Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2020
 

Spring 2020


Purpose, Function, and Cases

In these conversations about governance, much attention focuses on the individual actors: presidents, coaches, athletic directors, faculty, student-athletes, the NCAA. However, it sometime helps to look at the system to determine what purposes it serves. Very little in the organization and governance of college sports happens by accident or in response to the needs or opinions of single actors or single groups of actors. Instead, much of what takes place is about the function of the system as a whole.

College sports succeeds because it serves a wide range of interests, satisfies in some way many constituencies, and adapts effectively if slowly to changes in its environment. The experience of colleges and universities, large and small, over a long period of time indicates clearly and unambiguously that organized intercollegiate sports is regarded as a valuable and in most cases essential feature of college life. Institutions of all types and characteristics invest in college sports teams, and while only a few operate at the level of high national visibility associated with the Big 10 or the SEC, their focus and interest in these games is often no less intense.

Part of the challenge of governance is the balance between the fundamental drivers of sports themselves and the purpose of the university that sports are designed to serve. Sports, as everyone knows, are about winning and keeping score. Sports are about acquiring the talent, facilities, training, and opportunities for talented athletes, while living as students, to perform at the top level of their capabilities.

College is about teaching and learning (and beyond the undergraduate programs, research and advanced study). The connection of sports and college is natural and organic at its base, and the tremendous interest of students in intramural or sports club contests at almost every college and university testifies to the value and interest of sports to the student body in general.

The transformation of sports from an activity to a major and often substantial commercial enterprise rests on the attractiveness of high level student athletic performances to audiences beyond the university proper. Alumni are a primary audience, and at the beginning, the main supporters for organized intercollegiate competition. But in today's college athletic world, the audiences for intercollegiate sports, especially big time programs, extends beyond the campus-based students or the campus affiliated alumni, to encompass large numbers of enthusiasts nationwide. This increase in scale leads to extraordinary attention focused on what is a non-academic student extracurricular activity. That attention brings with it extreme pressure to win (at any cost in many cases), and a high level of public scrutiny, adulation, criticism, and celebrity for the participants in these games from coaches to players to university leaders.

The transformation of major college sports into a significant entertainment category confuses everyone involved in the activity. Student-athletes, showered with special benefits and perquisites since they began to demonstrate talent at young ages, arrive at the university with a deep sense of entitlement based on their demonstrated competitive skills and abilities. Recruited and courted by youth sports teams and clubs, secondary schools, prep schools, and eventually colleges and universities, they come to campus already part of a commercial entertainment enterprise of high visibility and interest. They arrive already prepared to respond to the expectations of the institution's constituencies thanks to endless television and internet coverage of the activities of the student-athletes who have come before them. Every institutional representative assures them that the world is theirs to claim.

At the top level of sports, student-athletes receive special treatment in every aspect of college attendance, from the mundane process of managing their course schedules to a highly developed system of support for their academic and personal needs. Not all student-athletes of course receive such celebrity treatment, but recruited student-athletes at all levels of college athletics are clearly special students.

Universities and colleges struggle to include the student-athlete's non-sports experience within the frame of a normal college experience, and for many student-athletes this works reasonably well, especially for those in sports for which a professional career is an unrealistic expectation or for those student-athletes who arrive with strong academic preparation. For many of the high profile student-athletes at top competitive institutions, however, athletics is their main event, with college but a required obligation to permit them competition sufficient to justify an opportunity to turn professional and reap major financial rewards from their lifetime of training and preparation that often began at age 5..

Most colleges and universities make extraordinary efforts to help student-athletes sustain an academic experience of some substance, efforts that often exceed what most ordinary students could imagine. Nonetheless, the draw of celebrity status, the siren song of a possible professional career at multi-million dollar levels, and the endless media and fan attention and often adulation can easily swamp out mere academic concerns.

The university, which might choose to terminate its relationship with a sports enterprise that attracts attention equivalent to rock concerts and major movie events, finds itself attached by an unbreakable link to the collegiate sports enterprise. With all its defects and operational challenges, nothing a college or university does gains the visibility and attention of sports. Even many unsuccessful sports programs whose teams win few championships will nonetheless attract more attendance to their sports contests than to any other repeating university sponsored activity with the possible exception of annual commencement ceremonies.

A successful major sports program puts the university's name into the national television media and on the various internet platforms devoted to sports on a daily basis and into the sports sections of national newspapers and news magazines that appear in every community in America. Having developed this student-based product to such a high level of sophistication, constructed a reasonably effective governance operation through the mechanism of the NCAA franchising system, almost every college, at every level, finds it impossible to disassociate itself from intercollegiate sports.

