Tennessee, men's basketball team work on CBA-like deal

quote:

---

The University of Tennessee men's basketball team released a collective bargaining term sheet Tuesday, a result of negotiations with the school's athletic administration, that includes a salary cap and spending floor, eligibility and transfer rules and cap circumvention enforcement.

The document, which is not a signed CBA and won't have any impact on how Tennessee's players are paid or treated moving forward, is meant to show what an agreement between athletes and a university can look like.

The basketball team elected Tyler Lundblade, Campbell Duncan and DeWayne Brown II to be player representatives and work with the college sports players association Athletes.Org and negotiate with the athletic department to complete the mock-trial exercise. Several rounds of discussions took place in August and September, with the deal agreed to on Oct. 1.

"We know what we want and how we want to move forward," said Brown, a freshman for the 11th-ranked Volunteers. "Working through the collective bargaining process has been great and I hope it's just a steppingstone for more college athletes to replicate our process with their own schools."

Tennessee athletic director Danny White and AO executive director Brandon Copeland both told ESPN that to be effective, an actual collective bargaining agreement in the future would have to be negotiated between a larger group of schools and players rather that one athletic department and its athletes. White and Copeland both said they feel that collective bargaining is the only sustainable route to stability in college sports.

"There will be people who say this would never work or that college athletes aren't mature enough or don't care, this shows they do care," Copeland said. "They're strong enough and mature enough to have these discussions with their university."

---

quote:

---

The hypothetical term sheet proposes to replace revenue share and university-affiliate NIL contracts with a universal services agreement with payments to begin at the date of enrollment or first practice.

The proposed spending floor contains two options: Spend 89% of the average annual salary cap over the agreed four-year window or negotiate a percentage of the athletic department budget to be established during the official collective bargaining negotiation. The deal would also include freshman pay scale similar to the rookie wage scale in professional sports and a minimum compensation that covers cost of attendance.

Under cap circumvention enforcement terms, the university, athletes, coaches and associated entities would all be subject to penalties. No specific dollar figure for the cap was included in the term sheet.

---

Loading Twitter/X Embed...
If tweet fails to load, click here.