Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform

13. Lowly Standards: Chaos in the Sports Yards

Lowly Standards—Chaos in the Sports Yards | 121 13 Lowly Standards Chaos in the Sports Yards The scandals of 1951 led to no long-term, meaningful reform in college athletics. This was not unexpected, for past history would indicate that governing boards, presidents, alumni, and students, though not faculty, preferred the professionalized and commercialized model that had developed over the previous century. That model for men’s sport dated back to the first intercollegiate contest, a crew meet between Harvard and Yale sponsored by a new railroad passing through the vacationlands of New Hampshire. In 1852, there were no eligibility standards and students were in nearly complete control of their sports. A hundred years later, there were recruiting and eligibility standards at the institutional and conference level, and the sports that colleges sponsored had passed from the hands of students to alumni, presidents, and governing boards, with a nod to college faculties. The reform that had taken place was created principally to attempt to ensure competitive equality, a level playing field, among the various institutions and conferences. Little had been done to ensure that recruited athletes would fit the academic profile of the rest of the student body as they entered college or during their college years. In other words, the governing boards and institutional presidents , from the elite Ivy League schools to state universities to private institutions large and small, generally accepted athletes who were inferior academically for the benefits they might provide the individual institutions on the playing fields. The athletic payback was generally the prestige a good football or men’s basketball team might provide, but it could also be the perceived need for the virile, manly element athletes brought to colleges, often considered effete through the first half of the twentieth century. By then, colleges stood for much more than the traditional classical education that had existed for most of the nineteenth century. The pursuit of academic excellence never entirely disappeared, but attending a university increasingly became important for social contacts instead of intellectual growth. Social status , not knowledge, became a twentieth-century trait of higher education, with social activities, fraternities, and athletics dominating student interests.1 Two prominent educational leaders, both intellectuals, who most opposed the direction 122 | Chapter 13 higher education was taking were Abraham Flexner of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who fought the “service station” mentality of many institutions of higher education, and Robert M. Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, who was greatly pleased when the trustees of Chicago voted to abolish football just prior to World War II. They were, though, definitely in the minority, and the desire by university leaders to allow big-time athletics to continue their professional and commercial growth prevented meaningful reform in the decades following World War II. By the early 1950s, there was a greater need for legislating athletic standards on the national level, even though the first attempt, the Sanity Code of 1948, was not complied with by many institutions and was never enforced. The growth of air travel, making interregional travel less burdensome, and the development of national networks, first in radio and then, more important, in television, created national audiences for the important sports, specifically football and the emerging basketball.2 The recruiting of athletes on a national level and the increase in interregional contests brought about the need for recruiting and financial aid to be on an equitable basis. This could not be done if some conferences allowed athletic grants-in-aid to fully pay for an athlete’s college expenses, such as took place in the Southeastern and Southwestern Conferences, while others, including the Big Ten Conference, opposed athletic scholarships. In short, a kind of civil war occurred, with most southern schools favoring athletic scholarships not tied to either academic skills or financial need and many northern schools advocating athletes meeting academic and scholarship standards similar to other members of the student body. The southern schools were not only more realistic but also less hypocritical, as many northern schools, including the academically elite Ivy League institutions,3 often winked at academic standards when they admitted needed athletes. The period following the defeat of the Sanity Code was one caught between attempting to retain some semblance of amateurism on the one hand and the payment of athletes at a subsistence level on the other. No national standard for the payment of athletes was reached until 1956, when, to the dismay of a number of reformers...