It’s Super Bowl week, and all eyes are on the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks, due to go helmet-to-helmet this weekend in America’s most-watched sports event. But another football team is making headlines this week: the Northwestern University Wildcats. Led by Wildcats quarterback Kain Colter and Ramogi Huma, president of the college athlete advocacy group National College Players Association, members of the team filed a petition to be recognized as a union at the Chicago regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
It’s unclear whether the unionization play by the Wildcats—unprecedented in the world of college sports—will make it to the end zone. The determining factor, according to experts, will be whether or not student athletes qualify as “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
