By the 1920s and 1930s, almost all higher-education institutions had physical education requirements in the curriculum. This, combined with an increased emphasis on intercollegiate athletics, made physical education and competitive sports popular and, effectively, big business. In the 1920s, intercollegiate athletic competition grew exponentially across the nation, making it a “golden age” of college sports. Students had new freedoms, new drives, and new desires for emotional and physical outlets. College sports seemed to provide the one common denominator (Wilson and Brondfield 1967). Colleges and universities were adding sports and building formidable athletic programs in the process. The NCAA held its first championship in track and field in 1921 (Byers 1995; Falla 1981).
The post–World War II era brought forth significant rules and regulations that were later adopted by NCAA member institutions as a whole. The postwar NCAA also returned to the business of attempting to restore and maintain integrity in intercollegiate athletics. At the first NCAA convention (actually called the “Conference of Conferences”), in July 1946, the participants drafted a statement outlining “Principles for the Conduct of Intercollegiate Athletics” (Brown 1999; Sack and Staurowsky 1998).
The principles concerned adhering to the definition of amateurism that existed at the time. This included not allowing professional athletes to compete, holding student-athletes to the same academic standards as the rest of the student body, awarding financial aid without consideration of athletic ability, and developing a policy of recruiting that basically prohibited a coach or anyone representing a member school from recruiting any prospective student-athlete with the offer of financial aid or any equivalent inducement. These principles collectively became known as the “Sanity Code,” or Article III of the NCAA constitution when it was first presented in 1947. This code was initially developed to help colleges and universities deal with the growing levels of abuse and violations in intercollegiate athletics, especially football and men’s basketball. The code was a tortured, yet in some ways brilliant effort to reconcile a number of disparate interests and philosophies concerning intercollegiate athletics (Falla 1981; Sack and Staurowsky 1998; Sperber 1990; Zimbalist 1999). At the time of the development of the Sanity Code, values in intercollegiate athletics remained skewed toward winning and athletic success, rather than academic achievement and graduation.
Intercollegiate athletics in the first half of the twentieth century faced other issues similar to those that colleges and universities still deal with today. These included amateurism, academic integrity, financial aid to athletes, and recruiting restrictions and violations. The birth of the NCAA brought the once shockingly high death rate of football players prior to 1910 to an almost nonexistent low by having somewhat consistent rules and regulations to make the game safer, while to some extent keeping academic cheating and pay-for-play under control. Even though rule problems both off and on the field were minimized, as the competition grew nationwide, the exploitation of academic requirements became tougher for the NCAA membership to control (Byers 1995).
Back in 1910, the first NCAA constitution, like the Sanity Code put in place in the 1947 NCAA constitution, had many provisions that are applicable today in the areas of initial athletic eligibility and satisfactory academic progress. These led to the reform of intercollegiate athletics and the restructuring of academic eligibility standards for athletes. Article 2 stated, “Its [i.e., the organization’s] object shall be the regulation and supervision of college athletics throughout the United States in order that the athletic activities in the colleges and universities may be maintained on an ethical plane in keeping with the dignity and high purpose of education.” Article 8 went on to address the area of intercollegiate athletic and academic eligibility, stating that the “Colleges and Universities in the Association severally agree to take control of student athletic sports as far as may be necessary to maintain in them a high standard of personal honor, eligibility and fair play and to remedy whatever abuses may exist” (Falla 1981, 134–35). These goals are still supposed to drive the governance of educationally based sports in America today.
However, problems arising from the drift away from academic primacy were exacerbated by four major changes in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first step toward actual professionalization of college sports happened in 1956 when the core definition of amateurism, concerning not receiving any remuneration for athletic competition, was modified to allow athletic scholarships that paid for tuition, books, and course-related fees as an “educational award” for college athletes. This was done in an attempt to curb prohibited payments and other benefits to college athletes. Athletes were also given a stipend of $15 per month as laundry money, until that became impermissible in the early seventies.1 At the time of this redefinition, athletic scholarships were guaranteed for four years and could only be taken away for extraordinary, college-based reasons, such as not meeting academic standards, and not for athletic reasons, in an attempt to keep education at the forefront and preserve athletics as a true extracurricular activity. Athletes were still able to keep their athletic awards even if they quit the team voluntarily.
The second step toward professionalism came less than a decade later, when many universities expressed frustration at that last provision, that an athlete could quit a team, but keep his or her athletic scholarship. This early version of guaranteed scholarship had also planted the seeds for an athletes’ rights movement, mostly by African American athletes who began demanding equal rights and treatment parallel to civil rights demands and protests that were happening elsewhere in the United States. Coaches and administrators grew frustrated with what they felt were challenges to their authority and a growing lack of control over athletes. In response to the concerns of many athletic departments, the NCAA determined in 1967 that scholarships could be canceled if an athlete quit a team. In 1973, the athletic scholarship was made a one-year award that could be taken away for virtually any reason at the end of the period of the award, even for athletic reasons. It essentially became a yearly pay-for-play contract, with coaches given immense authority over whether an athlete would remain on scholarship (Strauss 2014).2
The third and arguably the biggest challenge to college sports’ being an integral part of education was the growth of television and other media in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is difficult to fathom today that as recently as the mid-eighties one could only watch one college football game per weekend, or potentially another regional game, if lucky. If Ohio State was playing Michigan in football, one of the greatest rivalries in college sports history, it had to be selected by the NCAA for national TV coverage or it would not be available for the general public, unless, of course, you had a ticket to the game. The logic behind this was multipronged. There was a belief that television, despite the potential mass marketability, would dramatically affect the home-gate revenue of participants in a negative way. However, the potential for television revenue drove several schools, most notably the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia, to challenge the NCAA’s authority to control television broadcasts in a landmark legal case, NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which went all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1984.3 The NCAA lost in a 5–4 decision that forever altered the landscape of intercollegiate athletics and moved the collegiate system even further away from a primary focus on the academic mission in regard to athletes. The NCAA wanted desperately to control broadcasts and revenue, not just to protect the live gate, but also in an attempt to provide a level playing field among competitors. The fear was, if schools and conferences negotiated their own television and other media contracts, it would lead to a system of haves and have-nots, along with damaging the live gate. This could influence schools to have a “do whatever it takes” mentality to get star players and star teams on the field or court, in order to make more revenue via television and, by extension, corporate sponsorship rights (Byers 1995).4 While it can be argued that a system of haves and have-nots has existed anyway, since the beginning of college sports, it is true that this decision opened up unprecedented amounts of revenue for some schools in the more high-profile conferences. This in some ways forced smaller schools to overspend and overextend in a desperate attempt to keep up with the major institutions, often trumping educational priorities in the name of athletic success, or face the prospect of dropping out of Division I football altogether. Some, like Drake University, decided to downgrade to a lower, non-scholarship division; others to this day are trying to keep up in a race they cannot win.5