Since the inception of revenue-generating athletics at U.S. universities, administrators and coaches have faced calls for reform on the playing field and in the classroom. From Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 demand for decreased violence in college football to the Knight Commission’s repeated exhortations at the end of the 20th century to re-emphasize the academic side of the student-athlete relationship, universities have survived controversy after controversy by endorsing slight changes to eligibility and recruiting rules.
Two recent NCAA decisions — the temporary suspension in June of existing restrictions on student-athletes’ ability to profit from the use of their names, images, and likenesses, coupled with a task force on racial equity’s mid-October recommendation that incoming college freshmen no longer be required to meet minimum standardized test scores in order to participate in intercollegiate athletics — seem likely to change this field of play forever. Now, if a player happens to be among the fortunate few with sufficient name recognition to command a paying audience, he can offer up his face to T-shirt vendors, billboard advertisers, and even a subscription service like OnlyFans. On top of that, he can earn much-needed walking-around money without wasting two semesters applying himself in the classroom to compensate for having failed to meet a standardized test floor so low that even students herded into the vast center of the undergraduate bell curve nearly double that minimum.
If you take a free-market perspective on these matters, the NCAA’s decisions may strike you as positive developments. Many players attending Division I schools to participate in sports, particularly big-revenue sports such as basketball and football that generate positive cash flow for 25 of the 65 largest universities, go there primarily to learn how to play a sport in an effort to reach the next level of competition and therefore stand to benefit from diminished academic requirements and a little pocket money for their labor. But given how seamlessly the myth of the student-athlete undergirds the marketing of the college sports product, university alumni and other fans may eventually repudiate such dramatic alterations insofar as they sever the symbolic ties of the players to the fans’ beloved almae matres.
Further modest proposals may entail paying college athletes outright, reducing their course loads to almost nothing, and separating athletics departments from the universities to which they are connected. Those proposals would upend the marketing model that has sustained college sports for generations. In his book Big-Time Sports in American Universities, economist Charles Clotfelter writes, “No foreseeable force is likely to sever the century-old marriage between commercial athletics and American higher education … [given] the social benefits that are produced by big-time sports,” which range from donations and political support to the enjoyment provided to legions of fans. To a considerable extent, such enjoyment arises from the intense association that fans have with the student-athletes who represent their schools. Although it is widely accepted that athletes do less academic work and receive other benefits from the university administration, the belief that these individuals are not merely performers loyal to the highest bidder but rather fellow alumni and fellow students — one of us! — has a profound appeal.
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament thrives on audience suspension of disbelief in the mercenary nature of revenue-generating athletics. Absent a desire to win a bracket pool or see one’s university advance to the Final Four, most spectators root for the underdogs — undermanned, underskilled teams from smaller colleges and universities that ostensibly play the game the right way, exhibiting an unselfish, team-first attitude that reflects the virtues instilled in them by their coaches. To some viewers, the players on these teams offer living proof that the myth is real, that top athletes can simultaneously excel in the classroom and on the playing field. Even when viewers aren’t thinking this, the announcers-cum-shills for the NCAA brand are quick to remind them when a gritty team leader places his schoolwork ahead of his accomplishments on the court and plans to attend medical school if a career in professional basketball fails to materialize.
Top universities always bent the rules in order to recruit star players and ensure they remained academically eligible to perform. But the populist outrage of casual fans tends to be reserved for those programs that have had their violations exposed by NCAA investigators and sports journalists. The University of North Carolina received intense media scrutiny for allowing its athletes to reap the benefits of vastly inflated grades earned in bogus independent study courses. But the truth is that there have been hundreds of instances of similar conduct by other major universities: In the 1910s and 1920s, there were numerous examples of college athletes who were never enrolled students at all. The benefit of the UNC scandal to the NCAA was that it helped convince fans that such violations are exceptions rather than the rule. Such useful exceptions can be remedied with a pledge of increased institutional oversight from the offending university and whatever NCAA sanctions the market will bear — a full program shutdown in the case of an upstart university, as was foisted on Southern Methodist University during the 1980s, or a one-year postseason ban for a major player, the penalty for UNC’s football team in 2012.
Absent organizing myths that appeal to casual fans, public interest in a spectator sport will dwindle. A purely cynical atmosphere is bad for business. Major League Baseball discovered this after cracking down, in a haphazard and confusing manner, on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. If college sports devolve into glorified minor leagues for the professional sports to which they supply players, then the affiliated universities will likely draw measly crowds similar to those attracted by teams in the XFL, the NBA Developmental League, and the assorted minor-league baseball associations. Loyal alumni who might happily watch a medical-school-bound hometown hero make daring steals and drain 3-point shots would be far less eager to watch an entire team of similarly scrappy players drawing their salaries from that university’s athletic department but otherwise lacking any formal ties to it.
Revenue-generating college sports will endure as an ungainly appendage to American universities until the precise moment when their costs outweigh their benefits. Now, it looks like that day may come sooner rather than later. Decisions intended to funnel money to players while exempting them from bottom-of-the-barrel academic requirements may hasten the previously unthinkable effacement of a curious, 100-year marriage between research universities and high-end athletics. Until then, the student-athlete ideal, as phony and compromised as it is, remains the NCAA’s chief asset. Remove it, and nothing is left of the moribund student-athlete system that provided an actual education to my own dirt-poor father — and perhaps nothing should be.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
