NCAA

The Power 5 Conferences Should Split Revenues with College Football Players

by Victoria Jackson

Another college football season means another chance to demand that universities and the NCAA recognize a fundamental fact about the dangerous and isolating work performed by players: they are not student-athletes, but employees of the football team. 

The Century-Long History of the College Football Coaching Carousel

by Andrew McG

Mass media helped build the lucrative world of college sports by establishing sports as a news beat; today's highly-paid and transient coaches ride the wave of an economy that thrives on making a splash in the headlines. 

Biden NLRB Counsel Says College Athletes are Employees

"Jennifer Abruzzo took issue with the term “student-athletes,” calling it a misclassification of college players, and warned that using it could be construed as an attempt to lead players to believe that they’re not protected by labor laws."

Group of Historians Recognized for Best SCOTUS Brief of the Year

by Ronald A. Smith

A group of six historians has been recognized by the Education Law Association for the best Supreme Court brief of the year. Their historical deconstruction of the myth of amateurism in college athletics influenced a unanimous decision that the NCAA cannot bar college athletes from profiting from the commercial use of their names, images, or likenesses.

Texas and Oklahoma's Move to the SEC is a Major Blow to the NCAA

by Andrew McGregor

The move by two power programs in college football will create a Southeastern Conference that rivals the NCAA in power, part of a longstanding battle between individual colleges and the NCAA that may overthrow the rules of amateurism in college sports. 

How Historians Convinced SCOTUS that the NCAA's Idea of Amateurism is a Myth

by Ronald A. Smith

The Supreme Court was influenced by the work of a team of historians to reject the NCAA's arguments about amateurism and open the way for college athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses – something history shows they did extensively before the NCAA's rules. 

Women’s College Sports Was Growing. Then the NCAA Took Over

The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was pushed aside by the NCAA as universities dedicated more resources to women's sports to comply with Title IX. Critics say that the NCAA has not followed through on the need for equity while squeezing out women coaches and athletic administrators.

Will the Supreme Court Uphold the NCAA's Version of Amateurism?

by Ronald A. Smith

A pending Supreme Court case will test whether the NCAA can bar student athletes from making money from products that make use of their images, a form of property right of "Name, Image, or Likeness." A historian who wrote an amicus brief says the NCAA's claim to protect the amateurism of the athletes is selective and hypocritical.

John Thompson Led Black America’s Basketball Team

Today's racial justice activism by prominent Black athletes has roots in the influence of the late Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson. 

Black College Athletes are Rising up Against the Exploitative System they Labor In

by Amira Rose Davis

While athletes’ collegiate activism in the 1960s and 1970s produced limited wins, today’s movement echoes many of the still-unanswered demands of that time.

Playing College Football in 2020 Would Continue to Devalue Black Lives

by Eddie R. Cole

In many ways, the disproportionate number of black student-athletes preparing for their football seasons have become the figurative lab mice as some college leaders assess the feasibility of in-person classes.

Cancel the Fall College Football Season

by Victoria L. Jackson

For too long, instead of facilitating the intellectual advancement and economic empowerment of young Black men, college sports have helped make American universities another institution perpetuating the undervaluing of Black lives.

Ivy League Cancels Basketball Tournaments Amid Coronavirus Concerns

The NCAA, which continues to prepare for its signature men’s and women’s tournaments, made clear that its recommendations have not changed, despite the Ivy League’s decision.

Sports Historian Explains Why She Wrote that the NCAA is the Modern Jim Crow

Victoria Jackson’s claim appeared in an explosive op-ed for the Los Angeles Times.

A Brief History of College Cheating Scandals

by Fatima Ahmed-Farouta

Cheating and college sports go hand-in-hand. This is especially true in college football, with its extreme competitiveness and the potential to launch careers. Cheating scandals have embroiled most of the top colleges in the country for decades, and the cases run the gamut from cash payments to players, free (and illegal under NCAA rules) perks, academic fraud, financial aid fraud, and -- of course -- drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes. Here is a list of some of the most prominent and cringe-worthy scandals in the history of college sports:1) 1986: SMU gets the death penalty. In 1986, the ABC affiliate in Dallas revealed that the Southern Methodist University football program had been paying its players signing bonuses of up to $25,000. Further investigations by Dallas media unearthed apartments provided to players rent-free, and an NCAA investigation showed that thirteen players had been paid about $61,000 from a slush fund set up for that specific purpose. This practice had gone on for years, with the complicity of both coaches and top school officials.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Why I Love, But Also Hate, March Madness

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).I’m a crazed basketball fan, so I love it when the NCAA tournament rolls around. But I’m also an educator, and so I hate myself for watching.That’s because college sports are – to put it bluntly – a plague on American higher education. They add a big-ticket item to our mounting costs, and they compromise our academic quality. And now we’ve got the numbers to prove it.Let’s start with costs. Colleges in the Football Bowl Subdivision – the most competitive of the Division I programs – spent an average of nearly $92,000 per athlete in 2010, according to a January study by the American Institutes for Research. For the student population at large, the average per capita spending was less than $14,000.I’ll spare you the math: These schools spend more than six times as much on athletes as they do on students generally....

Luther Spoehr: Review of Albert J. Figone's "Cheating the Spread: Gamblers, Point Shavers, and Game Fixers in College Football and Basketball" (University of Illinois Press, 2012)

Luther Spoehr, an HNN book editor, co-teaches a course on the history of intercollegiate athletics at Brown University.“The race may not be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” the inimitable Damon Runyon observed, “but that’s the way to bet.” Unless, he might have added, the fix is in. And as Albert Figone demonstrates, the fix has been in many times in major college sports over the past seventy-five years or so. Figone’s research into “court records, newspaper articles, books, government documents, magazine articles, documents found in university archives, scholarly journals, and interviews” has produced a chronicle that is both impressive and depressing.