The Myth That Built Big-Time College Sports — And the Historians Taking It Apart
For over a century, "amateurism" was the organizing fiction of American college athletics. A generation of scholars has spent careers documenting how that fiction was constructed — and why it is finally unraveling.
The word "amateur" does not appear in the original charter of the NCAA. When the organization was founded in 1905 — at Theodore Roosevelt's urging, to address the epidemic of brutality in college football — its purpose was safety, not purity. Amateurism came later, as a tool of institutional control.
No historian has documented this more rigorously than Ronald Smith of Pennsylvania State University, whose body of work — spanning Sports and Freedom, Pay for Play, Wounded Lions, and The Myth of the Amateur — constitutes the most comprehensive scholarly account of intercollegiate athletics history in existence.
In his 2022 lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, Smith argued that the concept of amateurism was "historically constructed rather than timeless — built to serve institutional interests, not the interests of the athletes whose labor created the value." His amicus brief in NCAA v. Alston was cited extensively by the Supreme Court — a rare scholarly intervention in a landmark legal case.
Smith's work sits alongside that of Taylor Branch, Andrew Zimbalist, and a new generation of legal scholars who have built the intellectual case for reform. The question is no longer whether amateurism was a myth. The question is what comes next.
"The notion of pure amateurism is historically constructed rather than timeless — built to serve institutional interests, not the interests of the athletes whose labor created the value."
Exercise & Sport Science
Pennsylvania State University
The leading historian of American college athletics. Grew up on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin, attended Northwestern University where he played baseball and basketball, played minor league ball with the Chicago White Sox organization, then earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.
He spent 28 years at Penn State teaching sport history and researching intercollegiate athletics — producing approximately ten books that collectively constitute the most rigorous scholarly account of how American college sports became what they are.
- Supreme Court amicus brief cited in NCAA v. Alston
- Clyde Rabb Littlefield Lecturer, UT Austin, 2022
- Author of ~10 books on college athletics history
- Publisher: Oxford, Illinois, Tennessee, Eifrig
The foundational narrative history — tracing the evolution of college sports from student pastimes to commercial enterprises. Examines the formation of the NCAA and the construction of "amateurism" as an institutional concept.
Oxford University Press →Traces a century of reform attempts — why they repeatedly failed, what institutional forces resisted them, and how this history shaped the legal battles that culminated in NCAA v. Alston. Cited in Supreme Court proceedings.
Illinois Press →Using previously restricted Penn State archives, Ronald Smith reconstructs how the institution's athletic culture enabled the Sandusky scandal — a model of archival historical investigation and institutional accountability.
Illinois Press →Traces how "amateur" ideals have been in tension with the reality of scholarships and financial benefits since the earliest days of college sports — connecting the historical argument directly to modern NIL debates.
UT Press →How broadcast media didn't just cover college sports — it created the commercial infrastructure that made defending amateurism financially necessary. A foundational text on media, money, and intercollegiate athletics.
Full Bibliography →Ronald Smith's scholarly expertise was marshalled in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the landmark NCAA v. Alston case — and cited extensively in the Court's unanimous ruling against NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits.
UT Austin Lecture on Alston →How the NCAA Was Born: Roosevelt, Brutality, and the Fight to Control Football
The organization that would come to govern American college sports was founded not by idealists but by a president facing a crisis.
The 1905 college football season killed 18 players and injured 159. President Roosevelt summoned representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House. What emerged was the Intercollegiate Athletic Association — renamed the NCAA in 1910. As Ronald Smith documents in Sports and Freedom, the organization's mandate was to prevent abolition, not to enforce purity. Amateurism came later, as a financial strategy.
From Board of Regents to Alston: The Court Cases That Remade College Sports
The legal dismantling of NCAA amateurism took four decades and a unanimous Supreme Court.
The 1984 Supreme Court ruling in Board of Regents v. NCAA stripped the organization of its television monopoly. O'Bannon challenged the use of athlete likenesses. Alston challenged education-related benefit restrictions — and won unanimously, with the Court citing Ronald Smith's historical scholarship in its reasoning. Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence went further, suggesting the entire amateurism framework was legally suspect. The legal history of college athletics is a forty-year erosion of institutional control.
