Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2020
 

Spring 2020

Controlling Intercollegiate Athletics

Although the creation of the NCAA established a structure for college sports development that continues to evolve, the relationship between universities, students, faculty, the public, and intercollegiate athletics remains one of conflict and change. The issues may vary from time to time, but continuity in the themes of college sports governance is one of the principal characteristics of the conversation.

A constant concern has been the location of control of intercollegiate athletics. Students, faculty, athletic departments, coaches, college administrations, boards of trustees, athletic conferences, the NCAA, state and federal governments, and the courts all assert a role in managing college sports. The balance among these groups varies over time and often depends on the particular issue in dispute.

Even though the development of the franchise system through the NCAA established a reasonably effective overarching structure for the operation of college sports, controversies and challenges posed by competitive athletics have remained constant since the early days of the twentieth century. The topics of concern tend to repeat over the years, taking on somewhat different perspectives depending on the time and circumstances. Almost all of the major controversies, derive from one fundamental characteristic of college sports, its remarkable outsize popularity, and in many instances, the large sums of money generated by this popularity.

Everyone appears to have a firmly held opinion on the proper conduct of college sports and believes that the activity deserves a prominent place among the major issues of each generation. Some want to see college sports expanded and enhanced to become more like the professional versions of the games. Others, seeing the tremendous success of and in some institutions the large sums of money involved in college sports, believe this popularity distorts the values that should apply to activities within a collegiate context. Some believe that the system over emphasizes student-athlete issues and provides too much special treatment for individuals within the university whose primary talents may have almost no relationship to the academic enterprise. Others believe that the system exploits the student-athlete and provides too little support for individuals whose on-field performance brings such fame to and requires so much money from the university. This is especially so when so many outside interests such as media, apparel companies, and others profit from successful programs.

The Faculty

Faculty see the power of sports popularity as debasing the traditional academic and faculty-centered governance of the university and seek expanded authority for faculty voices in the determination of institutional athletic policy and practice. Trustees, many of whom see sports as one of the more significant achievements of their institution, often take a special interest in the athletic program and protect its operation from attacks. Legislators vary, some believing that college sports have grown well beyond any reasonable university-related activity, others work diligently to protect the special amateur, university student related, status accorded the business of college football, and some seek greater financial rewards for those student-athletes who participate in high profile football and basketball programs.

The Students

Students traditionally have been relatively enthusiastic about college sports, tolerant of the special treatment accorded student-athletes, and reasonably supportive of special fees frequently assessed to sustain collegiate athletic programs. The fans, of course, are among the primary audiences for college sports. With a fervor and energy normally reserved for religious crusades, they defend their sports teams, criticize the failures of coaches and players, berate institutions that fail to provide sufficient support, and otherwise take a personal, direct, and vociferous interest in activities related to these college games.

The Media

The media have always been key participants in promoting the popularity of college sports. From the original enthusiasm of sports writers in local and the national newspapers, the media attention expanded to radio, then to television, and now to the Internet. News magazines dedicated to sports highlight student-athletes and their coaches, and with the expansion into ubiquitous television coverage, make national celebrities out of high profile college football and basketball student participants. Television has also transformed what had been primarily a local or regional enthusiasm into a national preoccupation, greatly increasing the financial value of the college games, again, especially football and men's basketball.

The Administration

University leaders often operate within a conflicted context. They know that the sports teams and programs of their institutions attract endless attention and passion from supporters and critics. They understand that a failed athletic program is sure to be regarded by most observers as an institutional failure. They recognize that while many good things come from successful college sports, the margin between a fine program that reflects well on the university and a tarnished program that brings shame and controversy can often be thin. University presidents are, in the end, the responsible executives for college athletics, for while the athletic directors run the operations, the coaches run the teams, and the student-athletes perform in the competitions, it is the president who must establish the structure for success that will also guard against operational failures.

The president represents the institution's interests within the governance organization of the NCAA (which is a presidential association where the institutional chief executives vote on policies and practices) and the management activities of the conferences. The president is called before legislative committees to testify about college athletic issues and problems. The president is challenged by trustees, alumni, students, and faculty when difficulties arise within a sports program and owns the responsibility of resolving problems when they occur. The intensity of controversy that has always surrounded college athletics raises this extracurricular activity to the highest level of institutional concern. On some occasions, more in the past than at present, presidents have taken strong positions against the overwhelming influence of popular college sports, even to the rare extent of eliminating football (often the lightening rod for controversy).

