Regardless of which side you come down upon in the debate over whether student-athletes should be allowed to unionize, there’s no question that the NCAA and its member schools brought this upon themselves. They have dismissed the student-athletes’ concerns, if they ever listened. The industry needs to find an answer beyond “Shut up and look how much we’re spending on you.” That isn’t working.

Sadly, they think it is.

But then I attended the NCAA convention earlier this month, where Duke lacrosse player Maddie Salamone — representing the organization’s largely ceremonial Student-Athlete Advisory Committee — got up in front of 800 Division I administrators and lamented, “The student-athlete voice is not as meaningful as we have been led to believe in the past.”

You would think at some point that somebody with a modicum of common sense would urge his or her peers to pull their collective heads out of their asses.  But this is the NCAA we’re talking about, so that’s still something of a pipe dream.