Unionizing College Athletes

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Jade Smith
Harold Blanco
First Year Seminar
17 September 2014
Professional College Athletes
In Michael Dobie’s editorial, “A rim-rattling ruling in college sports; Athletes aren’t
blind to the billions they earn for the NCAA. Change is coming…” he right off the bat starts
talking about sports drama. He shares information about the National Labor Relations Board,
which is an independent federal agency that protects the rights of private sector employees to
join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions (“Who We
Are”). He states that the NLRB ruled football players at Northwester University as employees of
the school. As employees of the school it gives players the ability to form a union and engage in
collective bargaining. Dobie continues on talking about the NCAA being sued for not protecting
athletes from head injuries, gives players money for schooling but not compensation. The NCAA
goes against their word by calling collegiate athletes student-athletes. The NLRB refuses to side
with the NCAA. They believe that the NCAA is going against their word on most things and that
students are spending too much time on sports to be considered a student-athlete. They will
expect a fight from the NCAA to stop the ruling that collegiate athletes are no longer student
athletes, but employees (Dobie n. pag).

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Gary Klein wrote my first source, he works for the Los Angeles Times. He mostly covers
USC’s athletics, mainly the football program. He began working for The Times in the San
Fernando Valley edition and has reported on high school, college and pro sports (La Times). The
article was published on March 27th, 2014. While reading, you can infer the article did not have
any bias or opinion in it. Seeing as how the author works for a company and only writes about
sports he is more credible then someone who knows nothing about sports writing it. You can find
quote after quote in his article from people directly involved in the situation, which is a good
way for the reader to connect to both sides of the issue.
In Filip Bondy’s “Paying players should not be name of game” you can tell from the get
go that there is some sort of bias. He is already saying what he thinks about the issue. Bondy
works as a columnist at the Daily News (New York), he has published eight nonfiction books
about sports, and is a journalism professor (Monclair State University). His background
information about writing sports books shows that he is most likely credible when it comes to the
topic of sports. I found out my information about Bondy on a website ending in .edu therefore
his bio is credible. The article written was published on March 27th, 2014. Although he writes
the whole article sharing what he thinks about the situation, he backs his opinion with facts that
make readers more easily persuaded towards his point of view.
My other source, also against college athlete being employees, is credible. It is a
scholarly source written by Dick Weiss. Weiss is a sportswriter/columnist and works with the
Big10 and Blue Star Media (“Dick Weiss”). Having worked in sports for so long this makes him
more knowledgeable about the topic from the start. He does share his opinion and instead of
disagreeing he is pushing more towards the fact that athletes should be able to be paid for what
they do and able to form unions. He feels there is no equality in the differences between revenue

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that coaches get coming from a sports bowl and players not getting anything. He ends his article
with his final thought that, “Paying the players a fair wage might be a way to keep everyone
honest and keep kids away from the agents and runner who have infested campuses across the
country” (Weiss n. pag.).
Michael Dobie’s article was well rounded. I felt like it gave all of the information it
needed and left people with a clear thought on the topic. Not necessarily having the reader with a
dead set opinion on whether or not they agree but just that they knew all that they should from
reading the article.
Credibility is the most important thing when reading something you need to be more
informed about. What good does it do if you are reading something about supporting the church
written by an atheist? It would most likely be much different then if a religious person were
writing something about supporting the church. Credibility is a key role because it contributes to
the significance of a person and keeps people from questioning a persons principles and
qualities. For someone who does not have credibility in what they are writing about would make
them seem like a liar, which would steer people in the other direction for any of their work. It is
easy to communicate misinformation by filling the air with repetitive thoughts. That would come
off as not knowing the information well enough so they need to dance around the topic. You
would seem much less credible if you have multiple contradictory statements about your topic.
Misinformation is fueled because authors might not have the credibility they need to be fully
aware of what they are writing about.
If you want to prevent the spread of misinformation you can do so by building
credibility. You can build credibility by developing expertise in whatever you decide on. It
would be most helpful to stick with one thing and study and form knowledge on that so when

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you do end up writing something about it you will be the most informed and readers will trust the
information you are giving them more than information from someone else.
I found useful information in all of my sources because they were all credible. All of the
authors had a great deal of background information on sports. They all used facts or quotes,
which made their article credible because it was coming from people who were directly involved
in the situation. Even though a few used their opinion they fueled their opinion with facts which
made the reader still have a clear understanding of what was going on.

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Works Cited
Bondy, Filip. "Paying players should not be name of game." New York's Hometown Newspaper
27 Mar. 2014: n. pag. Print.
"Dick Weiss." Linkedin. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/dickweiss>.
Dobie, Michael. "A rim-rattling ruling in college sports; Athletes aren't blind to the billions they
earn for the NCAA. Change is coming..." Newsday [New York] 30 Mar. 2014: n. pag.
Print.
"Gary Klein." LA Times. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2014. <http://www.latimes.com/la-bio-gary
klein-staff.html>.
Klein, Gary. "Board says college players can unionize; Football players at Northwestern win
NLRB ruling. It could lead to vast changes." Los Angeles Times 27 Mar. 2014: n. pag.
Print.
Montclair State University. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.
<http://www.montclair.edu/profilepages/view_profile.php?username=bondyf>.
Weiss, Dick. "SHOW THEM THE MONEY." New York's Hometown Newspaper 1 July 2012:
n. pag. Print.
"Who We Are." National Labor Relations Board. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.
<http://www.nlrb.gov/who-we-are>.