As you watch the Oregon Ducks and the Washington State Cougars kick off their football game tomorrow, here’s something to keep in mind: Not one young man on either team has the basic job protections we guarantee virtually every other working man in the United States.

None may bargain for a better deal, for example, and none may profit from his stint in NCAA football, even by selling last year’s jersey. Meanwhile, the schools and coaches haul in millions, not only from the likes of Phil Knight, in the University of Oregon’s case, but from television, and, yes, the sale of replica jerseys.

Civil-rights historian Taylor Branch laid out the case against the NCAA, which exerts an iron grip on college sports, and the schools themselves in a recent issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine. It isn’t a pretty picture unless you happen to be the NCAA itself or the university running a successful football program.

Consider the case of Kent Waldrep, a Texas Christian University running back paralyzed during a game against Alabama in 1974. TCU paid Waldrep’s medical expenses for nine months, Branch writes, then cut him off. He sought workers’ compensation, arguing he was effectively a TCU employee, albeit one without a salary. He lost the argument in 2000 when a court ruled against him in part because he had not paid taxes on the financial aid package the school gave him.

Or consider this: Football players generally receive single-year scholarships that are renewed every year. But not always. Should a college fire its head coach, last year’s coach’s darling may find himself cut off from the funds that allowed him to attend college in the first place. He has no right to appeal, either.

Meanwhile, the NCAA makes the case that college athletes are, in fact, students as much as athletes. Yet the numbers tell a pretty sordid picture of their academic achievement.

To be sure, some athletes and some schools actually do well by each other on an academic as well as athletic level. In fact, when all college sports are considered, about 80 percent of athletes graduate, according to figures released by the NCAA earlier this week. Sadly, in football and basketball the rate is below 70 percent, and while the University of Oregon’s football program has a graduation success rate of 69 percent this year, it was just 49 percent two years ago.

None of this is meant to imply that the lot of a Division One college football player is all toil, no reward. While in school he’ll be fed, housed and to some extent clothed at university expense. He’ll be provided with tutors and special rules aimed at making him an academic success. And, at many schools, his crimes large and small will be ignored if possible, even when those crimes put him on the wrong side of the law. In fact, in some cases he’ll begin attending college already in possession of a criminal past.

So what’s to be done? Author James Michener had an idea back in 1976, when his “Sports in America” was published, that makes sense today.

Recognize the real status of Division One football players, Michener said, drop the pretense that they’re all scholars in shoulder pads and treat them like the semiprofessional athletes they really are. Pay them. Allow them to negotiate contracts with the schools for which they play.

Branch puts it a bit differently, but winds up in essentially the same place. He would go after the NCAA, which controls college athletes and the schools they attend with an iron grip.

He notes that allowing Olympic athletes to accept money for what they do and giving them a voice in Olympic sport governance has not poisoned those games, despite early predictions to the contrary.

It can be hard to whip up sympathy for the likes of Cliff Harris, the lead-footed University of Oregon cornerback who apparently cannot get into a car without breaking the law.

At the same time, a system that denies young, often poorly educated men the right to professional help negotiating their own futures, that keeps them on a short financial leash and then unceremoniously dumps them when they’re too badly hurt, is just plain wrong.