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
The last of these steps toward professionalization was letting freshmen compete in varsity athletics and not requiring a year in residence if they had met minimal academic standards in high school, measured by grade point average and/or standardized admission test scores. Freshman athletes were ineligible for varsity competition until 1973. The purpose of the one-year residency requirement was to allow an academic transition to college without the distraction of ultracompetitive sports. Many schools had freshman teams that played lighter schedules, therefore limiting practice, travel, and emphasis on competition in order to minimize the impact on academics. Doing away with the mandatory year of residence before varsity play continued to solidify, for many, the impression that college athletics was no longer “education-based” in any meaningful sense, but had become more about winning and revenue generation.6
The debate about intercollegiate athletics, and, by extension, American sports development grounded primarily within the existing educational system at all levels, has been growing for over a century. It is exacerbated by an inability to fully quantify its costs and benefits within an educational model. Thelin refers to college and university athletics as “American higher education’s ‘peculiar institution.’ Their presence is pervasive, yet their proper balance with academics remains puzzling” (Thelin 1994, 1). According to Sperber (1990), intercollegiate athletics participation and competition have been scarred by abuse of academic requirements for athletic eligibility almost since their very beginnings in the early nineteenth century. Abuse of academic requirements in intercollegiate athletics has had a long and sordid history (Ryan 1989; Sperber 1990).
THE PROBLEM OF SHAM AMATEURISM
In America, the United States Olympic Committee and/or other sports national governing bodies (NGBs) could actually act as the broker for the athlete, and bargain for an educational opportunity outside of directly competing for the school. The US government could also adopt ideas used in Europe and provide educational credits or grants to assist athletes of national and international caliber to maximize their opportunities in both athletics and education. Let’s not forget capitalism, either. If individuals and/or corporations want to sponsor athletes either solely or in conjunction with the government to further their athletic development and educational opportunities, then that should be encouraged and formalized. Considering that the USOC is the only privately funded Olympic committee in the world, it is not a huge leap to believe that the private sector could be involved on behalf of elite American athletes in a more flexible model such as this. It’s conceivable that private individuals and companies could directly assist athletes and help finance their educational goals. Currently, arrangements like this would run afoul of archaic NCAA rules prohibiting direct assistance as not aligned with the tenets of amateur athletics. Even though individuals can donate to university foundations for athletic scholarships, at this point in time any direct payment to an athlete would be a violation and cause the institution to be sanctioned.7 But this raises the whole issue of amateurism in American sports, an issue that we need to revisit in this society.
A repulsive example of how current eligibility and amateurism rules can detrimentally affect an elite athlete is the story of former dual-sport athlete Jeremy Bloom. Bloom was a noted professional skier, world champion in moguls skiing, and a member of the US Ski Team from the age of fifteen. He represented the United States in the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City and became the youngest person and only the third American ever to win the World Grand Prix title. Bloom was also blessed with the ability and in some ways the misfortune to be a highly successful athlete in two sports, one of which happened to be part of the American intercollegiate athletics system. He enrolled at the University of Colorado in the fall of 2002 and excelled as a Division I football player, gaining a number of receiving, punt return, and kick return records and earning freshman All-American and Big XII honors in 2003. Later that year, he won a world championship gold medal in mogul skiing. In 2004, despite Bloom being an outstanding student, the NCAA declared him ineligible due to the compensation he was receiving as a professional skier, and he lost the last two years of his football eligibility.
Note that the problem here is with definitions of amateurism in intercollegiate sports specifically. The US Olympic model at least allows athletes, even college athletes, to earn outside income through endorsements, sponsorships, and employment, often actually brokered by the USOC and/or a particular sport’s NGB. While not receiving a straight salary, Olympic athletes can provide themselves a good living, depending on their marketability, along with receiving funds or in-kind support for training. Under USOC rules, Bloom was allowed to earn outside monies as a professional skier.
As a football player, Bloom did everything he was supposed to as an amateur
