“We might, I say, have possibly more of the paying of money for the support of athletes in college if we abolished the [no] money rule; but I am very sure that we should have vastly less scandal, vastly less lying and deception of all sorts, than we have now. Remember, there is nothing wicked in giving money to a young man to help him through college partly because you are interested in him as an athlete. There is nothing base in his taking that money if he can maintain his standing as a student and his position as an athlete at the same time. Do away with the state of mind which this rule has established for many years and consider whether there is anything base in that. I say that the practice of giving and receiving money might increase somewhat; but I am confident that the practice of lying and deceiving in all ways in regard to such giving would diminish very greatly, and I should be willing to see the amount of that act increased fourfold, if I could diminish to one-quarter the amount of lying about it, which is the main evil.” (emphasis added)

- Edwin H. Hall, Harvard professor and renowned physicist: “Athletic Professionalism and its Remedies”, The School Review, Vol. 13, No. 10 (The University of Chicago Press, Dec. 1905, pp. 766, 767)

"Everybody’s chasing the bag. Then you get mad at the players when they chase it. How is that? How do the grownups get mad at the players for chasing it when the colleges are chasing it?”

- Colorado Head Football Coach Deion Sanders (August 4th, 2023, after five Pac-12 schools announced they were leaving for the Big Ten and Big 12 conferences)

“To conduct athletics in a professional mode while calling them amateur was both a self-contradiction and an hypocrisy; a pretense at virtuous character without possessing virtue. To call collegiate sport amateur was in fact playacting, the ancient Greek definition of the term hypocrisy. Intercollegiate athletics, which had many virtues according to many individuals, was acting the part of amateur sports while playing like professional athletics. Thus, the amateur-professional athletic dilemma developed. If a college had truly amateur sport, it would lose contests and thus prestige. If a college acknowledged outright professional sport, the college would lose respectability as a middle-class or higher-class institution. Be amateur and lose athletically to those who were less amateur; be outright professional and lose social esteem. The solution to the dilemma, then, was to claim amateurism to the world while in fact accepting professionalism.” (emphasis added)

- Smith, Ronald A. 1988. Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics, 171. New York: Oxford University Press.

“The only permissible or clean money shall be that collected by the colleges and rationed to the players under a prescribed formula set forth in the colleges’ mutual, NCAA-enforced contract. Sports dollars not subject to the colleges’ laundering process are considered dirty money if the money finds its way to a player. The athlete’s amateur standing and eligibility will be ruined. For all others in the campus hierarchy, the dollars are rewards for dedicated service.”

- Byers, Walter. 1995. Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, 371. University of Michigan Press.

In 1852, in what is generally considered the first intercollegiate athletic contest, a group of Harvard rowers defeated a team from Yale in front of less than 1,000 spectators. That inauspicious race—the winning team received a valuable ornamental oar—spawned a uniquely American obsession with intercollegiate sports competition. Next came expanded competitive regattas, baseball and track and field in the post-Reconstruction years, and football and basketball in the late 19th century.

College sports in America have always lived a double life. For outward purposes, college sports cultivated an image that is the product of elitist social conventions and pretenses of the 19th-century British aristocracy. Among the aristocracy’s social luxuries was “amateurism,” where the only legitimate motive for athletic competition was the pleasure of the contest.

Mixing money and sport was beneath the dignity of Britain’s elite.

College sports’ poorly concealed second life is fueled by uniquely American values of freedom, equality of opportunity, hard work, financial reward, and bare-knuckled competition that leads to winning.

The self-serving picking and choosing of principles from these competing value systems has resulted in an enterprise defined principally by its contradictions.

In truth, British amateurism never had a chance against America’s opportunity-based freedoms and ingenuity:

“The English amateur system, based upon participation by the social and economic elite and rejection of those beneath them from participating, would never gain a foothold in American college athletics. There was too much competition, too strong a belief in merit over heredity, too abundant an ideology of freedom and opportunity for the amateur ideal to succeed.” (Smith, Sports and Freedom. Chapter XII, Amateur College Sport: An Untenable Concept in a Free and Open Society, 174)

Nevertheless, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American higher education leaders and policymakers defaulted to familiar British and European education-sport models to define the values of college sports.

