Historian Taylor Branch Predicts Revolt Against NCAA Within the Next Five Years

The easiest way to introduce the subject of this post is to simply ask you to read his latest work, if you haven’t already. “The Shame of College Sports” was featured in the October 2011 edition of The Atlantic and can be read here.

Frank Deford has called it the most important article written about college sports, and Taylor Branch talks more about what he learned from digging into his story and the future of the NCAA below.

Taylor Branch joined WJOX in Birmingham with Paul Finebaum to discuss where the idea for his article came from, what he learned and what the reaction has been like, where things stand going forward, why a scholarship doesn’t really make sense in the argument that it is payment to a college athlete, what he would tell the NCAA president, how we can get to where he thinks things ought to be and how long he believes it will be before the NCAA falls apart.

Where did this whole story begin?:

“I went into my friends at The Atlantic last fall and said I was about to disappear into another American history book … but I don’t really like to disappear that long. … I wanted to do something to keep my pulse up and get it out quicker. They asked me for a bunch of ideas and I gave them to them. They said, ‘Do you have anything else?’ I said, ‘ I almost played college football and I’ve always been, as a fan, amused and puzzled by the NCAA scandals never seem to get anywhere. I’d like to look into the structure of NCAA sports.’ … I really didn’t know very much, but it was a continuing wonder to find out how we became the only nation on Earth that plays big-time sports in colleges.”...