Today, however, most presidents are more cautious, recognizing the public penalty that comes from opposing the success or from being seen as the cause of a decline in sports achievements. Presidents tend to work in groups on college sports issues to buffer the negative impact that might come from reform or change. They support their membership in the NCAA and the conferences as organizations that bear the brunt of much of the criticism from the eager public on all sides of every sports issue. They can criticize the NCAA operations, safe in the knowledge that the organization moves slowly, deliberately, and exercises its authority, derived from the chief executives, only with the support of most of its constituent institutional presidents before making significant changes

Within the context of college sports, many issues, concerns, and activities rise above the normal hum of institutional operations thanks to the amplification of the media. Since the earliest days of significant college sports, the media (first the press, then the press and radio, then the press, radio, and television, and now the press, radio, television, and the Internet) spend an exceptional amount of time, energy, and ink (real, electronic, and virtual) on college sports.

Sports narratives in the media take two fundamental positions. One is to echo and amplify the significance of the contests themselves, with high intensity but often ritualized discussions before, during, and after games. These tend to be carefully constructed stories, designed to demonstrate the importance and significance of the contests, to follow the details of the competition for the benefit of the faithful followers, and to provide a positive and exciting platform for the commercial advertisements that sustain the business.

The second is to amplify the criticism, scandal, misbehavior, and peculiarities of everyone connected to college sports but especially those engaged in the high profile sports of football and men's basketball. This media enthusiasm produces endless high and low concept attacks on people and programs, on athletes and coaches, on administrators and the governance structure. They highlight exceptional misbehavior to stand for all behavior, they exaggerate effects, underestimate legitimate challenges, and seek to amplify controversy in an outraged style that matches the fervor of the most dedicated fan.

More sober critics and analysts often find themselves captured by this media frenzy for controversy, which frequently makes the public discussion of college sports issues exceptional for its pyrotechnics and its absence of voices of reason. Those voices exist, but usually speak outside the public realm, behind closed doors, and within much less heated environments. Drowned out by the celebrity-driven cacophony, the loss of reasonable voices in the public discussion is significant, but inescapable.

Themes

Throughout the continuing development of intercollegiate athletic governance, some themes lie at the center of all issues. Sports is entirely about winning, which of course is why everyone keeps score. Winning in all college sports is:

• in the first instance, dependent on the athletic skills of the talented student-athletes available to compete in each sport, and
• in the second instance, dependent on the capacity of the university to provide a platform of support that translates this talent into successful competition on the field of play.

To achieve success, then, a college sports program requires the acquisition of student-athlete talent and the provision of coaches, facilities, and other material to extract the maximum competitive benefit from the student-athlete talent available. This apparently simple framework underlies almost all the controversies and governance issues of college sports.

The franchise system of the NCAA, created and sustained by its member institutions and conferences, has been most successful at managing the issues of winning. These issues involve the rules of play, which are adjusted frequently to achieve better competition, reduce injuries, create enhanced spectacles, and the like. Much of this governance activity occurs within the community of coaches and athletic directors whose expertise in the details of competition have few equals. They negotiate, improve, and revise the rules and the competitive process on a continuing basis. Not everything they do meets universal approval from fans and the media, but the success of the college sports enterprise is testimony to the achievement of the NCAA membership in designing competitions that appeal to large audiences.

Perhaps the most significant governance issue related to competition involves championships. For almost all sports except until just recently the top level of football, championship arrangements and competitions evolved over the years into rather well settled, if constantly adjusted, systems. In football, however, the post-season competition at the top level posed significant and continuing difficulties that has resulted in the current system of a four-team championship tournament.

Most of these difficulties derived from the complexity of organizing real championships for football within the bowl competitions that had long characterized the top programs. Early in the organization of football, bowl games came to serve as the post-season concluding contests. The bowl, named for the stadium in which the competition takes place or the financial sponsor of the event, depends on the owners of the venue who take on the responsibility of organizing and financing a post-season game between pairs of the apparently best teams. Traditionally, the bowls attempted to structure these competitions between conferences, with the team with the best record from one conference playing the team with the best record of a rival conference in a traditional bowl location.

