III.

History

A.

Early Years

The Intercollegiate Athletic Association (IAA) was founded in 1906 in response to the rising number of serious injuries and even fatalities in high school and college football. In 1910 the IAA changed its name to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It initially functioned only as a rulemaking body charged with making intercollegiate athletics safer and more uniform. In 1921 the organization held its first championship event, a track-and-field competition.

Before World War II (1939-1945) the NCAA primarily worked to establish standardized rules for various sports. The first NCAA men’s basketball championship tournament, held in 1939, featured just eight teams, and for several decades the competition was eclipsed by the privately run, East Coast-dominated National Invitational Tournament (NIT).

B.

Money and College Sports

The status and importance of the NCAA grew steadily in the second half of the 20th century as it began to generate significant revenues. In the early 1950s the NCAA took control of the rights to college football broadcasts, which at the time eclipsed professional football and basketball in attendance and fan interest. Men’s college basketball grew in popularity and revenue in the ensuing decades, especially when the postseason tournament expanded in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, college football and basketball—together often referred to as the revenue-generating sports—bring in millions of dollars a year at top-tier schools.

As the influence of money in college athletics grew steadily, the NCAA’s policy on amateurism became a source of controversy and debate. The organization stipulates that college athletes receive no direct compensation for their play, although in the early 1950s it voted to allow athletic scholarships (which covers tuition, room, board, and miscellaneous costs such as books). The NCAA has dismissed or ignored any attempt to develop some form of direct payment program to student-athletes.

As college sports have grown in influence and visibility as well as financially, the intensity of debate has also increased. The NCAA’s detractors argue that major college sports are thoroughly corrupted by money—only a fraction of which goes toward scholarships—and no longer focus on the best interests of the student-athlete. At the same time, supporters of the NCAA contend that high-profile college athletics serve as a means of keeping alumni connected to their schools, serve as a source of school and community pride, and—most importantly—provide needed funding for the many college sports programs that do not generate revenue.

This conflict dates back to long before the age of billion-dollar NCAA television contracts or teenage athletes signing professional contracts for millions of dollars. A 1951 editorial in the New York Times noted: “[The college athlete] lives in a twilight zone between pure amateurism and out-and-out professionalism. And there [lies] the fundamental flaw in intercollegiate athletics as it exists today.”

C.

Scandals

The growth in college sports revenue resulted in an equal growth in the potential for corruption and rule-breaking. The first major scandal in college athletics emerged in 1951, when key players from City College of New York (which won both the NIT and NCAA tournaments the year before) admitted to taking money from gamblers to “fix” the outcomes of some of their team’s games. Further investigation revealed more than 30 basketball players from New York-area schools had engaged in such activities.

Such scandals were not limited to gambling nor to large cities such as New York. Evidence of illicit recruiting techniques and illegal payoffs to athletes was uncovered in schools across the country. Even players from the University of Kentucky, a team led by future Hall of Fame coach Adolph Rupp, were implicated. At least partially as a result of these revelations, member schools voted to give the NCAA greater disciplinary power. For the first time the NCAA levied sanctions against a member school, putting both Kentucky and Bradley University of Illinois on probation for the 1952-53 season.

Even as the NCAA worked to adopt more stringent rules, harsher punishments, and stronger enforcement policies, cheating in college sports continued to flourish. A major source of problems involved athletic boosters, fans who often donate large sums of money to their favorite school’s athletic department. In addition to their school donations, boosters would sometimes also covertly pay recruits and current athletes or provide other illegal benefits.

One of the more extreme examples of such practices came in the 1980s at Southern Methodist University (SMU). An NCAA investigation of the SMU football program revealed a slush fund of $400,000 that boosters had provided to help attract and pay players. The scandal produced one of the few examples of the NCAA handing down the “death penalty” to a member school, as SMU’s football team was shut down for the 1987 and 1988 seasons. In response to these and other revelations during this period, the NCAA moved to reduce athletic scholarships, curtail some recruiting practices, and severely limit the activities of boosters.

Comprehensive knowledge and enforcement of the NCAA’s many complex rules is a daunting task for both the association and its member schools. The NCAA does not have the resources to fully monitor the thousands of teams it governs, nor do many athletic departments have the ability to make sure all of their coaches and employees understand and follow every NCAA rule to the letter. The potential glory and financial rewards that success can bring to schools, administrators, coaches, and the NCAA itself are so great that there is also a lack of incentive for thorough compliance and enforcement. The discovery of NCAA violations and corruption within high-profile college athletics programs remains a commonplace occurrence.

D.

Title IX

While men’s college athletics boomed, women’s programs were generally small and poorly funded. For the first 80 years of the 20th century, the NCAA did not run national postseason tournaments for women, citing costs and lack of broad interest. To fill this void, a separate organization for women’s sports, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), was founded in 1971.

The playing field changed in 1972, when the United States Congress enacted the Education Amendments Act. Title IX of this act prohibited any form of sexual discrimination at schools that receive federal funds. In practical terms, this meant that female high school and college athletes were entitled to the same resources and opportunities as the men received. The NCAA initially resisted the legislation, but at the same time it gradually began to provide greater support for women’s sports, including championship tournaments. By the early 1980s the NCAA had replaced the AIAW as the premier governing body for women’s intercollegiate athletics. In the year 2000, colleges granted more than $370 million worth of female athletic scholarships.

Title IX not only resulted in increased funding and participation for women’s college athletics, it greatly boosted high school programs as well. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, participation in girls’ high school sports has risen from 2.7 percent of all students in 1972 to 40 percent today. These girls, and their parents, can use the possibility of a college athletic scholarship as a motivator to excel. The fan base for women’s college sports has also grown steadily during this period—in the case of NCAA women’s basketball, attendance increased every year between the mid-1980s and 2003, when more than 7 million fans attended a game. Millions more watched the annual championship tournament on national television.

The change caused by Title IX generated considerable controversy. Advocates of the old approach to college sports argued that women did not deserve the same resources because their programs did not generate revenue. Some of these fans also noted that there was no women’s equivalent to football, which required the largest number of athletic scholarships of any sport. Supporters of smaller men’s college sports, such as gymnastics and wrestling, feared that the new emphasis on women’s athletics would reduce or eliminate the funding for their programs so that the money can be reallocated to women’s sports.

In the early 21st century, officials in women’s athletics continued to point out that a majority of NCAA schools were failing to meet the standards laid out by Title IX. The Women’s Sports Foundation cites studies showing female college athletes still receive significantly less money than men for athletic scholarships, recruiting, and overall opportunities and resources. A number of lawsuits have been filed on both sides of the issue, and working to interpret the rules and meet the requirements of Title IX remains a large challenge for the NCAA and its member schools.

E.

Academic Standards

Another major challenge for the NCAA has been to define the academic eligibility standards for student-athletes, which have been variously criticized as too low or too high. Regulations introduced in the late 1980s and 1990s designed to strengthen these standards were viewed by some as discriminatory, since a large percentage of the players failing to qualify were African American. In an attempt to address these concerns, the NCAA lowered the entrance requirements for incoming freshmen in 2002.

In recent years the organization has also been forced to confront the low graduation rates among some groups of college athletes, particularly in football and basketball. Surveys have shown that many top football programs have much poorer graduation rates than their student body as a whole, and graduation rates for black athletes are particularly low. In early 2005 the NCAA board of directors passed reforms linking a particular team’s number of scholarships to the graduation rates of its players.