The best evidence of this linkage comes from the outrage provoked by the elimination of a single sport from a college program, whether gymnastics or rugby, wrestling or volleyball (not to mention the rare cases of football). The level of response from the faithful associated with these sports reaches extremes unseen for any other change in university programming. Eliminate the study of German language and culture, and a few alumni, students, and colleagues will rebel. Eliminate gymnastics, and the university will face a concerted, long-term, well-funded campaign to force the trustees, the president, and the institution to reinstate the program.

Imagine, then, what would occur with the elimination of a major football or basketball program from a high profile institution. On occasion, an institution will indeed allow football to fade, mostly as a result of financial challenges or the inability to produce winning programs. In exchange, however, such colleges will highlight their basketball or hockey programs to create a substitute. Some small institutions and a few large ones escape from the football machine by never having had a team and focusing their big time media activity on basketball, a much cheaper sport.

The significance of intercollegiate athletics to the visibility of institutions struggling to maintain their academic reputations and compete for students, alumni support, and other indicators of significance is difficult to overestimate. Reformers, recognizing the distortions intercollegiate athletics introduces into every college or university, challenge what they see as the hypocrisy of institutional leaders, trustees, and administrators who speak the language of academic integrity but permit their sports programs to construct special academic careers to keep student-athletes eligible to play in an extracurricular activity that carries no substantial connection to the university's primary academic purpose. University leaders, however, know first hand and by sometimes bitter experience that they cannot appear to undermine the pursuit of athletic excellence. Their trustees will not stand for it, their alumni will not tolerate it, and if they are in the public sector, their legislators will object.

A scandal or collapse of local athletic management in the university causes great stress. Presidents can lose their positions, coaches are fired, athletic directors dismissed, but the identification of culprits and scapegoats has the purpose of restarting another athletic season. The minute the cleansing begins, the institution re-frames its athletic activities as engaging in a new season of competition. Like the contests themselves, a new season means that the failures of the past disappear into the archives, and everyone begins anew with few residual consequences.

A new coach carries no burden from the failures of a predecessor, a new president announces the objectives of the new season without carrying responsibility for the past failures of control, and the new athletic director assumes responsibility only for future performance. Scandals and other athletic crises fall into the backwater of transitory failures equivalent to a lost season, a failed championship appearance: something to regret, something to fix for the next season, but never an occasion to re-imagine the role of intercollegiate sports within the university.

Although many express anger and disillusionment at these cycles and blast the NCAA, the institutions, and the sports enterprise in high rhetorical style, they miss the point. Intercollegiate athletics is what it is because the audiences want it that way. When confronted by an outraged faculty member or alumnus, the conversation generally goes like this:

Mr. President, how can you possibly permit this outrageous behavior of the football program. The amount of attention lavished on a corrupt program is a disgrace, the amount of money you pay the coach is outrageous, and the celebrity status you give players who can barely read and write is an embarrassment, an academically oriented alum asks. 

The president responds, And did you watch the championship game on television? Yes, says the critic, and all that talk by commentators and the huge crowds all indicate that college sports is out of control

The president says, Well, perhaps you're right, but what we have succeeds because so many people like you watch the games. If you and everyone else stopped watching, the sports enterprise would change dramatically.

The critic isn't pleased to find himself among the causes of what makes him angry.

As a number of studies make clear, this fascination with intercollegiate sports affects institutions from the largest public universities to the most selective private liberal arts colleges. There are significant differences among institutions in how they leverage their sports engagements, but the universality of intense sports interest and equally intense institutional responses underlines the significance of this activity within American undergraduate life.

The record of NCAA enforcement practices in recent years makes explicit the characteristics of this college sports enterprise. The most significant challenges to the college sports franchise rules come not from the competitions themselves (although there are some issues there too), where players, coaches, and everyone else can watch the games and know whether the playing rules are observed. Any deviations produce instant responses and corrections because the contests are visible and everyone has an interest in identifying unfair behavior on the field. However, the rules that govern the acquisition and management of student athletic talent are more complicated and less clear than those that govern the games and much of this activity is conducted out of public view.

Given the necessity of high level athletic talent, it comes as no surprise to find that most of the NCAA franchise enforcement effort focuses on breaches of the rules that govern the recruitment of athletes, the management of student-athlete eligibility, and the behavior of coaches in relation to their student-athletes. The NCAA rule book and a review of cases from the NCAA enforcement record, plus the exceptionally detailed media coverage of scandals when they occur, make this clear.

The difficulty of specifying exactly how a student-athlete should be treated within the context of intercollegiate sports is a consequence of several characteristics of the franchise institutions. These educational institutions vary dramatically in size, scope of programs, quality of student bodies, and availability of resources. While it is relatively straightforward to specify the rules of a game that is constructed exactly the same for everyone, it is immensely complicated to specify the characteristics of a student-athlete's college life (from recruitment to graduation) that will apply to every student-athlete within every institutional context.

