Senator says it's 'hard to root' for NCAA athletes who get paid

If Manchin, a powerful figure in Washington, D.C., is against legislation allowing endorsement deals for college athletes, it could be a sign of trouble ahead as officials work to regulate a market that has resulted in multi-million-dollar valuations for some athletes.

Without that legislation, recruiting and endorsements will remain the "wild, wild west" where stars are essentially being paid to play for certain schools, as Penn State head coach James Franklin described it.

That's very much the antithesis of the NCAA's wish, as the organization has long argued against such payments and harshly punished schools found to violate their rules against it.

However, Jack Swarbrick, the athletic director for Notre Dame who was a witness in the Senate committee hearing, proposed what he described as a "fairly radical notion": have athletes remain students of the school, but allow them to collectively bargain as unionized employees do.

"We don’t have a mechanism to [collectively bargain] without them becoming employees," Swarbrick said, as reported by Yahoo Sports' Ross Dellenger. "It would require a new mechanism that would recognize the rights of student-athletes to negotiate for the terms and conditions of their participation as athletes without being employees. I think it’s worth considering.”

Swarbrick's proposal sounds like what the Northwestern football team proposed in 2014 when they tried to unionize, though their union was struck down the next year after the National Labor Relations Board voted unanimously that the athletes weren't employees.

To achieve a different outcome would require legislation, something that's often difficult in a fiercely divided D.C. But if Swarbrick is right, the NCAA could be one law away from taming the "wild, wild west" while continuing to allow student-athletes to be compensated for their name, image and likeness.