In an era when college football coaches frequently command higher salaries than university presidents, many call for reform to restore the balance between amateur athletics and the educational mission of schools. This book traces attempts at college athletics reform from 1855 through the early twenty-first century while analyzing the different roles played by students, faculty, conferences, university presidents, the NCAA, legislatures, and the Supreme Court. Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform also tackles critically important questions about eligibility, compensation, recruiting, sponsorship, and rules enforcement. Discussing reasons for reform—to combat corruption, to level the playing field, and to make sports more accessible to minorities and women—Ronald A. Smith candidly explains why attempts at change have often failed. Of interest to historians, athletic reformers, college administrators, NCAA officials, and sports journalists, this thoughtful book considers the difficulty in balancing the principles of amateurism with the need to draw income from sporting events. | Cover Title Page Copyright Table of Contents Preface Introduction 1. Student-Controlled Athletics and Early Reform 2. Faculty, Faculty Athletic Committees, and Reform Efforts 3. Early Interinstitutional Reform Efforts 4. Presidents: Promoters of Reformers? 5. Football, Progressive Reform, and the Creation of the NCAA 6. The NCAA: A Faculty Debating Society for Amateurism 7. The 1920s and the Carnegie Report on College Athletics 8. Individual Presidential Reform: Gates Hutchins, and Bowman 9. Presidential Conference Reform: The 1930s Graham Plan Failure 10. The NCAA and the Sanity Code: A National Reform Gone Wrong 11. Ivy League Presidential Reform 12. Scandals and the ACE Reform Effort in the 1950s 13. Lowly Standards: Chaos in the Sports Yards 14. The Hanford Report, Rejected Reform, and Proposition 48 15. Title IX and Governmental Reform in Women's Athletics 16. African Americans, Freshman Eligibility, and Forced Reform 17. Presidential Control, Minor Reform, and the Knight Commission 18. NCAA Reorganization, the Board of Presidents' Reform, and the APR 19. Faculty Reform Efforts: CARE, the Drake Group, and COIA 20. The Freshman Rule: A Nearly Forgotten Reform Afterword Intercollegiate Athletic Reform Timeline Notes Bibliography Index | "In this provocative book ... [Smith] details the efforts to purify intercollegiate sports since the first teams faced off in the 1850s. He makes a solid case for why reforms are needed."—Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
"Smith's extensively researched and well-documented text shows that throughout the history of college athletics there have been only a handful of true champions of reform and they have universally lost to the pressures of professionalization."—EH.NET
"Sweeping in its coverage of big-time college athletic reform and rich detail. . . . A significant contribution to the place and meaning of college sports in the modern United States."—American Historical Review
| Ronald A. Smith is professor emeritus of sports history at Penn State University and the author of several books, including Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics and Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport.