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Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2015 Spring 2015 Tuesday 4-6 and online Values, Fairness, and Culture The long history of college sports in America demonstrates the close relationship between a wide range of American values and their expression through college sports. Issues of fairness, cultural norms, and entertainment all focus on what Americans believe or want to believe about themselves and their country. These values appear in many places including popular culture through the media of television and the movies. Within the college sports franchise, fairness is a core value with a special meaning. The ideal of college sports imagines that each college is more or less like every other college, and that the athletic teams representing the student body compete on about the same basis no matter what college they attend. In reality, of course, this is not so. Some colleges or universities are small, some are large; some rich, some poor; and not all colleges play all sports. Nonetheless, the NCAA, in managing the college sports franchise, regulates the operation of sports to try and ensure that when the teams meet on the field they arrive on an equal basis and no team has a special competitive advantage over another. This "leveling the playing field" in sports jargon requires a host of regulations developed over many years. Everything that might give any individual team or institution an advantage unrelated to the actual competition on the field comes under regulation. Because sports is about wining, every team and coach seeks an advantage that will improve their chances. As the NCAA and the conferences regulate one advantage, the coaches identify another unregulated advantage, and then that, in turn, is controlled. When institutions stray too far from the rules that define fairness, they run afoul of the NCAA's regulations, suffer an investigation with significant penalties, and must then find a way to bring their programs back into compliance. Many of the creative advantages relate to recruiting. As we have discussed, whatever else is important, recruiting the best talent is the critical element in securing a winning season. As a result, coaches, boosters, friends, university administrators, and anyone else with an interest in sports wants to help their teams recruit the best talent. Large issues, such as bribing high school students and their families to choose one college over another, and small issues, such as how many times a coach can call a prospective player on the phone, are strictly regulated. The NCAA Division I manual has many pages defining the permissible and impermissible behaviors in recruiting a student-athlete. Additional issues involve the specification of what a college or university can do under the terms of financial aid or other institutionally provided benefits for its student-athletes. If one institution provides more than another it creates a competitive advantage. Each sport has detailed rules about practice times and places, number of competitions, numbers and types of coaches, and similar characteristics of the organization, structure, and operation of each sport. If one college has three coaches and another has only two, a competitive disadvantage appears. If one college makes its players practice three times a day and another only twice, a competitive advantage may appear. Again, the NCAA Division I Manual offers full detail on all these issues. Within the manual we can look at the sections on Financial Aid, or Awards, Benefits and Expenses for Enrolled Student-Athletes to see the rules that affect individual student-athletes. For the specific and detailed regulations for each sport, see the section of the manual on Playing and Practice Seasons, that are specific and detailed. Originally, all colleges and universities competed against each other in intercollegiate athletics, regardless of the type and size of institution. But by 1973 the complexity of the sports and the dramatic expansion of higher education threatened the notion of the "level playing field." The difference between an Amherst College and The Ohio State University proved too great to imagine them both in the same competitive context, so the NCAA created three divisions and then later divided the top Division I into separate categories for football only (now called championship and bowl subdivisions). The requirements for each division, while complex, serve to define an important element of the college sports environment: The Program. Where professional sports are about the competitions among individuals or teams playing the same sport, college sports are about the athletic program defined as a specific collection of men's and now women's sports. Part of the level playing field is the notion that because college is about students, intercollegiate sports should represent an athletic program that serves many students on a campus with different sports interests. However, if one college spends all its money on football and another divides its money and supports football, basketball, soccer, and volleyball, the institution with a multi-sport program is at a disadvantage relative to the institution with a single sport program. For this reason the the divisional requirements within the NCAA franchise specific the minimum number of sports sponsored by teach institutions programs, setting a minimum investment required to compete. This involves not only the number of sports needed to maintain division status but also rules about minimum size of stadiums, minimum attendance, competition patterns, and similar characteristics. The idea, of course, is that all programs within a particular division classification will be more or less equivalent. Other things can influence the image and marketability of college sports such as drug or alcohol abuse or gambling. The NCAA, to protect the commercial viability of their franchise, legislates a wide range of rules, regulations, and remedies that guide colleges and universities in drug testing, alcohol and tobacco education, and the prevention of gambling. Drug use, of course, is not only dangerous for individual student-athletes but creates a significant competitive advantage for those teams whose players use certain performance enhancing substances, particularly steroids. Gambling, however, is a truly franchise destroying activity, for the mere suspicion that a player, coach, or team may not compete at the highest level because of a gambling obligation takes all the joy and enthusiasm from the spectator's appreciation of the game. Gambling is particularly difficult to control since the amount of gambling by the general public and fans on college sports is high, and if we include illegal betting, Internet off-shore gambling, and similar activities, the amount wagered on high profile college games is exceptional. Insulating coaches, players, and others involved in the athletic enterprise from gambling is difficult, but the major scandals involving college sports gambling or fixed games so threaten the enterprise when they happen that most people are prepared to tolerate very stringent regulations. Because students often bet on college and professional games and some students serve as bookmakers, the gambling culture surrounds the student-athletes and their programs. Even referees sometimes fall victim to the gambling compulsion. For the NCAA, issues of gambling and drugs fall under the category of ethical behavior. Culture College sports is also a central element in American culture, captured alongside the professional enthusiasm for baseball and football and directly connected to a parallel high school sports commitment. Indeed, as memorialized in the fictional representation of small-town America in the very successful film, Hoosiers, sports is everywhere. Sometimes, through dramatic representations, popular culture allows us to see the changing values and understand the powerful drivers, good and bad, of the American sports culture. Movies and television, simplify and clarify as they distort, and a careful viewing of a sequence of films and shows offers clues to the shifting nature of the American love affair with high school and college sports. Everyone has their favorite sports movies, and a number appear in our reading list. Many of these films, especially those focused on high school and college sports, highlight the cultural values that we project onto these games and that these games reflect back to us. Even in 1927, the movie College showed sports as a central concern for a high school and then college student who discovered that his popularity depended on his willingness to embrace the sports culture. Knute Rockne--All American is the classic football movie that articulates all the core beliefs and values that American college football promotes. As it glorifies the Notre Dame legend, it prepares us for another popular movie over fifty years later in Rudy (1993), a movie that demonstrates the distorting influence a sports obsession can have on individuals and families, and at the same time highlights the importance of winning over other values. In contrast to these feel-good stories, The Program (1993) is a not very good and in many ways cynical movie that attempts to provide a perspective on some of the negative aspects of college football culture. Scandal and corruption always serve as good themes for movies, and two basketball movies about 40 years apart take on basketball corruption. In The Basketball Fix (1951), gambling and its corrosive impact on both players and the game is the focus, while in Blue Chips (1994) recruiting corruption provides the context for a morality tale about integrity and winning. Many sports movies are uplifting tales set in small town America. Hoosiers (1986) mentioned above is a classic small town high school basketball movie that celebrates all the values of intense, community identified, sports. Varsity Blues (1999) offers a high school football companion to Hoosiers, and Remember the Titans (2000), shows how an intense focus on producing a winning high school football team can overcome powerful social and cultural divisions within a small town. Of course not all basketball movies are about small rural towns, and Hoop Dreams (1994) offers a much acclaimed perspective on the aspirations of talented inner city Chicago players. Recent sports films of significance include the dramatized version of a real-life football player from the inner city in The Blind Side (2009) and the high school based movie and subsequent television series Friday Night Lights (Movie 2004, TV series 2006-2010). © 2015 |