SOUTH BEND, Ind. — With or without a union, more rights and benefits are coming for college athletes.

Whether the NCAA schools that compete in big-time athletics can provide enough to keep other more ominous threats to collegiate sports at bay remains to be seen. Even the failed attempt to unionize the Northwestern football could be viewed as progress for those still pushing for reform.

“I certainly don’t think this is the end of this type of discussion,” said David Ridpath, a professor of sports administration at Ohio University and president-elect of the Drake Group, a watchdog group for college sports. “And certainly regardless of what happens, this has energized the athletes’ rights movement for years to come.”

The National Labor Relations Board on Monday blocked a historic bid by Northwestern University football players to form the nation’s first college athletes’ union.

In a unanimous decision, the board said the prospect of union and nonunion teams in college could lead to different standards at different schools — from how much money players receive to how much time they practice — and create competitive imbalances on the field.

The new ruling annuls a 2014 decision by a regional NLRB director in Chicago who said scholarship football players are employees under U.S. law and thus entitled to organize. But Monday’s decision did not directly address the question of whether the players are employees, which allowed the organizers of the movement to claim it was only a setback and not a total defeat.

“The door’s not closed,” said Ramogi Huma, a former UCLA football player and executive director of the advocacy group, the National College Players Association.

The biggest factor in how it ruled, the board said, was the NLRB’s jurisdiction, which extends only to private schools like Northwestern, Notre Dame and the University of Southern California. The board repeatedly cited the need for standardization of rules and policies in sports and said giving the green light to just one team to collectively bargain would disrupt that uniformity. Public university are subject to state labor laws.

Huma and former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter, who became the face of the unionization movement, said the bid to unionize helped push along reforms such as more long-term health coverage of the college athletes, guaranteed four-year scholarships for athletes and the removal of NCAA restrictions on meals for athletes. Starting this school year, universities can begin paying stipends worth several thousands of dollars to college athletes to cover cost-of-attendance expenses beyond tuition, books and room and board.