Higher education professionals might catch themselves wondering, “Why does my employer bankroll a professional sports franchise?” America’s largest schools have athletics departments that generate millions of dollars in revenue, including hundreds of millions for the top programs. They intend to be self-supporting, but yet 92% of them require institutional support or student fees to offset a combined $17 billion of expenses each year.
Colleges and universities are deeply embedded in the big business of sport despite little evidence of this enterprise being part of their core mission. Many institutions are taking austerity measures to balance their budgets, including faculty, staff, and program cuts at universities that sponsor Division I sports.
A new book titled “College Sports” (Johns Hopkins Press) by authors Eric Moyen and John Thelin provides a historical and analytical account of how we got here. Thelin’s “A History of American Higher Education” is an essential read for people interested in the story of academia, one that can’t be told without the impact of athletics, making “College Sports” an excellent follow-up for an aspect of higher education that deserves its own historical treatment. The book takes readers on a journey from the first intercollegiate sporting event more than 170 years ago to the current environment in which amateurism has been all but completely obscured by commercialism.
Two key takeaways from “College Sports” are 1.) amateurism has always been debated in intercollegiate athletics, and 2.) college sports, like higher education itself, is a winner-take-all game of prestige with huge financial returns but even larger costs. Together, these points explain how the higher education movement in America enabled the growth of college sports, and, in many cases, how universities themselves flourished because of the sports they sponsor.
Amateurism Is a Perpetual Question
Commercial interests, corporate sponsorships, and gambling have had their hold on college sports from the beginning. The first athletic contest between two colleges in America happened in 1852 when the Harvard and Yale rowing teams competed against each other on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The boat race was funded by the railroad company whose train line skirted the lake and could bring to the shoreline spectators who then placed wagers on the outcome.
However, the history of intercollegiate college sports wasn’t a wire-to-wire money grab. Over the next decades and well into the next century, college athletics were restrained under Victorian Era British ideals on American college campuses that emphasized leisure and recreation over competition and professionalism.
Yes, there were “tramp” athletes who dotted rosters of collegiate football teams — regardless of their amateur or even enrollment status — as the new grid-iron game became wildly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But college athletes back then were predominantly unpaid members of what we think of today as club teams, without professional coaches or administrative oversight.
That eventually went away when athletic scholarships became widely accepted in the middle of the 20th century. In 1935, the Southeastern Conference became the first conference to legalize athletic scholarships, three years after the league was formed when schools broke away from the Southern Conference over differences of administrative control.
Grants in aid for athletic prowess don’t today seem like something that would invalidate amateur status, but it was a new open practice to compensate athletes, similar to the way they now can legally profit from their name, image, and likeness, known as NIL.
Compromises to pay athletes were made throughout the history of college sports, mostly below the board and unregulated. But the belief that college sports had this founding principle of amateurism is a myth.
“From the earliest days of intercollegiate athletics, commercial interests, press coverage, and big-time sports existed — as did scandal and controversy,” Moyen and Thelin wrote. “At the same time, administrators and faculty members began various attempts to regulate the activities student-athletes had created.”
Even the term “student-athlete” was part of a public relations campaign starting in 1956 to protect the NCAA and member colleges from liability lawsuits alleging that college students playing sports were employees.
Moyen and Thelin point out that reforms in college sports continually “looked backward” to a bygone era of purity that never really existed. Meanwhile, university reforms and the development of the modern university in America meant greater specialization in curriculum and its own workforce, as well as increased size and access through competition for tuition and research revenues.
“While American universities ‘professionalized’ virtually every other part of higher education, (the amateur model) sought to keep its most popular and lucrative product — athletics — amateur,” Moyen and Thelin wrote. “University faculty desired to be governed by the spirit of higher education, focused on freedom from interference of outside influence. Sports, however, were to be governed by collegiate ideals that had been adopted by British aristocracy and molded by the religious ethos of an earlier era.”
The authors argued that the development of modern research universities in America, as well as the nation’s socio-economic desires for competition, provided the conditions for big-time athletics to flourish.
Amateurism persists today with the tens of thousands of college students who participated in non-revenue-generating sports and intramurals, but big-time college athletics is a multibillion-dollar industry that prevailed when university leaders were unable or unwilling to make it fit within the institutional mission.
Prestige Is a Winner-Take-All Game
How did athletics then go from “looking back” to pulling institutions forward? As higher education evolved, universities decided to engage in a winner-take-all game of prestige. While schools in the Northeast like Harvard and Yale were models for academics and football, other institutions in the Midwest and South, especially state flagship and land grant universities that served the middle class, used the public affinity and notoriety of sports to become competitive.
“Athletics in general and football in particular played an important role in the ability of ‘standard’ American universities to climb the ladder of prestige,” Moyen and Thelin wrote. “Modeled on the great American universities but lacking the resources of elite universities, standard American university presidents utilized the publicity of athletics to promote their institutions.”
A few schools like Sewanee (The University of the South) and the University of Chicago at first used football for commercial success as founding members of the SEC and Big Ten conferences, respectively, but chose to take different paths. For hundreds of colleges in the lower divisions of NCAA and the NAIA, they don’t use the big-time model, but athletics are a driver for enrollment and fundraising.
For the more than 365 schools that sponsor NCAA Division I sports, success in athletics is a catalyst for enrollment growth and alumni donations. But engaging in big-time athletics is difficult to sustain, and the rationale is hard to justify on money alone. Fewer than 5% are profitable. There are tremendous costs for competing at such a high level, from exorbitant coaches’ salaries and facility improvements, to travel expenses to remain in conferences that procure lucrative television contracts.
“A weakness in the Division I business model was that those supposed ‘golden goose’ sports often laid goose eggs,” Moyen and Thelin wrote. “Big-time college football may be good at generating revenues, but it is even better at generating expenses.”
The revenue growth is so pronounced that the universities that choose to enter big-time athletics can’t go back. They must keep spending to remain competitive in a winner-take-all game. This is not a finite game, like winning a championship or making the most money in a single season, but rather an infinite game of relevance and reputation.
They are mirroring what is happening in higher education at large, a “positional arms race” once observed by Cornell University economics professor Robert Frank and referenced by the authors of “College Sports.”
Moyen and Thelin claim that university presidents, coaches, and athletics administrators are doing what they are charged to do within the higher education enterprise: figure out a way to be the best. But success in intercollegiate athletics is not defined as a core function.
As written in “College Sports,” “American college sports are an enigma in that although they are central to higher education and to American popular culture, there is little indication that universities have formally acknowledged intercollegiate athletics as part of their respective institutional missions.”
Perhaps they should.
After reflecting on the history of college sports, as interpreted by Moyen and Thelin, higher education professionals shouldn’t question why their institutions are bedmates with professionalized sports. They are made for each other — kindred souls with similar histories.
A better question to ask is “What took so long?”
