The rumblings surrounding corruption in high-profile college sports have reached an all-time high in the last year. Every couple of months, it seemed, a new “scandal” emerged — Jim Tressel and Terrelle Pryor at Ohio State, the Willie Lyles allegations at Oregon and Lousiana State University, and the all-you-can-eat buffet style violations uncovered at Miami over the summer, to name a few — followed by the requisite indignation on the part of the NCAA and the obligatory contrition from those involved.

Then the story would fade away. Somewhere along the line, though, a good deal of reporters and sportswriters began to look at the constant transgressions and finally see faults in the system instead of its adherents. Those who had felt that way all along began to speak louder. It all arguably culminated in Taylor Branch’s “The Shame of College Sports,” an epic takedown of the NCAA that ran in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic. Here was a piece on the treatment of college athletes that was getting massive national exposure. There was momentum behind the idea. It was outside momentum supported by reporters, journalists, talking heads and, increasingly, fans — certainly an important part of any movement.

But to capitalize on that kind of push, any kind of substantive reform has to begin from within — from either those who run the NCAA or the players who are governed by them. The former have shown no interest in change. The current system reflects their best interests too well: That leaves the latter — the labor, so to speak — to the NCAA’s management. What leverage do they have? They can’t simply skip college; the NBA and NFL have rules, arguably destructive and illegal ones, against that.

Of course they have the same leverage as any other labor group. They can stop working. While there has been a ton of talk in pro basketball and pro football this year about labor-management relations, both extended work stoppages have been the results of lockouts, not strikes. The owners, not the players, decided they were unhappy with the current arrangement and prevented (or are in the process of preventing, in the case of basketball) their respective leagues from beginning until a more agreeable system is in place. In college sports, the idea of a lockout is laughable — the players already, by any credible standard of capitalism, receive overwhelmingly little payment for the benefits they bring to their schools.

There will always be those, the NCAA brain trust among them, that claim that the student athletes do get paid — in scholarship money, as well as money for books — and that giving them any more would be in violation of the amateurism that college sports represents. A few days ago, NCAA president Mark Emmert even suggested a $2,000 increase in student-athlete grants, which would go toward helping players pay for increased housing costs and other assorted fees.

This, of course, is ridiculous — it’s the NCAA recognizing that there is a revolution at hand and hoping to stem the tide with an early and minor courtesy concession. Nick Saban makes somewhere in the area of $6,000,000 a year for his role as coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team. In 2009, University of Connecticut men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun was the highest paid state employee in all of Connecticut. College athletes who accept cars from boosters or sell their rings and autographs for money (and who are disciplined for doing so if the NCAA finds out) are not going to stop because of a possible extra $2,000. They do it because there is an enormous market for their autographs, because they are veritable superstars. The fact that they never see a penny of the profit — both from the thousands of jerseys sold with their names on them and the TV money for the product they put on the field or court — is nothing more than a well-crafted joke.

Playing college football and basketball is incredibly demanding — you are at risk for injury and for brain trauma — and the vast majority of athletes will be going pro, as the NCAA commercials helpfully point out, “in something other than sports.” Perhaps the most damning aspect of NCAA scholarships is that due to their year-by-year re-evaluation, injured players who cannot play anymore are vulnerable to having their scholarships revoked, their education taken away and their chance at something other than sports lost. The mark of the Ivy League’s loyalty to academics over revenue has always rightfully been its unwillingness to implement official athlete scholarships. What is the University saying by revoking a scholarship? Is a player expendable to a university because of physical injury? Or what about the inverse situation, such as when a player leaves its university for professional money the second he is permitted? How can anyone insist that such a person is a student-anything with a straight face?

There are two logical ways to deal with this issue fairly. One is decommercialization — to stop selling jerseys and stop TV licensing deals, allowing the game to truly be “pure.” That wouldn’t sit well with anyone, and doesn’t make sense given the popularity of college sports in America. The second is to figure out a way to make the commercial system already in place a more fair.

There is a brief section in Branch’s article (which went online around a month ago and which any college sports fan should read if they haven’t done so already) that relays the story of an unnamed Elite Eight college basketball team in the last twenty years whose players, if they had made the national championship, were planning to boycott. “They were going to dress and go out on the floor, and refuse to play.” The effects such a decision would have had on non-players are laid out: “several hundred million dollars in television revenue, countless livelihoods, the NCAA budget and subsidies for sports at more than 1,000 schools.”

Clearly the players have leverage. Now all they need is a list of demands — starting with a cut of the TV and merchandise revenue that could be shared evenly among all players, for instance — and the courage to do what exploited Americans have always done to attain them when they are tired of seeing their hard work translate into dollars in others’ pockets: Strike.