Welcome to the Edge of Sports podcast brought to you by the Nation magazine.

I'm Dave Ziron.

This week we are talking to Jason Stahl, the founder of the College Football Players Association,

and he is going to unwrap for us why the Wild West of college football with its monster transfer portal

and quarterbacks making $5 million a year and linemen making absolutely nothing.

This incredibly just Byzantine system can actually make sense

through the process of unionization. Jason Stahl's going to explain that to us. Can't wait for you to

listen to what he has to say and let's go to him right now. Jason, how you doing, sir?

Good, Dave. How are you doing? Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, there's so much I want to talk to you about, but let's start with right now as we're talking.

You're headed to New York on Friday. Could you speak about what that's about, please?

Yeah, so I'm headed in New York City. The CUNY School of Labor is having an event.

I don't know to say it's a launch, but it feels kind of like a launch to sort of introduce people, the media, the public, to a bill that New York State has put forward to give college athletes collective bargaining rights within the state of New York.

Full collective bargaining rights, unionization, and so forth, classifying them as employees,

obviously. Mimics, I would say, the Michigan bill. There's a similar bill in Michigan that was

proposed, gosh, I want to say at least a couple of years ago now and has

been languishing a bit. But yeah, I think that the states could be a way, just as we saw with

NIL five years ago, five, six years ago, the states could really be a kind of battleground

for how college athlete unionization,

collective bargaining, labor rights gets adjudicated here because the feds are so MIA, basically,

when it comes to this issue or actively hostile towards it. So yeah, going to be there on Friday.

If anyone's around on Friday, if this gets posted before Friday,

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