Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2017
 

Spring 2017

Monday 4 pm and online

Origins and Development of College Athletics Organization

Governance is the word used in college sports to describe who is in charge of intercollegiate athletics. Governance addresses the questions of whether university presidents have sufficient information and authority to direct college athletics, the faculty have responsibility and authority to monitor the quality and integrity of college sports, and whether trustees assert their institutional control authority effectively. Universities are complex places with many levels of authority and responsibility that often overlap or conflict. Athletic directors, coaches, athletic staff, and student-athletes have responsibilities, but so also do faculty, deans, senior administrators, and trustees. Governance is a topic that considers the relative authority of everyone involved in sports and attempts to determine who is responsible for which elements of collegiate athletic programs.

Governance also involves the activities and authority of organizations outside the university. Most of these are membership organizations created by groups of colleges and universities to manage and control sports. Conferences and the NCAA itself are examples of this kind of organization. In addition, state and federal legislators, other elected officials, the courts, and bureaucrats assert influence and control over various aspects of college athletics. Universities and their organizations contract with commercial enterprises for a number of college athletic functions, especially television networks, delegating authority to these firms to perform services in support of college sports. All of us interested in college sports find ourselves involved in one way or another with governance.

Whenever a problem arises in college sports, commentators look for someone to blame, for the assignment of blame is a popular exercise. Governance systems often take much of the heat, as commentators assume that if those responsible for operating various aspects of the games would just do their jobs, the problems would go away. Over the years, observers have tried to encourage presidents to pay more attention, faculty to assume more responsibility, and the NCAA and conferences to monitor more closely. Others wonder whether the alumni and fans, donors or politicians, newspapers or television, or professional sports organizations have too much influence and undermine the effective operation of college athletics and the welfare of the student-athletes who perform.

Governance includes the rules that apply to the conduct of sports competitions. Rule-making is one of sports most important concerns because competition, the purpose of the sports enterprise, requires rules to define the context and competitive structure of the games. Historically, in American college sports, rule-making associations established the first control over the games, and other governance functions evolved out of the rule-making authority. The rules governing play became the foundation for constructing the regulations that organize and manage intercollegiate sports in America.

Origins and Development of College Athletics Organization

Of particular interest here is the evolution of the NCAA. College sports is about two things: the individual competitions themselves and the regulations that define a sports program. The transition from rule-making for individual sports, particularly football, to the governance of institutional athletic programs with their hundreds of student-athletes defines the evolution of college athletics. 

Unlike most professional sports, college sports is about a program that includes all of the institution's intercollegiate teams. While we may follow college football, basketball, baseball, soccer, track, hockey, or lacrosse, the governance of college sports is an activity about the program that includes all sports and student-athletes and that operates and is defined as a coherent organizational unit. Part of the value of focusing on a college sports program is to dilute the dominant role of football. Even so, the effort to control and manage football has driven and continues to determine much of the organizational character of intercollegiate athletics.

The structure of organized college athletics evolved rapidly in the early twentieth century from its beginnings in ad hoc arrangements for football, track, crew, and other competitions to the developed organization achieved by the late 1920s. A careful review of college sports at the end of the first two decades of the 20th century highlights the common themes and issues that have dominated intercollegiate athletics ever since. By reading this record, we find that almost every issue, from an over emphasis on money, to corruption in the recruitment and retention of student-athletes, to the celebrity-creating attention by the media, to the safety of participants in the games, and other common themes, appeared then as it does now.

Commentators throughout the years since the organization of intercollegiate athletics in the first decade of the twentieth century worried about these recurring issues. Over the years the primary organization for overseeing the operation of college sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), responded to concerns about the integrity and operation of the competitions with ever more complex and carefully constructed rules, regulations, structures, and educational programs.

The importance of football in the development of college athletic governance not only reflects the exceptionally high level of popularity of this game throughout the years but also recognizes that many issues important to football, that receive high levels of publicity, are common to all competitive college sports. The emphasis on one or another aspect of intercollegiate sports activity varies from time to time, but issues important in one era can reemerge generations later. 

