With a midnight deadline in place, Northwestern University filed a motion late Thursday night with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to overturn their decision to allow scholarship players on the school's football team to form a union.

According to the Associated Press, the school, which has maintained its opposition to unionization in college athletics, filed the 60-page motion Thursday night, just a matter of hours before the midnight deadline. The NLRB's Chicago office granted the Northwestern football team with a chance to form it own union, but the school's appeal went to the national headquarters in Washington D.C.

The NLRB in Chicago ruled on March 26 that the Northwestern football players playing on a scholarship should be allowed to unionize. The team held a vote earlier in the spring, but the results have been sealed pending the national organization's final ruling.

"Student-athletes participate for their own benefit; they do not render services for compensation," the American Council on Education, a group of 1,800 colleges and universities, said in a statement. "[The players] are not employees and therefore not subject to the National Labor Relations Act."

The NCAA also filed a brief in support of Northwestern, arguing that a student-athletes' status is primarily academic. The NCAA is fighting on multiple fronts to protect its model of amateurism.

"Over past 70 years, more than a million student-athletes have received athletics scholarships, and no legal entity has determined that these scholarships transform students into employees under the National Labor Relations Act," Donald Remy, NCAA chief legal officer, said in a press release. "There is no legitimate reason that they should be considered such today. While there certainly are improvements to be made to the college model of sports, transforming the relationship between students and their university to an employment relationship is not the answer."

Adding to a flurry of motions, six Republicans in D.C. also filed a brief with the NLRB, arguing the national labor laws were never meant to include collegiate athletes, the Chicago Tribune reported. They said if Northwestern forms a union, nothing would stop all the rest of the nation's scholarship athletes from doing the same.

William Gould IV, a former chairman of the NLRB, said the lawmakers' brief is unusual for such a matter. He told the Tribune the lawmakers "are probably trying to intimidate the board."