The NIL Era in the Long View: What Ronald A. Smith's Histories Anticipated

When the NCAA's name, image, and likeness rules changed in July 2021, and again when the House settlement opened the door to direct revenue sharing with athletes, much of the commentary treated the development as the end of college sports as America had known them. Readers of the historian Ronald A. Smith had reason to see it differently. Across four decades of scholarship, the Penn State professor emeritus had documented, case by case and document by document, that compensation for college athletes was not an invasion of the system but a recurring feature of it.

Smith's Sports and Freedom established the baseline fact: big-time college athletics was commercial from its earliest days. The first intercollegiate competition, the 1852 Harvard-Yale regatta, was staged by a railroad as a commercial promotion. The nineteenth-century campus sporting scene that followed involved gate receipts, recruited talent, and training tables long before the NCAA existed to regulate any of it.

The amateur doctrine, in Smith's account, was an English class import grafted onto an American system that never actually practiced it. The Myth of the Amateur, his 2021 history of athletic scholarships, shows the doctrine being constructed, contested, and selectively enforced across a century, with the athletic scholarship itself, pay for play in institutional form, becoming official NCAA policy in 1956 under the euphemism of the grant-in-aid. The term student-athlete, Smith showed, was itself a legal invention deployed to fend off workers' compensation claims.

Pay for Play completes the argument by explaining why reform after reform failed to resolve the underlying tension. Each generation's reformers, faculty committees, university presidents, congressional hearings, confronted the same contradiction between an educational mission and a commercial entertainment enterprise, and each produced a settlement that managed the contradiction rather than resolving it. Revenue kept growing; the athletes' legal claim on it kept strengthening; the doctrine holding the arrangement together kept eroding.

Seen through Smith's lens, the NIL era is the moment the contradiction finally resolved in the athletes' favor, with the courts, as so often in his histories, forcing the change that internal reform could not deliver. For anyone trying to think clearly about what comes next, collective bargaining, employment status, a restructured NCAA, the historical record he assembled is the most reliable guide available. The system's future, like its past, will be decided institution by institution, document by document.