America’s most elite institutions of higher education—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, the “Big Three”—forged the template for this strange collision of British social conventions and irrepressible American freedoms.

In what began as a mostly student-run system, the Big Three focused on winning at all costs to establish their institutional superiority.

At the same time, they used their formidable resources and institutional influence to project a public image rooted in principle and honor.

The emergence and popularity of football were at the center of the Big Three’s domination of college sports in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Harvard and Yale were the primary innovation centers for college football—the sport itself and the values and business models that grew from it.

Walter Camp is considered the “Father of American Football.”  Through Camp’s coaching acumen and public football promotion, Yale earned the distinction as the “cradle of coaches.”

Camp is credited with pioneering rules changes (e.g., line of scrimmage and possession rules based on “downs”) that transformed football from a free-for-all rugby-style game to what now resembles modern American football.

Camp informally presided over college football with a czar-like influence until he died in 1925.

Camp personified the dissonance between perception and reality in college sports. He cultivated a reputation as the quintessential scholar-athlete and guardian of the amateur ideal. His 1893 book Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports promotes gentlemanly virtues such as sportsmanship, amateurism, and godliness.

Yet many of Camp’s peers viewed him as a bully, a spoilsport, and a ruthless self-promoter. Camp’s public sermons on amateurism contrasted with his exploitation of amateur sports for commercial and reputational gain.

Among his less virtuous practices, Camp had a slush fund while at Yale from which he paid for athlete tutors and gifts to coaches and athletes (including Yale football captain James Hogan’s two-week vacation to Havana, Cuba). (Smith, Sports and Freedom 170, 205.)

Camp’s status as the unofficial head of college football made the Big Three a vanguard of football’s expansion. In 1903, Harvard, not Ohio State or Michigan, built the first permanent football stadium. It accommodated 40,000 spectators. Its primary purpose was to satisfy the demand for the Harvard-Yale game. Yale, not to be outdone, completed a stadium in 1914 that held 75,000 fans—the largest in the country. Princeton soon followed suit.

Yet, in their quest to retain features of the Oxford/Cambridge amateurism model, the Big Three ran headlong into an American force unknown to their British counterparts: fierce market competition in higher education.

With the passage of the Morrill Act(s) in 1862 and 1890, states were incentivized by the federal government to build universities, expand the higher education frontier to less populated areas, and provide fields of study aligned with territorial expansion (agriculture, mechanics, technology).

Elite colleges and universities were not well-situated (or inclined) to serve that role. Many of the Morrill Acts’ land-grant colleges became large public universities that now dominate the college football market.

As the supply of higher education institutions increased, so did competition for students, tuition dollars, and resources.

Following the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton model, newer colleges and universities used intercollegiate sports to secure what all colleges and universities desire most: publicity, prestige, power, loyalty, and money: “With the success of Harvard and Yale as competitors in higher education and in athletics, it was not surprising that the twentieth century saw a ritualized cloning of Harvard and Yale.”  (Smith, Sports and Freedom, 218)

By the end of the 1920s, over seventy permanent college football stadiums had been constructed. In nearly every case, the stadium was the largest building on campus. Larger institutions—primarily in the heartland and West Coast—soon joined the stadium arms race. These grand structures became a symbol of power and prestige.

In 1922, Ohio State built a stadium seating over 60,000; in 1923, the University of California at Berkeley completed a 70,000-seat stadium; then Stanford with its 90,000 capacity super-stadium; then a flurry of Big Ten structures whose seating capacities turned Saturday afternoons in the Midwest into an assortment of one-day state fairs. (Sack, A.L., & Staurowsky, E.J. (1998). College Athletes For Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth. Greenwood. Chapter 2, The NCAA Turns Professional: 1906-1956)

College football entered America’s consciousness, culture, and economy. The opportunities of scale that football provided made the sport too valuable to be left in the hands of students and alumni.