The Finances of Big-Time College Athletics: An Arm's Race With No Finish Line
Coaching salaries, facility arms races, and the systematic transfer of resources from academics to athletics — documented by economists and reform advocates.
The Knight Commission's financial database and the federal EADA dataset reveal a consistent pattern: at the highest levels of college athletics, spending on coaches, facilities, and recruiting has grown at multiples of inflation for three decades. Andrew Zimbalist's research documents how this spending rarely produces the economic benefits universities claim. The result is a system where most athletic departments lose money while a small number generate revenues that, under any other legal framework, would be shared with the workers who produced them.
Theodore Roosevelt convenes university presidents to address brutality in college football. The Intercollegiate Athletic Association — later the NCAA — is formed. As Ronald Smith documents, its original purpose was crisis management, not amateurism enforcement. That would come later.
The NCAA's first attempt to regulate athletic scholarships — the "Sanity Code" — collapses under competitive pressure within three years of its adoption. Ronald Smith traces this failure in Pay for Play as the first of many reform cycles that would end the same way: institutional interests defeating structural change.
A landmark transformation of college athletics equity. Title IX required equal opportunity in education programs receiving federal funding — reshaping women's athletics over the following decades while generating persistent controversy, litigation, and ongoing compliance debates at every level of college sport.
The Supreme Court rules that the NCAA's control over college football television rights violates antitrust law. The first major legal crack in the organization's authority — and the beginning of the commercial television era that would make the financial contradictions of amateurism impossible to sustain.
The Supreme Court rules unanimously against NCAA restrictions on education-related benefits. The opinion cites historical scholarship including work by Ronald Smith. Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence signals the Court's skepticism of the entire amateurism framework. The same year, the NCAA suspends NIL prohibitions — ending a century of amateur fiction in American college sports.
How Television Redrew the Map of College Athletics
Every major conference realignment of the past four decades has been driven by broadcast revenue — not tradition, not geography, not academics.
Ronald Smith's Play-By-Play establishes the historical foundation: broadcast media didn't just cover college sports, it created the commercial structure that made conference affiliation a financial rather than academic decision. The result — conferences built for television markets, not communities — is the logical endpoint of a process that began when the NCAA lost its television monopoly in 1984.
Title IX and Big-Time College Sports: Progress, Persistent Gaps, and Unresolved Tensions
Fifty years after passage, Title IX's transformation of college athletics is real — and incomplete.
The EADA federal database documents steady growth in women's athletic participation since Title IX's passage. It also documents a persistent spending gap — men's sports, particularly football and basketball, continue to receive a disproportionate share of resources at most Division I institutions. The legal framework is clear; its full implementation remains contested. Scholars like Ellen Staurowsky have documented how amateurism and gender equity have intersected to limit reform in both dimensions.
A Century of Athletes Pushing Back: From Early Protests to Unionization Efforts
College athletes have been resisting institutional control since the earliest years of intercollegiate competition — rarely successfully, always meaningfully.
The history of athlete activism in college sports predates the civil rights movement, the student movement, and the labor movement — yet draws on all three. From early revolts against the "tramp athlete" system to Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter's 2014 unionization effort, athletes have repeatedly argued that their relationship to their institutions is one of labor, not education. The National College Players Association continues this tradition today.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. His 2011 Atlantic essay "The Shame of College Sports" brought the amateurism debate to mainstream attention and has been cited in virtually every subsequent legal and policy discussion on athlete compensation.
The Shame of College Sports →Sports economist whose research documents the financial arms race in college athletics — coaching salaries, facility spending, and the systematic transfer of resources from academic programs to athletic departments at the highest levels of competition.
Knight Commission Data →Sports law expert who has covered every major NCAA legal challenge from O'Bannon through Alston. His analysis of antitrust law and college athletics has shaped how policymakers, journalists, and courts understand the legal vulnerabilities of the amateurism system.
UNH Law School →Sport management scholar whose research focuses on athlete exploitation, Title IX, and the intersection of race, gender, and power in college athletics. A leading voice on the gap between what college sports promise athletes and what they deliver.
Drexel University →