In January, during an interview on the podcast Pardon My Take, Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN’s lead college football analyst, said the quiet part out loud.

“I say we make the players employees,” he told PMT. “I say we’re on a path to unionization. … That’s where we’re headed.”

A month later, the movement to make college athletes employees of their universities took another significant step.

On Tuesday, the National College Players Association filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the NCAA office, the Pac-12 Conference and California schools USC and UCLA as single and joint employers of FBS football players and Division I men’s and women’s basketball players. The goal is to affirm employee status for D-I basketball players and FBS football players.

It is the latest chapter of an athlete rights movement that has generated sweeping changes to archaic NCAA policies governing athlete compensation and transfer policies. Buoyed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the NCAA v. Alston antitrust lawsuit in June, the country's sentiment has started to swing in the favor of players over those in charge—coaches, school administrators and conference officials.

In fact, the NCPA’s stroke only comes after new NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo encouraged such a move. In a September memo, she deemed college athletes employees under the National Labor Relations Act, a thundering message from the agency’s lead lawyer that invited athletes and...

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