Decades ago, prescient NCAA leader Walter Byers foresaw that college athletes might not be content with just tuition, books, room and board in exchange for their labors and would come looking for — shudder — compensation or a voice in association affairs.

Seeking to head off a Colorado workman’s compensation case, he calculatingly coined the term “student-athletes” to refer to the players and made it a mandatory part of the association’s lexicon and message that is insisted upon to this day.

It was an ingenious invention. At once, it stamped the players as students, not employees due compensation, and as athletes, a class the NCAA could exert control over and administer like chattel.

But what has helped beat back dozens of lawsuits now faces a necessary and long overdue test. A group of Northwestern University athletes has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to allow them to be represented by the recently formed College Athletes Players Association, which is backed by the United Steelworkers, with the contention that Northwestern is their employer.

For the NCAA, which is already under siege on concussions, videogame royalties, stipends, reorganization and other fronts, involvement by the USW is worse than the prospect of another 12 rounds with Jerry Tarkanian. And this figures to be an even more protracted and expensive battle.

It was, after all, Marvin Miller who came over from the USW to shake the foundation of Major League Baseball and deliver the game’s first collective bargaining agreement in 1968.

Bit by bit college sports has been headed this way. The Grambling football team’s boycott that prompted the forfeit of a road game against Jackson State last season said as much. More telling was players at Georgia, Georgia Tech and Northwestern wearing APU “all players united” messages and sending a threat of solidarity.

That showed the players’ rights movement was gaining steam and the real nightmare at NCAA headquarters — athletes at marquee schools banding together — wasn’t far off.

Whether you believe college athletes should be paid or not, it is hard to argue that they shouldn’t at least have some real voice in how they are governed. Right now there is basically a take-it-or-leave-it policy in place because individual athletes have had little clout with the NCAA.

So, the NCAA sets the rules on the conditions under which a player may transfer to another school even while their coaches are free to jump jobs whenever they please. 

The NCAA determines how many hours a school is supposed to have athletes practice, how long the seasons will be and how many games can be played.

The NCAA sets no ceiling on how much coaches or administrators can be compensated for going to a bowl game or postseason tournament but does impose limits on the value of gifts for the players.

All of which might eventually lead to the NCAA (if it is still around) grudgingly adopting a new label: “student-stakeholders.”

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.