ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit Comes to Shocking Admission That It’s Time for College Athletes to Unionize

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for ESPN

While talking this past weekend about players who opt out of bowl games and claiming, “this era of player just doesn’t love football,” ESPN’s analyst Kirk Herbstreit is now calling for college football players to unionize.

“I want to kind of recalibrate the whole system,” Herbstreit said on the latest episode of Barstool’s Pardon My Take podcast. “I say we make the players employees. I say we’re down a path now we form a union. I mean that’s where were going with this thing.”

Herbstreit continued that players need to accept what they’re getting into after they form a union.

“If you do that players got to understand when they go get a massage that’s for free now, that’s going to cost them. When they go to the cryo machine, that’s going to cost them. It’s a very different relationship,” the ESPN analyst added. “But that’s where I think that’s where we’re headed at this point because players need to be treated that way. They need to benefit more than they are not just with name image and likeness.”

Herbstreit added that players need to feel valued. “They need to feel like, okay, they’re appreciating what we bring to the table,” he told Barstool.

Herbstreit said in the past he would have never considered college football players unionizing as a possibility. “These are all things that five years ago, I would have never thought we would have gotten to, but we have to accept where we are.”