College sports leaders have spent years debating how to manage athlete compensation and player movement. Tennessee men’s basketball players have offered a blunt response: negotiate with the athletes.
The University of Tennessee, its men’s basketball players and Athletes.org developed a proposed term sheet outlining what a collective bargaining agreement could look like, according to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports. Athletic director Danny White backed the exercise and hopes it moves the conversation toward binding agreements and a CBA.
“Our athletes want a CBA,” White told Yahoo Sports.
The distinction matters: Tennessee has not signed a collective bargaining agreement with its players. The term sheet is a proposal meant to show how negotiations might work, not a contract that is now in effect. Still, it gives the national debate something more concrete than another round of arguments about whether college sports should change.
What Tennessee’s proposed framework covers
The proposal would replace the pachwork of revenue-sharing and school-affiliated NIL deals with a universal athletic services agreement that pays players for their services. It also includes a proposed men’s basketball salary cap of about $22 million, an athletic-department spending floor, guaranteed minimum compensation for roster spots and a separate pool for postseason revenue.
In another sign of momentum for collective bargaining, Tennessee administrators negotiated a proposed term sheet with basketball players and Athletes(dot)org that AD Danny White hopes furthers the CBA conversation nationally. “Our athletes want a CBA.” https://t.co/Sa1cvJqlHS
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) November 10, 2026The framework reaches beyond pay. It proposes guaranteed medical and health coverage, retention bonuses for veteran players and a jointly designed transfer portal period lasting 15 days after a sport’s national championship. It also sketches out enforcement, arbitration and agent-certification rules, including a proposed 5% cap on agent fees.
Those are significant changes, and each would raise questions about how a national system could work across schools, conferences and sports. Tennessee’s exercise does not answer all of them. It does, however, show the kinds of issues players and administrators could negotiate rather than leave to court cases, state laws and shifting NCAA rules.
A test case for the next phase of college sports
White has argued that collective bargaining could create a more stable structure for college athletics. The Tennessee term sheet gives that idea a test case with school leadership involved and players helping shape the proposal.
Whether other programs follow remains an open question. A single men’s basketball team cannot set rules for the entire NCAA, and a proposed term sheet does not resolve the legal and practical hurdles to a formal CBA.
But the message from Tennessee is hard to miss: players want a seat at the table, and the university is willing to talk about what that could mean. In a college-sports landscape still searching for durable rules on compensation and movement, that conversation may be the story to watch.