For example, one of the primary elements in the formation of the NCAA was high public concern about the level of injuries and death in college football contests at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, of course, we find college (and professional) sports engaged in an intense conversation about the importance of head injuries and other health dangers inherent in contact competitions.

When reviewing the issues of governance and the evolution of the sophisticated system we have today, we need to focus on the importance of two powerful activities that helped build the governance organization.  The first are the rules, the second are the championships.

Rule making: The rules that regulate play are clearly central to all sports governance. The first purpose of governance is to agree on the rules of the game and to standardize those rules so that the competitions are uniformly played. By addressing issues of rules, the organization that evolved into the NCAA quickly became central to the conduct of college sports. Once institutions agreed to abide by the rules developed through the governance organization, and established an enforcement process for violations, the rules organization quickly expanded its influence to other aspects of intercollegiate athletics related to the management of sports on campus. This extension of rules issues to other operational issues sought to establish what everyone seeks: fair competition.

Fair competition lies at the core of all sports, for if the competition is unfair, a victory loses its meaning. Fair, however, involves more than just the common agreement on rules of play, but also agreement about size of teams, methods of identifying athletically talented college players, practices for the support of college athletes, and other similar issues. Once we agree to play fair, we need to define the characteristics of fairness. Much of the subsequent evolution and modification of intercollegiate athletic governance turns on a complex and detailed effort to define and enforce the conditions that will make the competition fair among the many highly disparate collegiate institutions that participate in the many different competitions

Championships: The second important leverage for intercollegiate athletic governance comes from the development of championships. If fair competition is the goal, the outcome of fair competition is the determination of champions. 

Sports, everyone should recognize, is primarily about winning. Winning is the point of the exercise or otherwise we would not keep score and we would not care whether the competition was fair. Fairness means that every team has an equal opportunity to compete and win following the same rules and using techniques and methods available to other teams. Once we have a reasonable basis for a fair competition, we want to know which team or individual in each sport is the best among all the teams and individuals. 

Because there are too many colleges playing the various sports to pit every team against every other, the NCAA constructed championship systems to identify national winners. These championships over time established the significance of the NCAA as a governance organization.  At the end of the day, if your college wants to participate in the competition that leads to a national championship in any sport, your institution must join the NCAA because that organization developed and owns the national championships in most sports.

Although some commentators believe that college sports and the NCAA are about money, this view misses the point of intercollegiate athletic governance.  Money is surely important, but it is secondary to the development of a governance system capable of constructing national competition among widely differing universities and colleges on a fair basis that leads to the identification of the best national performers in each sport. Money may help institutions compete more successfully, it may serve to aggrandize various participants and components of the intercollegiate sports enterprise. Money, however, follows from the successful creation of a sports governance system that delivers a valuable product unavailable from other sources. 

The governance system that exists in American collegiate athletics today is surely not the only model possible, but it has been durable, effective, adaptable, and remarkably successful. Predictions about its demise, often made, have so far proved premature, but challenges to the governance model are many and significant as we will see throughout this course.

The Franchise

Over the years, the evolution of the NCAA governance model has created a structure that functions much like a franchise. A franchise establishes a standard product, such as a fast food outlet like McDonalds or a service business like Jiffy Lube, and then allows individuals or other groups to purchase a license to operate a branch of the standard business. The franchise will specify the operational standards that ensure the uniformity of the product, the service rules and conditions, and a host of other requirements. It usually provides standard advertising and often provides financing to the individuals or groups who buy a franchise license. If the owners and investors in a branch do not meet franchise standards, they lose the the right to operate a branch and can no longer provide services under the franchise brand.

The value of this arrangement is the provision of high quality standardized products delivered to customers over a wide geographic area reinforced by national advertising that creates common brand value. Customers benefit by anticipating and reliably receiving the same quality product from every franchise outlet.

