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This chapter examines the college life and college sport participation of Jewish Americans in the U.S. prior to World War II. Jewish college students who participated in intercollegiate athletics played a special role in this college experience by serving a spectrum of contradictory interest. The accomplishments of these athletes gave hope to the Jewish people that it was possible for them achieve real success without abandoning or denying ethnic attachments.

This chapter reflects on the future of college sports. It discusses the controversial issues swirling around college sports and the role of NCAA. It argues that despite the persistence of scandal or antitrust litigation, sports has remained the activity most identified with college student life and the strongest link between an institution and the public. In the end, the great majority of college athletes are genuine college students and should be treated as such. Rather than simply paying them for what they do on the field of play, the school that admits them—not the NCAA, not the government, not the media—should shoulder the responsibility for stimulating and feeding their intellectual curiosity and developing them into productive members of society.

This chapter discusses Title IX, the Civil Rights Restoration Act, and gender equity on college sports. The Education Amendments passed by Congress in 1972 included a provision in its Title IX that “no person in the United States shall on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” However, many colleges and universities, whose athletic policies were dominated by male coaches and administrators, dithered on making significant commitments to expand female participation in intercollegiate athletics. In 1987, Congress proposed an act “to restore the broad scope of coverage and to clarify the application of Title IX.” The law, named the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which applied to Title IX and three other civil-rights statutes, would require that any organization or entity that receives federal funds, or indirectly benefits from federal assistance, must abide by laws outlawing discriminatory practices based upon race, religion, color, national origin, age, disability, or gender.

This chapter details the regularization of athletic scholarships and establishment of the NCAA as the principal arbiter of the college sports establishment. It describes the NCAA's Sanity Code of 1949, which sought to enforce the principle that college athletes were amateurs who played sports as an “avocation” and should not be differentiated from other students. It discusses the evolution of intercollegiate sports between 1950 and 1956, which resulted in athletics and athletes becoming virtually separate from the rest of the institution in which they resided. After 1956, an athletic scholarship and the time demands of competition often forced many “student athletes” to make their academic commitments secondary to their athletic ones.

This concluding chapter reflects on the continued trend of widespread gambling in the U.S. entertainment industry—which, among other factors, has contributed to the frequency of betting on college sports to this day—and the consequences thereof. Gambling has since become the norm, and with college sports programs being especially profitable ventures, game rigging as well as the exploitation of the players will continue to remain the norm rather than the exception, as the chapter explores more recent trends in sports betting. To conclude, the chapter discusses the possibility of further legislative regulation on sports betting, but warns for the consequences should such laws be enacted.

This chapter discusses how athletic budgets have spun out of control and created an athletic–academic divide that troubles observers both inside and outside the academy. Those who oversee college sports, from coaches to athletic directors to presidents, harbor a three-pronged motivation that prevents them from reversing the tide: (1) they want more money so they can spend more; (2) they need more money because their competition is getting more; and (3) they are caught in a spiral where they need money because they think it will enable them to win, and they need to win because they think success on the field is going to bring more money. Media exposure is one means to these ends. While the big money that flows into athletic departments from television provokes resentment from the academic side, those in athletics who bask in the limelight of an adored sport exude an attitude that is simultaneously cynical and realistic.

This chapter examines Title IX's progress in changing the cultural norms surrounding women's participation in sports by focusing on how it deals with issues facing athletes who become pregnant. It first considers Title IX regulation that addresses pregnancy and provides the basis for the law's approach to pregnant athletes. It then explains Title IX's approach that skirts the debate pitting equal-treatment proponents against advocates of special pregnancy accommodations, and why there has been a long-time reluctance to focus on pregnancy as a gender-equality issue in sports. It also discusses the gains Title IX has made toward the cultural acceptance and embrace of female athletes; the law's failure to make serious inroads into the dominant model of college sports that values winning at all costs and treats athletes as commodities who add value to college sports rather than as students who benefit from playing college sports; and Title IX's progress in tackling issues involving male athletes who become fathers and high school athletes who become pregnant.

This chapter examines Title IX's progress in changing the cultural norms surrounding women's participation in sports by focusing on how it deals with issues facing athletes who become pregnant. It first considers Title IX regulation that addresses pregnancy and provides the basis for the law's approach to pregnant athletes. It then explains Title IX's approach that skirts the debate pitting equal-treatment proponents against advocates of special pregnancy accommodations, and why there has been a long-time reluctance to focus on pregnancy as a gender-equality issue in sports. It also discusses the gains Title IX has made toward the cultural acceptance and embrace of female athletes; the law's failure to make serious inroads into the dominant model of college sports that values winning at all costs and treats athletes as commodities who add value to college sports rather than as students who benefit from playing college sports; and Title IX's progress in tackling issues involving male athletes who become fathers and high school athletes who become pregnant.

This chapter discusses how television changed college sports. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the NCAA pursued deals worth millions of dollars with commercial, for-profit networks instead of with nonprofit, public radio and television, where the link between athletics and higher education might have been maintained and the commercialism of intercollegiate athletics restrained. The college sports establishment chose an economic playbook that promised direct benefit to athletics and to the institutions in which they operated. Televised football increased the visibility of a few privileged schools, but the bulk of money an institution derived from TV appearances went to support athletics. The schools themselves willingly complied with television policy so they could use television revenues and booster contributions inspired by TV exposure to pay for sports rather than to fund them from the educational budget. Thus, the commercial route was the one taken. While the NCAA may have exerted control over who played football on television, the networks found ways to use dollar appeal and flex their muscle to stretch television policy in their favor.

