LOS ANGELES — Lincoln Riley hasn’t bit his tongue, for the better part of a year, on his belief on the modern world of collegiate football. This was a “business,” and had been for a while, USC’s head coach said at a spring event hosted by NIL collective House of Victory. Staff structuring, Riley said in July at the Big Ten Media Days, was moving towards a “professional model.” And in December, Riley referred to a range of USC’s transfer-portal movement as “business decisions.”
They were business decisions made, though, without any structure. Collegiate athletes have yet to be legally recognized as employees even as schools like USC prepare to distribute revenue directly to players in 2025-26. And on Friday, a long-standing push that could have enabled USC athletes to unionize stalled out.
Almost a year after the initial hearing for the National Labor Relations Board’s landmark case arguing USC student-athletes should be deemed employees, the National College Players Association (NCPA) — the charging party in the case — has issued a motion to withdraw charges of unfair labor practices against the USC, the Pac-12 and the NCAA.
That’s a legal mouthful. To simplify: if a judge had ruled in the NCPA and NLRB’s favor, it would have opened the door for USC athletes to unionize and collectively bargain with the university, placing USC at the center of potentially radical changes to the operation of college sports. Instead, a years-long fight will likely drift away with the NCPA’s withdrawal, a huge legal monkey off USC’s back.
“The university agrees this case should be dismissed because it has no merit,” USC wrote in a statement to the Southern California News Group. “The evidence presented during the NLRB hearing confirmed that our student-athletes should not be classified as employees. We remain committed to providing exceptional opportunities for all of our student-athletes.”
In May of 2023, after Ramogi Huma, the director of the NCPA, originally brought a case to the NLRB, the labor relations organization filed an official complaint arguing that USC, the Pac-12 and NCAA had “misclassified the Players as non-employee student athletes.” Throughout the initial hearing, held in separate installments at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, the NLRB got a variety of points to their favor on record through USC student-athlete testimony — namely, establishing USC football’s level of control over players’ schedules similar to that of an employer. And in the summer, Huma told the Southern California News Group, “We’re going to win,” expressing extreme confidence in his organization’s legal standing throughout the case.
The NCPA’s tune changed drastically in the motion filed Friday. A primary reason for the initial charge, the motion explained, was to “help create a pathway” for USC athletes to receive compensation. But that pathway is already established, as USC prepares to opt into the revenue-sharing model proposed in the House v. NCAA settlement, which if approved would allow the university to simply pay players directly.
There’s another key factor lurking behind the NCPA’s decision, too. President-elect Donald Trump will take office Jan. 20, and experts widely believe he would enact sweeping changes to present NLRB leadership established under previous President Joe Biden, a leadership that’s been strongly in favor of collegiate-athlete employee status. Such changes, experts point out, could have affected the NLRB’s ruling on this USC case.
“This is highly strategic, to avoid setting precedence that will complicate efforts to establish employee status for college athletes in the future,” said Jodi Balsam, an expert on sports law and professor at the Brooklyn Law School.
Between the NCPA’s decision and Dartmouth basketball players recently ending an attempt to unionize, the momentum for collegiate-athlete employee status appears to have slowed. But multiple experts still pointed to a pending case, Johnson v. NCAA, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the NCAA’s motion to dismiss and ruled that collegiate athletes could be deemed employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“It’s going to be an even stronger case, now that schools are going to pay NIL deals directly to athletes,” said Jim Cavale, founder of collegiate-athlete advocacy group Athletes.org, “because it looks like an employment agreement, it smells like an employment agreement, it’s just not called one.”
In the meantime, though, USC has dodged a potentially momentous legal decision.