These student-athletes are defined as amateurs, but the definition is complex and exceptionally difficult to apply uniformly to all student-athletes in all sports. Colleges have different academic standards, social and operational environments, and amounts of money to spend on maintaining student-athlete eligibility. The student-athletes themselves have widely varying opportunities, depending on their sport and their talent, to imagine earning compensation based on their college athletic performance by selling their celebrity status to outside agencies while continuing to play on their university teams.

The NCAA franchise, tries to enforce rules that would ensure that student-athletes behave like regular students, but this is an impossible task since regular students themselves differ dramatically within and among institutions. Coaches and other athletic actors will always operate at the margin of the rules to find every advantage that will keep their best athletes academically eligible to compete.

Even institutions with endless resources and the capacity to recruit students with the best athletic talent and the highest academic preparation will violate the rules that define the amateur condition and academic standards. Moreover, the marketplace appears to indicate a willingness to see student-athletes as college students, but not necessarily as amateurs. The universities and colleges do not yet know how to manage student-athletes who could command substantial revenue from outside sources while still in college, but they will need to invent a system that accommodates these outside opportunities for student sports celebrities as legislators and the courts will surely intervene to give these students the right to commercialize their talent.

Another complication of the rules governing the management of student-athletes is that they must, by the complexity of dealing with widely varying human beings rather than absolute game rules, be open to interpretation. The fans and other followers of the sports, however, want absolute fairness to maintain the integrity of the game and prevent unfair advantage. In the pursuit of winning, institutions, coaches, student-athletes, academic administrators, faculty, and boosters will push past the boundaries of the rules, sometimes on behalf of an academically struggling student-athlete. Eventually many are caught, tried by the franchise system's complex adjudication process, and punished.

Punishment is difficult too, for the culprits are many but the NCAA franchise sanctions are restricted and limited since it is a voluntary organization without legal powers. Students can lose their athletic eligibility, coaches can be sanctioned which almost always causes their firing (although they are often rehired elsewhere), institutions can be penalized financially, particular sports teams can be punished by eliminating opportunities to compete for championships, and recruiting opportunities can be restricted. All these are significant but they have several defects that reflect the academic, student-based character of the enterprise.

Penalties almost always hurt the innocent but not always the guilty. If a team is held out of championship competition because a player took a bribe from a booster, the player may lose college eligibility, but could easily end up the following season in the pros as a multimillionaire. Next year or the following year, the team with players who all followed the rules, will nonetheless be prevented from competing for a national championship. This reflects the different time frames of sports interests. Student-athletes have a short time to participate, but the institution lives forever, and along with its fans and supporters will indeed suffer the consequences of being unable to compete or compete at the highest levels. The NCAA franchise, moreover, can penalize a coach, and make it difficult for the coach to work in the collegiate world after a major violation, but often the coaches manage to insulate themselves from the misbehavior of others in their institution's administrative organization or fan base.

If an assistant coach participates in bribing the family of a player during recruitment, the head coach will usually have been unaware or the NCAA will be unable to demonstrate that he knew of the violation. Often members of the extended university community can try to participate in violations without any direct involvement or encouragement from the athletic department. This circumstance, and the difficulty the NCAA enforcement staff has in getting information (for it has no legal authority to compel anyone who is not a current member of an institutional program to testify), means that compliance with rules must come from a strong institutional commitment that reaches inside the athletic department and that captures the support and understanding of high level donors and participants in the fan base. Some programs succeed in this and avoid problems, but even the most well-managed institutions will, on occasion, find that their efforts have been insufficient and somewhere, someone, intervened to improperly influence the behavior of a student-athlete.

The NCAA franchise works constantly to improve both the rules around student-athletes and the enforcement process, but its success, while sufficient to maintain the viability of the enterprise, is never enough to eliminate the occurrences of cheating. When one rule fixes a particular instance of improper behavior, other avenues for influencing or manipulating the student-athlete process appear. In the end, like every other high stakes enterprise in America, college sports will have its cheaters, mostly focused on student-athletes. The franchise goal is to maintain these at a low enough level to sustain the integrity of the competitions. Much like enforcement and regulation of the stock market or other high value parts of the economy, violations will never be eliminated, they can only be managed to the lowest possible level.

Like the games themselves, which demand unambiguous outcomes, critics of the NCAA seek unambiguous enforcement of rules surrounding the operation of the programs off the field. This is an unrealistic expectation, as the history of the NCAA's enforcement record demonstrates. The effort of the NCAA institutions to make this franchise system work is remarkable, reflecting the high value of the franchise to the colleges and universities involved. Perfection may well be unobtainable, but everyone recognizes that enforcement of the rules and standards that ensure some reasonable expectation of fairness is an essential feature of the entire enterprise.

© 2020