This chapter discusses the NCAA's efforts to restore academic respectability to college sports. For decades, the college sports establishment promoted rules of fair play and a level playing field in public, while coaches and boosters surreptitiously sought ways to evade those rules. However, the alarming spate of cheating and fraud in the 1970s and 1980s stirred up efforts at reform. Those efforts, however, did not lead in the direction that might have been anticipated from the overt events. Though related to the scandals, the major turning points of the era had mixed consequences. Changes in the playbook of college sports between 1973 and 1991 were bounded by two major landmarks. The first, the 1973 NCAA legislation putting Division I athletic grants-in-aid (scholarships) on a one-year renewable basis, highlighted the transformation of the student-athletes into athlete-students, whose commercial value could sometimes prompt others to cheat in order to attract and retain them. The second, the 1991 Knight Foundation report, “Keeping Faith with the Student Athlete,” revealed how pervasive the need for ethics reform had become and, in its weak aftereffects, the power the athletic establishment could exert to contain reform and continue the quest for revenue in what had become a high-stakes business.

This chapter discusses the racial integration of college sports starting in the 1950s. The racial integration of teams, accelerating in the North and beginning in the South, altered the quality of games as well as the composition of rosters. By the 1970s, football and track squads contained two dozen or more black athletes, and on some basketball teams blacks constituted a majority. To a considerable extent, the opening up of these rosters spelled the decline—or at least inability to compete at the highest levels—of historically black college teams. Meanwhile, coaches, though they lost some of the battles against assertive black athletes, and though their sensitivities on race matters were raised, most often emerged with their authority not only intact but enhanced by control of scholarships and by increasingly independent athletic departments. The college athletic enterprise was opening a new playbook in which money and media would be involved as never before.

This chapter discusses the case of Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. Arguments in the case focused on whether the NCAA was acting illegally under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 by monopolizing all college football television contracts. In September 1982, Judge Juan Burciaga of the Federal District Court for Western Oklahoma decided in favor of the plaintiffs, concluding that the NCAA was a “classic cartel. ... exercising almost absolute control over the supply of college football which is made available to the networks, to television advertisers, and ultimately to the viewing public.” The judge concluded that the NCAA violated antitrust law by acting in restraint of trade in three ways: fixing prices of telecasts; creating boycotts of networks excluded from its contracts and threatening boycotts of its own members that might engage in alternative television contracts; and placing an artificial limit on televised college football. The NCAA took the case to the Supreme Court. However, on June 27, 1984, the Supreme Court upheld verdicts of the District and Appeals Courts.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to synthesize the narrative of college sports history since 1950 in order to convey a fuller understanding of how and why “game changers” have created today's intercollegiate athletic landscape. These game changers involve money, media, race, gender, and reform. The chapter also traces the development of American college sports, which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century from the efforts by male undergraduates to engage in out-of-the-classroom activity independent from the strict faculty control that governed their college lives. By the early twenty-first century, the reality of commercialism and professionalism within the idealistic realm of amateurism characterized college sports more than ever before. A brief overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter reviews further basketball scandals from the 1980s and 1990s. As the professionalization and commercialization of college sports continued, gambling became increasingly accepted among college students. Since wagering on college sports was illegal in all states except Nevada, shady bookmakers reaped immense sums from the public's interest in betting on college football and basketball. By the early 1980s, the NCAA relied on the federal, state, and local governments to enforce and prosecute gambling-related crimes because the association, along with the conferences and colleges' athletic establishments, found it impossible to prevent game fixing. Most coaches had convinced the public that it was impossible to detect the rigging of basketball games, a viewpoint that only encouraged anyone wanting to fix games. A new generation of college student gamblers on sports would contribute to the decades-old scourge of game rigging, leading once again to federal and state investigations and prosecutions.

This chapter introduces a framework for understanding the historical development of feminist engagements with rape and domestic violence in the United States and men’s emergence as allies. The life history method used in the research for the book is described, and three men’s stories are introduced to illustrate men’s feminist antiviolence engagements in three historical age cohorts who work to bring about change in institutions like the U.S. military, college sports, and high schools. Two key tensions that are discussed throughout the book are introduced: first, the shift over time from a politicized mass feminist movement to antiviolence work that is increasingly professionalized, bureaucratized, and depoliticized; second, the promise and contradictions that inhere when people from privileged groups (in this case, men) join as allies in a movement for social justice.

In 1893, for the first time, major books on American football are published by authors beside Camp. Camp worries that one book, by Yale-trained Alonzo Stagg and Harry Williams, discloses Yale proprietary information, but Stagg and Williams publish over his objections (first self-publish and later by Appleton, publishing under various titles). Spalding suggests Camp write a booklet on football to be published by Spalding contemporaneously with Stagg-Williams and “to a certain extent kill” Stagg-Williams sales. Camp prepares the requested booklet, titled How to Play Football, but invites other American football players to write major parts of the booklet. Spalding goes on to publish annual versions of the booklet, and other writers are routinely included, with Camp both editor and writer. A similar procedure is used with Spalding’s Official Football Guide. Other books published in 1893 are James R. Church, ed., University Football, and Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports.