T.S. Eliot’s remarkable 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men,” ends with these oft-quoted lines: “This is the way the world ends—Not with a bang, but a whimper.“ Those words capture, in a far less grand context, this week’s decision by the National Labor Relations Board involving the efforts of some Northwestern University varsity football players to organize athletes on scholarship as “statutory employees” protected by the National Labor Relations Act.

Last year, a regional NLRB ruling took the side of the players, a decision that, as I wrote here at the time, was on the shakiest of grounds. There is no reason to rehash those legal arguments, because no one wanted a decision on the merits this week. The key task now is to explore the political forces behind the decision.

NLRB rulings are normally split sharply along party lines. In this case, however, the Board issued a unanimous decision that “it would not effectuate the policies of the Act to assert jurisdiction in this case … even if we assume, without deciding, that the grant-in-aid scholarship players are employees within the meaning of Section 2(3)” of the Act. Their reasoning: because it is clear that the definition of an “employer” under Section 2(2) excludes any state (including any state-run university), any ensuing regulations would apply to teams like Northwestern but not to their public university counterparts, upsetting the competitive balance in college sports. And so it is that a widely heralded decision that gave rise to both great hopes and fears has ended with a jurisdictional whimper.