Jason Stahl

Jason Stahl is the founder and Executive Director of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA). Jason is a former faculty member in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. At Minnesota, he also directed one of the largest programs for first-year student experience in the nation. It was through these twin roles that Jason met and educated hundreds of college athletes over a ten-year career. In these roles, Jason took a particular interest in the lives of the 60 or so football players who he came to know in the classroom. Seen by the public as “big men on campus” Jason came instead to see the more complicated reality of their lives as “student-athletes.”

Beginning in 2017, Jason became a tireless advocate for players who came to him to report an environment of player mistreatment and manipulation within the football program on campus. Over the next three and a half years, Jason worked internally at Minnesota to report what he learned from players. This advocacy work led to his demotion and subsequent resignation in the summer of 2020.

Since summer 2020, Jason has worked at his Substack newsletter to raise awareness of the exploitation of college football players at Minnesota and nationwide. In July 2020, as college football players began to organize for health and safety measures in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, they began talking about the need for their own players association. Jason immediately began the work of fleshing out how a players association would work and what it could do. Since then, Jason’s numerous writings on the subject have kept the idea of a players association within the public consciousness and his reporting has been picked up by mainstream news outlets. In February 2021, Jason began his campaign to lead a players association. In July 2021, Jason formally founded the CFBPA and established its first advisory board.

Jason is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where he received his PhD in 2008 and his M.A. in 2004 – both in the field of modern American political history. Jason also received a B.A. with Honors in the field of history in 2000 from Indiana University, Bloomington. Jason has written and taught extensively in the field of modern American political history focusing mostly on the history of political movements, institution building and the history of work in the United States. Jason’s first book focuses on how new types of political institutions are built and how they come to acquire power. Jason has been a political organizer in multiple different settings including on electoral campaigns and within unions.

Email: jmstahl@cfbpa.org