2 lawyers-to-be make a compelling case for paying player-workers

• Reprints

Updated: March 18, 2012 8:20AM

So often, the truth must come from the mouths of babes. Or young men, at least.

In this case, it comes from the mouths — OK, laptops — of Nicholas Fram, 26, and Thomas Ward Frampton, 28, graduating law students at Cal.

The two authors and lawyers-to-be soon will have their 63-page research paper published in an esteemed university law review. That is an honor and endorsement of thought process and reasoning usually reserved for professors only.

The title of their work is ‘‘A Union of Amateurs: A Legal Blueprint to Reshape Big-Time College Athletics,’’ and it is quite simply an analysis of how existing labor law might blow the NCAA’s big-business model into the ether.

The NCAA, as you know, has grown bloated and haughty with the income from its ‘‘amateurs-only’’ Division I men’s football and basketball programs until it has swollen up like one of those vest-busting, cigar-chomping politicians from the Tammany Hall era.

No, Tammany Hall didn’t play for Auburn. But these two fellows, who did their undergraduate and master’s work at Yale and Stanford, are deep thinkers and sports fans, and they quite simply didn’t like what they saw on the field of play.

The idea that professionalized but unpaid athletes can’t participate in the cash flow that comes from their performances and rewards others — and could be censured even for attempting to get their share — seemed, to Fram and Frampton, illogical, unfair and likely illegal.

The NCAA’s idea of sharing the wealth is to crack down on anyone who tries to circumvent its incomprehensible rule book and to make penalties ever harsher for player-workers who might want, say, to trade trinkets for free tattoos.

People at the top never willingly share what they think is theirs, and nothing can change for the workers without dissent. NCAA policy meetings never include athletes themselves, only the brass. The NCAA never has had to worry about painful player-worker strikes or lockouts the way the NFL and NBA just did. And without the athletes having the power that comes from banding together, nothing will change.

When I recently suggested that players in the BCS championship game should hold out for their cut of the millions of dollars in revenue, critics said this was akin to suggesting treason.

Fram and Frampton don’t see it that way. The players, they believe, have the right to act like a union because they are, by labor law, employees.

Here are the questions the authors ask: ‘‘Would existing labor law allow such a union? .  .  . Could players compel universities to negotiate over the terms and conditions of their service? Were school officials to retaliate against athletes who .  .  . collectively withheld their labor, could such punishment constitute an unfair labor practice?’’

Their answer to all those things is a resounding yes.

You would have to read the entire treatise to understand why the law shows this to be true. And Frampton apologized in an email about the legal gobbledygook.

‘‘Like I said, it’s definitely for a legal academic audience,’’ he wrote. ‘‘One of the great virtues of a legal education is that you learn how to be incomprehensible to almost anyone you’d want to communicate with.’’

He was joking because the paper is as clear as a bell. It is, in fact, fascinating and — dare we say it? — revolutionary.

When we talked on the phone, Frampton thought hard about the reason he and Fram spent so much energy and time on the paper.

‘‘We wrote it because we hope it has the potential to shake up the status quo,’’ he said. ‘‘Our hope is to make big-time sports more just. That’s the core of it: to recognize labor for what it is.’’

Work is good. It just needs to be identified and rewarded.

And if Fram and Frampton are right, the economic payout involving elite college sports soon will change forever. For the better, in fact.

Fairness is always better, regardless of what the fat cats say.