We recently reported that members of the Northwestern University football team are weighing the option to unionize.

According to labor law experts, the student players may have a case.

A recent play by some college football players to unionize is within the realm of possibility – as long as they convince the National Labor Relations Board they’re employees – which they seem to be, according to some labor law experts.

“From a reality perspective, many college athletes are analogous to ‘employees,’ but they are not paid any real salary other than tuition scholarships,” Charles Craver, a labor law professor at The George Washington University, said in an email to The College Fix.

Craver was responding to the recent news that the newly formed College Athletes Players Association has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to form the first-ever labor union for college athletes, a contentious issue in which billions of dollars in revenue hangs in the balance.

…The NCAA operates under the rule that student-athletes are amateurs and should remain unpaid. The organization has in the past punished teams that illegally paid players under the table, suspended players that have been paid, and vacated wins from the programs that have done so.

But because Northwestern is a private university, and not subject to state laws like public universities are, it falls under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board and can petition them for such causes.

Craver and Edwards are not the only scholars who think the athletes have a case.

Stanford Law School professor emeritus and former NLRB chairman William Gould predicts the board will rule for the players.

“I think these guys are employees because their compensation is unrelated to education, unlike the teaching assistants in Brown University, and they are supervised not by faculty, but by coaches,” Gould told The Associated Press. “Their program for which they receive compensation does not have a fundamentally educational component. So given the direction and control that supervisory authorities have over them, I think they are easily employees within the meaning of the act.”