Donald Trump and his party’s leaders have been simultaneously pushing to shield higher education officials from COVID-related lawsuits while demanding that schools ignore health warnings and launch the college football season. In calling for a resumption of collegiate sports, Republican lawmakers have depicted themselves as defending the interests of players because, in their words, “these young men need a season.”

New research, however, suggests that it is not the unpaid players who most “need” a season. Instead, those with a real financial stake in reopening are the coaches and university officials who are together making huge sums of money off players who are barred from being paid and joining a union to collectively bargain for compensation. Those prohibitions continue, thanks to the same lawmakers now demanding the unpaid players risk their lives by returning to the football field to generate the revenues that finance coaches’ multimillion-dollar pay packages.

A new study from researchers at Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and University of Michigan found that if Congress permitted Division I college football and basketball players to form a union and collectively bargain for the same revenue share as professional athletes, on average, each college “football player would receive $360,000 per year and each basketball player would earn nearly $500,000 per year.”