The intercollegiate sports franchise developed by colleges and universities is similar although with some important variations. In college sports, the franchise (held and managed by the NCAA) is created by the universities that then assign their authority over key aspects of college athletics to the NCAA. The NCAA, as the franchising manager and agent, using various governance mechanisms to standardize the fundamental aspects of intercollegiate competition, license this standardized athletic product back to the universities in the form of authority to operate a franchised college sports program.

The standardization has the benefit of presenting the public with a product that is fundamentally the same at every university, whatever the size, character, wealth, or history of the institution. Further, the franchise establishes not only what the standard product of football will be, for example, but it standardizes the sports program provided by the institutions within which football can exist. Although some variation is allowed in terms of the sub-products of each franchise branch (do they provide fencing, do they provide gymnastics), a franchise nonetheless must contain a specified minimum number of sub-products (16 sports in the Bowl Championship Division formerly Division IA although most sponsor about 19).

To hold a franchise, each university MUST abide by the standardized rules of play for each sport, rules that affect student athletic activity and the academic performance of students who participate in athletic activity, and a host of other characteristics of the enterprise. If a university fails to abide by the franchise regulations, the central franchising organization (the NCAA) levies penalties, some of which are severe. The university pays a franchising fee and shares revenue, primarily basketball revenue, with the NCAA franchising organization.

A major difference from commercial franchises, the college athletic franchise system does not provide the primary standardized marketing and branding for sports, leaving this function to the universities themselves. This reflects the value proposition of the college sports enterprise. Universities do sports because it promotes their individual institutional brand on a regional and national scale and engages the interest and commitment of alumni and others. The college-specific branding of sports provides a major element of sports value for institutions while the NCAA franchise provides the standardized structure of competition to which the individual franchise owners (the universities and colleges) can attach their brands.

The Conferences

Within the franchising system, college athletics has a second tier of governance through what were originally regional conferences, or collections of more or less similar and geographically clustered institutions designed to manage the details and organization of competition. To reduce travel costs and time, the conferences constructed playing schedules that allowed institutions to have predictable and regular competitions in all the sports sponsored by the institutions in the conference. The conferences now form a part of the governance system of the NCAA franchise, and the franchise delegates the organization of competition primarily to the conferences while reserving the operation of most championships to the parent NCAA. Over the years the conferences have gained significant power as they have come to operate the licensing of media especially television coverage of the contests between institutions, primarily based on football and men's basketball.

A constant tension exists between the conferences and the NCAA over the financial issues related to the value of the franchise product, and in the current operating model, the NCAA has maintained control over the financing of championships especially the profitable televised operation of the national basketball tournaments, but the individual institutions, primarily through the action of their conferences, have established control over the financing of television and radio for other sports but especially for the increasingly profitable and popular football enterprise.

The original function of conferences in organizing geographically focused competition has gradually given way to an emphasis on developing conferences whose members can present the most valuable media products, primarily to television and principally focused on football and basketball. As a result, the conferences have become larger, now around 16 institutions each, and with much wider geographic coverage made possible by air travel.

Conferences also provide financial stability to their institutional members by sharing television and other revenue. This revenue sharing buffers the ups and downs of athletic competition as few universities can maintain championship teams in football and basketball every year for long periods but their expenses, especially debt associated with capital projects such as stadiums, remain high whether the teams win or lose. In addition, a large number of highly competitive university sports franchise branches in a conference improves the television arrangements the conference can make on behalf of its members.

The history of college sports and the NCAA reflects a continuing evolution of the terms and conditions of the NCAA franchise. Because the NCAA is not independent but a creation of its member institutions, it responds to the needs and requirements of those institutions. The institutions, with their widely varying characteristics and resources, do not always agree on the proper operation of the intercollegiate sports franchising system. This leads to constant controversy and readjustment of franchise rules. To date, while many talk about a radical restructuring of the NCAA franchise system, the governance mechanisms have proved remarkably resilient. Traditionally, the NCAA is slow to change but eventually changes sufficiently to maintain the coherence of the franchise system.

In many ways, the university-created NCAA franchising system is a remarkable example of collaborative governance, and its longevity and continued significance offers a fine opportunity to understand cooperative governance within an environment of highly competitive participants.

© 2017