Stanford football players have taken the first concrete step toward something college sports has talked around for years: a collective bargaining unit.
On Monday, the College Football Players Association announced that Stanford had become the organization’s first chapter led by active athletes. It is a notable move, but only that - a beginning, not a finished model. The bigger questions still hang over the idea, especially the one nobody in college athletics has cleanly answered yet: who would the players actually bargain with?
CFBPA founder and executive director Jason Stahl, a former University of Minnesota faculty member, said he believes the answer should eventually be the conferences.
“We are very optimistic that other chapters will be announced soon,” Stahl told The Athletic.
The group itself is not new. The CFBPA was launched five years ago as an athlete advocacy organization with the goal of organizing players at the major college level. Stanford players had been in contact with Stahl for more than a year before this chapter was announced, and in late June he held a voluntary informational meeting on the Palo Alto, Calif., campus that drew more than 50 members of the team.
The exact number of players who formally joined the chapter was not disclosed, but Stanford did elect two representatives: fifth-year offensive lineman Fisher Anderson and fifth-year linebacker Ernest Cooper.
Anderson said on a CFBPA-produced podcast that Stanford’s relationship with the NFL Players Association helped push him toward the idea.
“We (at Stanford) have always had a pretty tight relationship with the NFL Players Association,” Anderson said. “Last year when this opportunity came about, it made me think if this is something that has had such a benefit on the National Football League, could it be done on the college football level?”
Third-year defensive lineman Benedict Umeh said the NFLPA meetings left him wanting the same kind of structure in college.
“Whenever I leave those meetings (with the NFLPA) I think, ‘Why don’t we have one of those?’” Umeh told The Athletic.
That frustration is part of a broader debate that has only grown as college sports has become more professionalized. A bipartisan bill aimed at creating national compensation standards and antitrust protections for the NCAA and its conferences has struggled in Congress, and some college sports leaders have floated collective bargaining as a way to bring order to the system without waiting on lawmakers.
Umeh said he sees value in federal action, but also sees the problem with leaving players on the sidelines.
“Standardization is necessary,” Umeh said. “The congressional bill could serve toward that purpose, give us the legal scaffolding to get everything in place. The issue with a congressional bill, in my eyes, is the players don’t get much of a say at all.”
The push at Stanford fits into a much longer history of college athlete organizing, one that has repeatedly flared up and then faded. Northwestern football players tried to unionize in 2014, arguing they were effectively employees of the private school. A petition filed with the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago by the College Players Association, led by college athlete advocate and former UCLA football player Ramogi Huma, was eventually rejected.
Another wave came in 2020, when Pac-12 players raised concerns about conference leaders’ decisions over whether football should be played during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stahl was involved in that effort and later founded the CFBPA in 2021.
Dartmouth men’s basketball players also voted to form a union, making the same basic argument as Northwestern’s football players: they should be treated as employees of the school. Dartmouth and the Ivy League fought the effort, and the movement ended in 2025 when the Service Employees International Union withdrew the petition, citing the expected leadership change at the NLRB under the Trump administration.
Stahl made another attempt in 2022 to organize players at Big Ten schools, hoping to build support for better long-term medical benefits and possibly a share of conference revenue. Penn State showed some traction, but nothing lasting came from it.
Athletes.org has also been trying to organize athletes in recent years and created an online platform for athletes in similar sports to connect.
The legal and labor picture remains unsettled, especially now that schools are allowed to directly pay athletes through a revenue-sharing arrangement that began last year. Still, athletes are not technically being paid for playing. They are compensated for their name, image and likeness and treated as independent contractors.
“The schools are paying us to play,” Umeh said.
That distinction matters because state labor laws differ so widely that a model built around bargaining with individual schools would not create a national standard. Stahl and the CFBPA say the long-term answer is for players at the highest level of Division I football to organize through local chapters and negotiate with their conferences.
“College football players deserve a meaningful voice in the decisions that shape their athletic, academic and economic futures,” Stahl said. “Stanford football is the first of what the CFBPA envisions as 17 ACC football chapters, creating the framework for conference-wide player representation and, ultimately, collective bargaining.”
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