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Johns Hopkins University Press
Shedeur Sanders, the University of Colorado quarterback and son of Colorado head coach and former National Football League star Deion Sanders, earns more than $5 million a year from endorsement deals and drives a Rolls-Royce. He made his first in-person appearance in a college classroom at the end of his third semester on campus, which videographers taped for his social media accounts. While Sanders’s compensation is exceptional, starting quarterbacks in the Power Four conferences average more than $800,000 annually through name, image and likeness deals; starting offensive linemen more than $500,000, and starting running backs more than $300,000.
In what has been called “the biggest upheaval in college sports history,” the commercialization of varsity athletics has been drastically accelerated recently by lawsuits, television deals and conference realignments. Some athletic departments now spend more than $200 million a year, and conference television contracts run into the billions. If a federal judge approves a $2.8 billion antitrust settlement in a class action lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association, universities will be allowed to allocate about $20 million annually to pay players directly.
In College Sports: A History, newly released by Johns Hopkins University Press, Eric A. Moyen, a professor of higher education leadership at Mississippi State University, and John R. Thelin, emeritus professor of the history of higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky, offer a timely, comprehensive and informative account of the long tail of the commercialization of college sports.
Moyen and Thelin make a compelling case that efforts to control that commercialization have largely been thwarted by highly compartmentalized modern universities, which granted athletic departments considerable autonomy. Administrators often cite alumni enthusiasm for athletics, the role of successful teams in raising their institutions’ visibility, compliance with Title IX and a desire to keep up with their peers as justifications for turning a blind eye to ballooning deficits.
The ideal of the amateur student athlete competing for the sheer joy of sport, the authors point out, is, to a great extent, a myth. The first intercollegiate sporting event, an 1852 student-organized crew race between Harvard and Yale Universities, was funded by railroad executives eager for publicity and embraced by rowers excited for a free vacation.
During the next 60 years, students and then faculty lost control over college sports. In a “monumental shift in the structure and mission of higher education,” liberal arts colleges ceded ground to large universities with an “appetite for expansion,” to use Frederick Rudolph’s language, cited by Moyen and Thelin. Universities became bureaucratized and siloed, giving faculty greater authority over research and teaching but far less control over administrative decisions, including athletics, which became more specialized and resource-intensive.
More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner concluded that intercollegiate athletics had become “a business, carried on too often by professionals, supported by levies on the public, bringing in vast gate receipts, demoralizing student ethics, and confusing the ideals of sport, manliness, and decency.” By 1952, the president of the University of Oklahoma was able to tell state legislators with no hint of irony, “I hope to build a university of which our football team can be proud.”
Episodic reform efforts by colleges and universities, driven at different times by player injuries, recruiting and point-shaving scandals, and sometimes even concern over the impact of commercialization on the academic mission, made little headway. In its 1929 Bulletin No. 23 on American College Athletics, for example, the influential Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching highlighted what Moyen and Thelin describe as the “disregard for the rules of amateurism” permeating college athletics, the “deleterious impact of press coverage” and the lack of attention paid to players’ health and safety.
Although it emphasized the need to “diminish” the commercial influence on college sports, the report offered little in the way of specific recommendations, insisting instead that “happily, this task is now engaging the attention” of college leaders, including presidents, who would succeed if they possessed “the requisite ability and courage.”
Of course, most student athletes in Division I non-revenue-generating sports, and in all Division II and III sports, can legitimately be called amateurs. Even so, the influence of big-time football and basketball programs has a trickle-down effect. Increasingly dispersed conferences designed to maximize television revenue force cross-country travel, missed classes and jet lag on students already left with little time for academics, their training and game schedules requiring them to spend a median range of 28.5 to 34 hours a week on athletics, often with no respite even in the off-season. The University of Southern California’s women’s volleyball team, for example, is expected to miss at least 12 days of classes this fall.
Recent court decisions have, of course, raised the stakes. Three years ago, players won the right to monetize their name, image and likeness and a new portal allows them to transfer easily to the highest bidder, spurring a new era of “financial chaos, legal confusion and secret deals.” While most college athletes still make little or no money, standouts in football and basketball are raking in large sums, with much smaller amounts going to top players in other sports.
Except for a handful of big-time sports programs, the vast majority of universities lose money on varsity athletics. Even top-tier football and basketball programs struggle to keep up with the skyrocketing costs of coaches’ salaries, stadiums and training facilities, and charter air travel. Their universities are forced to cover large and growing deficits from operating budgets and student fees, to the detriment of academics and student services. Last year, for example, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University athletic programs ran a combined deficit of more than $75 million.
In the past, Moyen and Thelin remind us, significant reforms have been driven by Congress and the courts. It took civil rights legislation and lawsuits to force colleges and universities to integrate their teams and, later, to support women’s sports at levels comparable to men’s. Worried by a confusing mix of state laws, antitrust claims, the uncertain application of antidiscrimination law to women’s sports in the era of revenue sharing and NIL deals, and efforts by student athletes to unionize, some college presidents and the NCAA are calling for Congress to intervene.
In our judgment, Congress and the Department of Education should act, in collaboration with colleges, universities, athletic conferences and the NCAA, with a commitment to keep educational interests at the forefront. Some of the steps we support, no doubt, have already been tried or are under consideration at some institutions. And one size need not fit all. Some colleges and universities, for example, might consider participating in a conference in which only walk-ons compete.
That said, action should be taken soon to admit only individuals who have demonstrated the desire and ability to be successful students as well as athletes, perhaps by tightening minimum high school GPA and test score thresholds, providing ongoing academic assistance for those who need it, increasing the minimum number of credits taken per semester and the minimum GPAs necessary to maintain eligibility, banning teams whose students’ graduation rates fail to come reasonably close to the institution’s overall graduation rate from participating in league playoffs and bowl games, mandating enforcement of the NCAA’s 20-hour-per-week cap on athletics-related activity, establishing reasonable limits on training to reduce serious injuries, eliminating or curtailing sports where injuries continue to be prevalent, publishing the sources and amounts of university subsidies to athletic program budgets, convening task forces to tackle the vexing issue of NIL and other payments to varsity athletes, and considering whether some form of antitrust exemption may be necessary to achieve these reforms.
Whether or not colleges and universities can agree on these proposals, there should be a consensus that game-changing reforms are urgently needed to restore order to the Wild West that now is college sports.
