion, faces a steep climb in the House of Representatives, which has just five business weeks before a new Congress — and likely a new, more Democratic-friendly bill — arrives in January. Democrats regained control of the Senate and House of Representatives in last week’s midterm elections.

Many believe any Democratic-led legislation will move more toward a collective bargaining and employment model for major players in college football and men’s basketball — the athletes who generate billions of dollars in ticket sales and television contracts each year.

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Congress’ expected failure now has conferences reverting to what many describe as “Plan B,” where leagues create and enforce their own rules related to player movement, eligibility and compensation. The Big Ten adopted a league cap rule last month with escalating financial penalties for cap violators and, as previously reported by Yahoo Sports, the SEC is exploring a similar model. In theory, leagues believe they are avoiding legal challenges by self-regulating, unlike NCAA standards that have fallen victim to the courts.

However, lawyers say such conference governance may still violate antitrust law as well as the House Rules — a federal injunction that the NCAA and conferences have signed up to to begin sharing revenue with athletes.

Copeland believes that league-wide conference compensation policies “make it seem like a lot of people are colluding” in an effort to “limit compensation and restrict control of college athletes.” He expects the exercise in Tennessee to continue what has been a wave of movement by many coaches and administrators at major conference schools who favor the idea of ​​employment and collective bargaining as a solution to the quagmire.

“The ABC is the only solution,” he said. “You can look for band-aid solutions, but the only proven way that’s fair and sustainable and gets the rules back on track is through a collective bargaining agreement. We hope we’ve proven that this can happen. More people on the other side of the table need to come to the table, or be forced to come to the table.”

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White also senses growing support for negotiation as school officials desperately seek regulation. The current compensation system – stemming from the House rules, which many in the industry now view as a failure – is “the most ineffective way possible to compensate players.”

There are public and private signs that negotiations are gaining ground. This summer, the Stanford football team established the first chapter of the College Football Players Association with the goal of creating a basis for possible unionization and collective bargaining. Also earlier this year, the Oregon State women’s basketball team, while partnering with the United College Athletes Association, filed a petition for union representation with the Oregon Labor Relations Board.

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In May, SEC presidents and athletic directors attended a presentation on collective bargaining at their spring meetings in Florida, and although it was rejected, the mere presentation alone is a clear signal of frustration in the current system.

Even though negotiation “seems to be a long-term process,” White said university leaders should begin exploring the concept in depth now to avoid a maze of years-long concepts, such as agreement in the House and lobbying in Congress, that only end in disappointment.

“The bottom line among our athletes is they want a collective bargaining agreement. We have a party willing to do that,” White said.

In the Tennessee exercise, the parties negotiated several main concepts: (1) a universal sports services agreement in which players are paid for services instead of the current patchwork of NIL revenue sharing and school affiliation contracts; (2) a salary cap of approximately $22 million for the men’s basketball team and a spending floor for athletic departments, plus a guaranteed minimum salary for each roster spot and a salary scale for freshmen; (3) a revenue reserve for postseason athletes, separate from the cap, as well as retention bonuses for veteran players; (4) guaranteed medical and health coverage; (5) a mutually agreed upon 15-day portal beginning after a national sports championship; (6) a jointly designed anti-circumvention, enforcement, and arbitration system; and (7) agent certification and transparency structure with a maximum fee of 5%.

“If we don’t start working on a collective bargaining agreement now, it’s going to take a long time,” White said. “We should make an effort to speed this up.”