Today’s guest columnist is Chris Corr, executive director of the College Sport Research Institute.

In January 2014, Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter and his teammates did something that, at the time, seemed almost unthinkable: They asked to be recognized as employees and to collectively bargain with their university.

The effort ultimately failed. Although a regional National Labor Relations Board director initially found Northwestern’s scholarship football players to be employees, the full NLRB declined to exercise jurisdiction in 2015 and dismissed the players’ representation petition without resolving the broader question of whether college athletes are employees under federal labor law.

But Colter and his teammates permanently altered the conversation surrounding college sports. More than a decade later, calls for employee status and collective bargaining remain rooted in many of the same concerns they raised: athlete health and safety, economic rights, representation and a meaningful voice in the rules governing their participation.

The problem is that efforts to establish college athletes as employees capable of collectively bargaining have continued to fall short of becoming the organizing force many advocates anticipated.

One reason may be relatively simple: The people most directly affected by the movement are not necessarily the people best positioned to build it.

College athletes have extraordinarily short competitive windows. They arrive on campus concerned with playing time, academics, professional aspirations and, increasingly, maximizing their compensation. Asking an 18- or 21-year-old athlete to sacrifice some portion of a present opportunity for an uncertain benefit that may principally accrue to someone else five or 10 years in the future is an inherently difficult organizing proposition.

That does not mean athletes are apathetic. It means organizers may be targeting the wrong center of influence.

Late last month, the College Football Players Association announced that Stanford had become the first program to establish a player-led CFBPA chapter, with players electing teammates to represent them and the organization hoping to expand the model to other schools. The effort is commendable and represents another meaningful attempt to give athletes a structured voice.

But player-centered organizing efforts risk overlooking one of the most consequential shifts in college athletics over the past several years: the rise of the athlete representative.

Agents are no longer peripheral figures who enter an athlete’s life shortly before a professional draft. At the highest levels of college football and basketball, agents and agencies increasingly advise athletes on recruiting, transfers, NIL opportunities, revenue-sharing agreements, endorsement arrangements, and decisions about whether remaining in college makes more financial sense than turning professional.

In other words, elite college athletes may not understand the intricacies of the National Labor Relations Act or the mechanics of collective bargaining, but they increasingly understand what their agent does.

Organizers should take advantage of this reality.

Unlike the individual college athlete, an agent has an obvious long-term economic incentive to improve the market in which college athletes operate.

Consider how dramatically that market has changed. Florida basketball star Thomas Haugh chose to return for the 2026-27 season despite being viewed as a potential lottery pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. Florida acknowledged that lucrative compensation opportunities were part of the equation, while reporting indicated that his college compensation could rival or exceed what he would initially have received as an NBA first-round pick.

Football has produced similar calculations. Carson Beck remained in college for an additional season amid reports of a multimillion-dollar package at Miami, while Quinn Ewers reportedly had an offer worth more than $4 million to remain in college before choosing the NFL Draft. Ewers’ base salary his first year as an NFL rookie was $840,000.

These are no longer isolated NIL stories. They are evidence that college athletics has become a genuine labor market, whether the legal system is prepared to call it one or not. And where there is a labor market, there is an opportunity for representatives to increase both their clients’ earnings and their own.

For decades, collective bargaining in professional sports has been a primary mechanism through which athletes have been emboldened to negotiate increased salaries and, saliently, significant benefits, working conditions, health protections, grievance procedures, free-agency systems, and rules governing the economic relationship between players and teams. The NBA’s current collective bargaining agreement, for example, expressly establishes the terms and conditions of players’ employment and the rights and obligations of players, clubs and the league.

College athletes now negotiate increasingly valuable economic arrangements without an equivalent collective structure.

This should matter to agents.

If an agent represents 20 college athletes, a system that produces greater athlete compensation creates more client value. If an agency represents hundreds, the financial incentive is even clearer. Unlike an individual athlete whose college career might last two or three more seasons, agencies can benefit from improvements to the athlete-compensation market for decades.

Labor organizers, therefore, should stop seeing agents merely as adjacent participants in college athletics and begin treating them as potential partners who hold significant influence over the actual labor itself.

A number of recent studies illustrate this point. During the recruiting process, college coaches and recruiters in Power Four football and Major Division I basketball communicate less with prospective athletes than ever before. Among transfers, the value of a genuine relationship—once the premium determinant factor in a player’s enrollment decision—is even more mitigated. In fact, many players in the transfer portal deploy their agents to solicit the best deal they can find. Recruiting visits and months-long courtships are a thing of the past.

There is another reason we should heed calls for the organization of labor in collegiate athletics: Collective representation could protect athletes from the agents themselves.

Professional players associations do far more than bargain against leagues. They regulate the people permitted to represent their members. The NFLPA requires agents negotiating NFL player contracts to become certified and subjects them to its regulations and disciplinary system. The WNBPA similarly certifies agents, monitors contracts and expressly describes its regulatory system as a way to deter unethical practices and ensure reasonable agent fees.

College sports has no comparable uniform national system.

Industry observers have reported college athlete agents collecting 20-30% in commission on some arrangements, a stark contrast with the tightly regulated contract-representation environment that exists in major professional sports. Congress has recognized the problem, with the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act introduced in 2026 including provisions that would cap certain athlete-agent fees at 5% and impose additional contract protections.

That creates what may initially appear to be a paradox. Why would agents support a system that could limit what they charge?

There are a couple of reasons. Primarily, sophisticated agencies should prefer a larger, more stable and more predictable market over a smaller, chaotic one. An agent may ultimately have more to gain from earning a reasonable percentage of a protected, collectively negotiated compensation structure than by extracting an extraordinary percentage from a marketplace whose rules change every year.

In this sense, collective bargaining could expand the economic pie for athletes while simultaneously professionalizing the representation industry around them.

That alignment of interests is precisely what organizers should exploit.

The legal and political path toward collective bargaining in college athletics remains uncertain. Whether athletes ultimately organize as employees, through conference-level bargaining structures, through some new statutory framework, or through another mechanism altogether remains unresolved.

But the economic transformation is already here. Schools are directly compensating athletes under the post-House settlement model, third-party NIL remains an important source of income, and athletes routinely make career decisions involving millions of dollars.

The organizing strategy should evolve with that reality.

Kain Colter’s generation tried to convince the country that college athletes possessed economic interests worthy of collective representation. Today’s athletes no longer have to make that case. The marketplace has made it for them.

The question now is who can turn that economic power into durable institutional power.

Players should not be expected to build that infrastructure alone. The people already sitting beside them in living rooms, negotiating their compensation, evaluating transfer opportunities and advising them whether to remain in college or turn professional may be the most underutilized constituency in the college-athlete labor movement.

If organizers want collective bargaining to move from an argument about what college sports ought to become to an institution capable of actually changing it, they should stop merely trying to engage and mobilize the athletes.

They should start organizing the agents.

Dr. Chris Corr is a principal lecturer of Athletic Leadership at Clemson University and executive director of the College Sport Research Institute (CSRI). More information on CSRI and its annual Adjusted Graduation Gap Reports can be found at www.csri.org.