Thus, stadium fever was a substantial factor in the quiet but hostile takeover of big-time college sports by universities, presidents, governing boards, professional athletics administrators/coaches, and outside commercial interests.

Inevitably, the football craze and its use for institutional purposes led to the adoption and acceptance of practices directly at odds with any rational conception of amateurism, including charging money from spectators, hiring professional coaches, and offering inducements to current and prospective athletes.

In 1929, the Carnegie Institute for the Advancement of Teaching issued a comprehensive report after a three-year field study that chronicled abuses in big-time football. The Report established that amateurism was honored chiefly in its breach and suggested a model of presidential leadership and control of college sports to bring it back in alignment with the values of higher education.

The NCAA later adopted the presidential leadership and control model, but it failed to rein in the commercialization and professionalization of college sports.

The conflicting incentives in college sports have led to permanent, deeply embedded structural and institutional hypocrisies that shape the motives of every stakeholder in the industry:

(1) The NCAA and its member institutions preach amateurism, yet they demand the most professionalized football and men’s basketball products that the market can bear.

(2) The NCAA was founded in 1906, mainly in response to an alarming rate of football-related injuries and deaths; yet, it has never adopted enforceable rules on health and safety.

(3) Its members profess and market racial equality and diversity while using low-cost black labor to line white stakeholders’ pockets with gold.

(4) The NCAA and Power 5’s regulation, governance, and rules enforcement in college sports reveal a profound dissonance between their claimed values and actual “legislation” and decision-making.

(5) The NCAA wraps itself in the American flag for public relations purposes while brazenly violating America’s free competition laws through compensation limits that set the cost of labor well below market value.

(6) In litigation and lobbying, the NCAA demands to be accorded supreme regulatory authority as the sole guardian of amateur athletics. At the same time, it also insists it is no more than a private, voluntary association regarding regulatory accountability.

(7) The NCAA contends that it alone should sit on the Iron Throne of college sports regulation yet asks for a congressional bail-out because of its inability to competently self-regulate.

(8) On-campus critics bemoan the subversion of academic standards attributed to revenue-producing sports and athletes but still accept NCAA-manufactured academic measurements that mask the educational exploitation of athletes, such as the “Academic Progress Rate” and “Graduation Success Rate.”

 In this sense, college sports in America has been in a war against itself that has lasted over 150 years. The terms of engagement and the interests of the combatants have become more complicated with technological advances, the amount of money in the system, and the demographic of the players who provide the labor, but the institutional incentives and values haven’t changed.

Into the 21st century, higher education developed an unmanageable addiction to the perceived benefits that commercialized, professionalized college football (and later, men’s basketball) could continuously supply—publicity, prestige, power, loyalty, social currency, and money.

College sports’ most powerful conferences are amid a conference realignment orgy of money, market share, and 24-7 media exposure.

In this grand game of football-driven musical chairs, no school wants to be left standing when the music stops playing. Every school wants to be associated with the best—and increasingly most professionalized—conferences in college sports. (Dunnavant, K. (2004). The 50 Year Seduction: How Television Manipulated College Football, from the Birth of the Modern NCAA to the Creation of the BCS. Thomas Dunne Books. Chapter 13 “Musical Chairs”)

As stakeholders assess the aftermath of the current wave of conference realignment, the primary beneficiaries of the current business model—the NCAA, Power 5, and sports-entertainment overlords—still argue that college athletes cannot be paid.

This principle is a sacrament in college sports along with similarly vague, high-minded, and misleading aspirations such as the “student-athlete” and the “collegiate model.”

These concepts are now powerful, free-floating American values rooted in virtue and morality, divorced from the poor public reputation of the NCAA bureaucratic state. Each has breathtaking normative and commercial benefits to the big-time sports entertainment-industrial complex.