Student-athletes of the world, unite! Your athletic directors already have, moving their advocacy beyond academia to an overtly political realm.

ADs from the 129 Football Bowl Subdivision schools recently announced plans to form a political action committee to take their concerns directly to Congress. They’ve rebranded what was unadornedly called the DIA Athletic Directors Association so it’s now LEAD1, which sounds more like a racing car circuit or new gasoline additive than a bunch of athletic bureaucrats.

Relocated to Washington, D.C., the organization hired a former three-term Congressman to run the organization with an eye toward influencing national lawmakers. Contributions to sympathetic candidates, including the 46 former NCAA student-athletes currently serving in Congress, also could be in the offing.

“It doesn’t mean you lobby,” LEAD1 CEO and executive director Tom McMillen says of forming a PAC. “You’re just building relationships.” McMillen did dispute one relationship-building effort reported by the Washington Post, placing his organization’s September 2017 banquet at the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capitol. Longtime ACC fans will recall McMillen, a three-time All-American, as a star forward on Maryland’s great teams from 1972 to 1974.

Universities regularly take their concerns to state and federal legislators, many via lobbyists. It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure a list of issues on which ADs would love to share their perspectives, running the gamut from pay for athletes to Title IX compliance, gambling to sexual assault, limiting liability for injuries to potential unionization by players. “College athletic directors have a particular viewpoint that not necessarily the university’s personnel would understand the nuances of,” McMillen says.

Budget bill

David Price, the longtime Representative from North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District, which covers much of the Triangle area, first came to the House in 1986 along with McMillen and Georgia’s John Lewis. Told of LEAD1’s efforts to form a PAC, Price is a bit perplexed. “I don’t think any kind of additional measures, let alone extraordinary measures, are required to have the kind of access to my office or other offices that these schools have a right to expect,” he says.

Maybe Price should enlist LEAD1 to lobby for the modest reform bill he introduced in 2014 and reintroduced last summer. Called “The Standardization of Collegiate Oversight of Revenues and Expenditures Act,” the measure would bring uniform standards to reporting budgetary information to the Department of Education and would require intercollegiate sports entities, including private institutions, the NCAA, athletic conferences, bowl games and the College Football Playoff to disclose their finances. Price calls it “a foundational piece” to athletic reform and greater transparency.

Not surprisingly, SCORE has yet to reach the House floor for a vote.

Meanwhile, LEAD1 has formed a committee to develop its own legislative agenda. Within specific parameters, that is. “I’m certainly not going to do anything to conflict with the university’s agenda,” says Debbie Yow, the N.C. State AD and a former president of the organization that’s now LEAD1.

Bubba Cunningham, AD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says a shift toward focused, joint activism is only prudent. “I think it’s like anything else – you don’t build the ark when it’s raining. You build it a little before it happens.”

Some might argue the deluge has been going on for years. Intercollegiate athletics and the archaic amateurism model it embraces strain and groan under the weight of legal challenges, commercial demands, mind-boggling salaries and edifices, erratic and cumbersome NCAA regulation, and a growing sense of dysfunction and inequity, at least from the outside looking in. Because contradictions within the system have drawn so much scrutiny and criticism, a lingering fear among those running elite programs has been clumsy or reactive intervention by Congress.

Reopening the loophole

Actually, there’s precedent for athletic directors to invite Congressional involvement when it suits them.

During the latter 1980s an Internal Revenue Service ruling curtailed the tax exemption for contributions to college sports programs. The IRS found that preferred seating and parking and other privileges were purchased to gain “a substantial benefit” rather than secured as a by-product of charitable giving. This quickly sparked athletic officials at the University of Texas at Austin, augmented by a Washington attorney representing the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, to seek a congressional fix. The exemption was soon largely restored.

Reopening the loophole protected the flow of dollars to athletic coffers, and ensured the rest of us would have the privilege of making up for the lost government revenues. That’s the hidden truth behind claims that schools use no public funds to, say, buy out a coach’s contract or build their latest state-of-the-art stadium.

With tax reform again a major topic of conversation in Washington, Yow is worried about the fate of what she calls “the 80-20 rule,” allowing the bulk of gifts to booster clubs and athletic departments to remain deductible under the tax-exempt umbrella of the entire university. “It comes up routinely,” Yow says of the IRS regulation, which she defends as key to funding athletic scholarships. “I know I need 80-20 to stay the way it is, and if (LEAD1 lobbying) helps that, then I would be supportive.”

Limiting athletes’ hours

Perhaps the greatest threat to the status quo arose from the 2014 O’Bannon case, in which an antitrust challenge was mounted to gain compensation for the NCAA’s use of athletes’ likenesses. The ruling by federal judge Claudia Wilken, later curtailed by an appeals court, nevertheless undermined arguments offered in a 1980s U.S. Supreme Court case that protected college sports from antitrust laws by affirming the importance of maintaining the “revered tradition of amateurism,” as one justice put it.

“That has been attacked and attacked and attacked, essentially on the grounds that maybe made sense when you weren’t trying to run this thing entirely as a business and assistant coaches weren’t getting paid a million dollars a year,” says Duke law professor Paul Haagen, who teaches sports related courses and is co-director of the school’s Center for Sports Law and Policy. “But it doesn’t make sense in this environment when they exert so much control over the lives of the students; they’re in fact employees.”

One response to O’Bannon was a move to significantly increase cost-of-attendance funding for student-athletes. More recently, the so-called Autonomy Five conferences limited the hours college athletes must devote to their sports – often in excess of 40 hours per week, more than they spent pursuing their studies.

These are corrections within the NCAA structure. The LEAD1 PAC clearly anticipates a struggle on a broader battleground, even as advocacy intensifies to accord athletes a more generous share of the revenues their efforts generate.

Yow says she’s “never been in a room” where colleagues discussed how they might avoid the need to pay athletes. Maybe not, but creating a PAC immediately raised suspicions that’s what athletic directors aim to do. UNC’s Cunningham, the first vice president of NACDA, does recognize peer interest in securing a protective antitrust exemption, akin to what Major League Baseball has enjoyed since 1922. “I don’t know if it’s a goal, but I think it’s something that people are considering,” he says.

Meanwhile, everyone insists they’re acting in the best interests of college athletes. Yet until athletes somehow find their own unified voice, they’re still not represented.