Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2021

Spring 2021

Competition and Fairness

With competition being the center of sports activities, the requirement for fairness in the conduct and management of these sports becomes a fundamental concern. When we read through the NCAA principles and rules, and when we observe the operation of the intercollegiate sports programs, we encounter an endless series of principles and rules designed to ensure the fairness of the competitions. This primarily because winning under unfair conditions may provide a momentary sense of accomplishment but the unfairness eventually leaches meaning out of a winning performance.

College sports have found fairness a relatively manageable challenge when dealing with the rules of the game, and as we have observed above, the sports competition rules are visible, generally followed, and easily monitored for activities like sports that appear in public.

However regulating two other dimensions of these games proved much more difficult. We have seen, for example, how hard it is to control the process of recruiting student-athletes to participate in the various sports. All types of special inducements have been provided prospective student-atheletes and their families and even their family's friends to persuade a talented high school student to choose one university over another. Although the NCAA has worked very hard to reduce the opportunities for this kind of unfair practice, the prevalence of violations cases pursued by the NCAA infractions process clearly indicates the risks college athletic people are willing to take to try and capture a stellar talent. As the complexity and detail of these rules testifies, the incentive to devise ever more creative means to cheat in recruiting is substantial.

Other Forms of Unfair Circumstances

If much of sports activity is regulated by the NCAA to attempt to ensure fairness, the organization's inability to regulate financial issues creates a major unfairness consequences. Colleges and universities can spend amount of money they like on all aspects of intercollegiate competition except for the compensation awarded student-athletes. As a result, the amount of money spent on sports programs within the same divisions and sub-divisions varies dramatically, by $100M or more. Institutions spending very large amounts on college sports facilities, coaches, equipment, general amenities for student-athletes, academic support services, and the like all translate into competitive advantages for the programs with more money.

This is one of the most dramatic elements of the college sports enterprise, and over the years the NCAA and its institutions have worked on various organizational schemes to try and even out these issues. The construction of the NCAA Divisional structure served to create more or less equivalent spaces for the competition of institutions of dramatically different size and resources. But the simple division into three divisions wasn't sufficient, so Division I was subdivided into what is now called the Championship division and the top Bowl Championship Division. But even then, the huge difference between the top football programs and the rest in the Bowl Championship Division forced the creation of the Autonomy Division. A group with permission to pay for more things in support of student-athletes and with other regulatory exemptions.

All of this testifies to the great difference in size, resources, and commitment to college sports among the various colleges and universities. While the enthusiasm for sports is similar at all levels, the financial and other resource commitments, the size of audiences assembled, the revenue generated, are very far apart. These differences, obviously, create an unfairness that is, as yet, not fully captured by organization or regulation, and as long as the public continues to generate the revenue for college competition through television, these tensions will continue.

Division III

For some, the non-scholarship lower resourced athletic programs in Division III offer a hope for a college sports engagement of a much less professional kind. Yet even here, although significantly attenuated by smaller size and fewer resources, the intense focus on winning can be found in the practices of recruitment of student athletes, in the compensation for coaches, and in the expense for facilities. Alumni are often as passionate about the Division III college games and have equally intense loyalties. What they don't have, is the huge sums of money from television, the high national visibility, and pressures that follow. They too have their violations in recruiting and other NCAA investigations, but at a significantly lower level of national visibility.

Unfairness in Academic Expectations

The first is the general national focus on college graduation and the emphasis on graduation rates as indicators of an institution's academic commitment to its students. The second, is the recognition that if the student-athletes at one institution remain eligible to compete without making progress towards their degrees and eventually finish their sports eligibility without completing a degree then that institution's sports teams would have an advantage over teams from another institution that made student-athletes spend the necessary time and effort to successful complete their degree.

The NCAA could not easily insert itself into the regulation of a college's academic programs involving student-athletes, but they eventually created standards of academic achievement for individual sports teams. If a team did not, over all, meet these standards for the academic performance of their student-athletes in degree completion, then the team would be excluded from post season play. This was a method that measured the aggregate academic success of student-athlete by team and created penalties imposed on teams, not individuals directly, for the failure of academic support.

Since participation in championships is one of the key goals of every college sports programs, this effort to monitor aggregate team academic success created an incentive for all coaches to ensure that their student-athletes stayed in class, on track to graduation. The mechanism for this system to enforce a level of fairness in academic engagement on all college sports teams required the invention of a measure of academic success. Thus, the NCAA and its institutions approved the creation of an Academic Progress Rate (or APR) statistic. The APR created a benchmark against which all teams could measure the progress of their student-athletes in all sports, and created a set of penalties related to championship participation for institutional teams whose members did not meet the benchmark.

The good result was to force academic expectations into the calculations of coaches and players in relation to their commitment to academic performance. The possibly negative result was the creation of an incentive to steer student-athletes into less academically rigorous programs so the teams would have an easier time achieving the required academic progress.

Still, the creation of this metric illustrates the constant effort of the institutions through the NCAA to create fair competition within the constraints of the college academic context.

In the end, of course, there is no escape from the competitive pressures generated by the nature of sports contests themselves and from the unique difficulty of combining sports with college.

© 2021