This system served its purpose well with one significant exception. It did not produce a clear national champion. Since sports is about winning and keeping score, the absence of a clear champion out of the tremendously popular football enterprise stood as a major governance challenge and, in the minds of many, a conspicuous failure. Although the major football conferences constructed various alternatives to approximate the determination of a championship, the absence of a familiar tournament model remained a major issue for college football fans.

Finally, the football powers, principally the major athletic conferences, with the incentive of significant funding from the television networks that broadcast the games, constructed a four-team tournament to determine the final two competitors for a championship game. This innovation, initiated for the 2006 season, provided some relief to those with a desperate need for a winning exercise and generates a large financial benefit to the participants. However, given the large number of football teams in the top NCAA division (around 130), a tournament based on four teams will surely fail to silence the critics in search of an undisputed champion. Indeed, there is a clamor today for an eight-team tournament.

The second set of controversies that drive the NCAA turn on the issue of talent. College sports is, at its most basic concept, an extracurricular activity conducted with college students. If the activity used professional players who did not qualify as students, then the activity would no longer be a collegiate sporting activity with students. This simple formulation conflicts with the fundamental purpose of all sports, which is to get the best talent possible and win.

With the pool of talent restricted to those individuals who fall within the definition of college students, some athletically talented individuals who could help a college team win but who are not students would be excluded. To maintain the integrity of the student-athlete concept (which implies non-professional amateur status, a distinction that may not remain), college sports also excluded talented students who sought to test their market value in the professional sports field or accept payment based on their sports performance for the university (a requirement currently challenged in many venues).

The battle over talent has confounded and complicated the college sports franchise since the very beginning. Sports is an unambiguous activity for the most part, designed to be specific, precise, and controlled to accurately and fairly determine a winner. Since athletic talent is the most important element in winning, colleges must define as precisely as possible the characteristics of the individuals they can put on the field to win the game. If college were about athletics, this would be easier. The institutions could define the competitive universe by age, 18-25 years for example, and permit colleges to recruit any talented individuals to play for the university for four or five years as long as they met the age limits. This would provide a reasonably definitive limit to the pool of talent, but it would not guarantee that students play for the college.

College sports is about college. The attraction of college sports to its many audiences has been that it involves students in athletic contests that carry the institution's name, prestige, and loyalty to audiences far and wide. If the competitors are not students, then the power of the college sports mystique fades. But if the competitors are not talented, then a college's chances of winning will be poor. Consequently, colleges have always recruited the most athletically talented individuals of college age to join the institution as students with an obligation to compete on its sports teams.

Frequently some of the individuals recruited to attend college and play lack some of the academic preparation and commitment expected of ordinary college students, sometimes these individuals come substantially under prepared academically compared to other non-athlete students, and on occasion the recruitment process involves payments to motivate a talented athlete to join one or another institution's student body to participate in sports. Controlling this competition for athletic talent has been one of the most difficult challenges of the governance mechanism.

Some of this appears as a controversy about the meaning of amateurism. Are student-athletes who receive pay from outside agencies, businesses, or fans based on their athletic talent and performance amateurs competing for the institution or are they professionals earning money for their athletic skills displayed in a university venue? If talented individuals receive payment for their athletic performance or their athletic promise before joining the university, are they professionals or can they become regular students?

While some of these questions may appear to have reasonable answers, the answers run into a thicket of thorny behaviors that appear to corrupt the student-athlete concept. Fans and coaches and university personnel sometimes bribe talented people to join the university to play sports, they can bribe their parents, and they can bribe other family members. These bribes, called payments to disguise their purpose, serve the goal of acquiring the best possible talent for collegiate competition, even if such bribery payments have been prohibited by the institutions through the NCAA.

The result of such behavior is a corruption of the fundamental requirement for fair competition. If the franchise permits bribes, then the competition will not be a fair test of teams composed of college students but rather a competition that tests the bribery skill and capacity of institutional representatives. If, moreover, the students on campus who compete in a sport do not actually participate in academic or campus life, to what extent can can the college claim that the players are reasonable representatives of the university student body?

