ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION
Several attempts at organizing an intercollegiate athletics governing body were made before the eventual formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as the primary and best-known governing body over college sports. On January 11, 1895, there was a historic meeting of the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, which later became the Big Ten Conference (Byers 1995). This was the first intercollegiate athletic conference on record that made regulations regarding student-athletes’ eligibility and participation (Chu, Segrave, and Becker 1985; Wilson and Brondfield 1967). Academic eligibility and participation rules began to spread across the country at other campuses, but many abuses of academic requirements still existed, and more needed to be done to keep the growing beast of athletics under the academic tent. There were many attempts at reasonable compliance, but manipulations of academic standards and what is referred to today by the NCAA and its member institutions as competitive equity standards needed to be addressed collectively by all higher-education institutions at a national level, before the enterprise became too big to control. Regulation and effective governance needed to start with what was as popular a sport then as it is now, the behemoth known as college football (Falla 1981).
In 1905, a nationwide call for college football reform led to the first steps toward creating a governing body for intercollegiate athletics. Collaboration among institutions was initiated not to address academic, booster, or even recruiting abuses, but to regulate college football on the playing field and reduce the numerous injuries and lack of consistency in the rules (Grimes and Chressanthis 1994). The call for reform in the rules of the game came from President Theodore Roosevelt himself. In the eyes of many, college football, with its mass-momentum formations, few rules, and anything-goes philosophy, had reached an unacceptable level of violent play that resulted in several deaths. President Roosevelt used the prestige of his office to try to calm the fears of a majority of the public about the growing sense of lawlessness surrounding college football, including the abuse of institutional academic requirements now pervasive in intercollegiate athletics. Many colleges and universities, fearing overemphasis on sports and seeing the dangers of the game, eventually suspended football, including Columbia and Northwestern. Harvard president Charles Eliot threatened to totally abolish the game on his campus (Grimes and Chressanthis 1994; Zimbalist 1999).
According to Falla (1981), there was a sense that something needed to be done at the highest levels to regulate intercollegiate athletics, as society clamored for the college game to adopt stricter rules. The response to this public outcry brought about the initial meeting in 1906 that eventually led in subsequent meetings to the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), the forerunner of the NCAA (Watt and Moore 2001; Zimbalist 1999). Although most of the concerns about college athletics focused on excessive violence, questions regarding the relationship of academics and athletics received almost as much attention from the first meeting onward (Funk 1991; Sack and Staurowsky 1998). In 1910, the IAAUS adopted a new name: the National Collegiate Athletic Association. In the words of one of the founding fathers, later the first president of the NCAA, Captain Palmer Pierce of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the association would be forever known as “the voice of college sports” (Falla 1981).
THE GROWTH OF SPORTS WITHIN HIGHER EDUCATION
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,