Over the years, the NCAA's members have discussed, fought over, and constructed ever more complex methods for determining whether an athletically talented 18- to 25-year-old is an actual student and has been recruited to play in a fair way that would have allowed all universities and colleges to persuade these talented individuals to join their institution. The rule book on recruiting is extensive, and reflects in almost every case an effort to prohibit a corrupt practice that introduced unfairness into the recruiting process or that permitted essentially non-students to participate as if they were real students.

A secondary front in this war for talent involves the definition of a continuing student. Once recruited as a student, in theory, an athlete should engage the academic life of the university as would any other student. But with considerable frequency, students recruited for their athletic talent found regular college work uninteresting or excessively time consuming, they preferred or were required to spend their time and talent on athletic preparation rather than academic work, or they found that their prior preparation in secondary school inadequate for collegiate courses.

Whatever the cause, many student-athletes struggled to succeed in the academic program, and colleges found ways to disguise poor academic performance with the result that the student status for these athletes became corrupted to permit them to continue playing. Again, the NCAA institutions constructed a variety of mechanisms to encourage, enforce, and improve the academic content of student-athlete experiences and make the constraints around the management of student-athletes reasonably consistent and therefore fair to all competing institutions.

None of this should surprise anyone who studies the governance of societies. Competition is hard wired into everyone, and however people organize themselves for whatever purpose, they compete either to establish hierarchies among themselves or to defend against others. Rules exist to control this competition. Whether in business, war, or sports, the rules exist to constrain competition within boundaries acceptable to all participants and recognized as appropriate for determining winners and losers. Within this process, the rules focus on whatever is determined to be the strategic resource of the competition (for example, money, territory, or athletic talent).

In the case of college sports, the strategic resource is student athletic talent. Once some control over the direct competition for this resource is achieved, however, attention then shifts to indirect competition for talent. With methods for recruiting student-athlete talent standardized, which makes the differences between institutions in this regard relatively minor (colleges have traditionally only be able to pay the cost of attendance for example), the competition shifts to indirect payments to student-athletes.

Talented athletes are, by definition and life experience, supremely competitive. They want to win, and they want to acquire every advantage that will permit them to win. The universities enhance their recruitment efforts to focus on the elements within the campus that will help a student-athlete win such as exceptional coaching, outstanding training facilities, and competitive venues where their performances will appear before the largest audiences.

Moreover, in those sports for which dreams of lucrative post-collegiate professional careers are possible, universities can compete for talent by offering platforms for the public demonstration of athletic prowess. Huge television markets and competition against the best-in-country showcase student-athletes exceptional abilities and enhance their opportunities for a post-collegiate professional career.

These benefits are indirect payments to student-athletes used to induce them to attend the university and participate in collegiate competition. These are expensive benefits, and while fans and coaches and others in the athletic enterprise who are not students benefit from these expenditures, a key purpose is to ensure the recruitment of the best student-athlete talent, without paying the students directly. This is, of course, a subterfuge that disguises a payment to student-athletes for their athletic performance delivered in a non-monetary form. Absent that talent, expensive coaches, training facilities, stadiums, and the like have minimal value to the institution because the purpose of the activity is to win and the critical strategic resource for winning is acquiring student athletic talent.

Paying Student Athletes

As if these challenges to the definition of student-athlete were not enough, the explosion of interest in high level college football and basketball has created another, probably irresistible pressure: money. Coaches, athletic department personnel, conference and NCAA executives at the highest level receive exceptionally large compensation packages compared to normal university salaries or student stipends. Direct compensation to student-athletes has traditionally been limited to the costs of tuition, fees, room and board, and other student related expenses, but recognizing that the value of high profile college athletics derives from student-athlete performance, many believe that the system should provide substantial extra cash payments directly to student-athletes in proportion to their performance value.

Using the tools of the legal system and lobbying through various legislative venues, these attacks on the notion of the amateur status of the student-athlete have reached the stage (as in the recent California legislation) where it appears that colleges will need to find a way to permit student-athletes to earn additional compensation beyond their student-based scholarship support. Exactly what form this compensation will take and how it will be managed within the requirements of Title IX and other university related rules remains to be determined. However, it appears that the notion of amateurism will gradually cease to be a criteria for participation in college athletics.

An understanding of these fundamental drivers of the college sports enterprise, clarifies the purposes and operation of the elaborate governance structure that has developed since the first years of the twentieth century.

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