4th and Goal? The Past of the American University and the Future of the NCAA

Patrick Potyondy 

This is your host Patrick Potyondy and welcome to History Talk the history podcast for everyone produced by Origins.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

And I'm Leticia Wiggins, your other host. Football season is well underway, and Ohio State is celebrating 125 years of Buckeye football. But the game has certainly changed since its inception as has what this sport means for the players and their universities.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Today, we are the only country in the world that plays big money sports at schools of higher learning and this distinction is causing a recent stir with issues of players rights and college finances.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

The National Collegiate Athletic Association or NCAA is feeling the heat as players moved to be seen as something other than quote unquote amateur athletes. These are students who play for the love of the sport without any expectation of compensation, financial or otherwise.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

 In today's show, we explore the distinct system of college sports in the United States looking to how history informs the current plight of the college athlete and what this means for the NCAA financially. So stay tuned.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

This is Steve Conn. I'm a professor in the history department at Ohio State. And I'm one of the editors of Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Hi, my name is Dr. Ann McCullough, I'm an assistant professor of Latin and Roman history and the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University. And I research modern interpretations of Greece, and Rome in American culture.

 

Marc Horger 

But my name is Mark Horger, and I'm a lecturer in the history of American sport and the human sciences department at Ohio State.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

So thanks for joining the show everybody. And it's great to have mark and Steve back for the second time on the show together and Anna for the first time. So here's the question that gets to the heart of it, and it's one for each of you. What would you consider the primary problem of college sports, and Steve we'll throw this question to you first.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

The primary problem, I gotta pick one? How much time do we have here? You know, there are lots and lots of problems with college sports. But let me let me put my finger on one that I think has not gotten as much attention. Recently certainly as the court cases have been going on and the conferences have been making different moves, and that is the effect that college athletics has had on the rest of campus. We've talked a lot I think about whether or not the athletes themselves are being treated fairly or whether they're entitled to some kind of compensation. Players at Northwestern are looking into unionizing, and so on and so forth. But I think what we what we really missed or what's receded into the background, is that what I see as the completely distorting effect that big time college athletics has on the rest of the university.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Ann and Mark, you want to follow up?

 

Marc Horger 

Well, I would, seems to me there are sort of two categories of problem in college athletics right now. And it might be worth trying to separate them. One being the problem people have with the existence of college athletics on campus. which is I think the category of problems Steve is interested in talking about. And the other one being the management of college athletics. And the way that that has is changing recently, and is changing in ways that the people who run college athletics at the moment, don't feel like they have very much control over because some of them are coming from federal court system. Some of them are being driven by the outside commercial interests, like television, in the shoe companies. There's a kind of a whole category of inside the sport problems and a whole category of hey, wait a minute, why is this thing glued to the institution in the first place, problems.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

I think a couple of these different problems however, especially the problem that you mentioned, Steve, about its its effects on the rest of campus. I think a lot of that derives from a very basic lack of consensus or at least lack of understanding of what it is amateurism means there doesn't seem to be a decision or consensus about the very definition of the term. Dr. Mark Emmert and his, the current president of the NCAA and his testimony during the O'Bannon trial, at one point conceded that he didn't understand fully what amateur meant, both to him and to the rest of American society. Some people see that you could grant for example, stipends to athletes without compromising that, that that amateur definition. Others think that it could, you know, that would be an absolute corruption of the definition. But if we can't agree on what college sports is for, and what constitutes an amateur, then then it's hard not for it to have negative effects upon the rest of campus, or for unintended effects upon the rest of you know the rest of the apparatus.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

That that's a great point, Anna and actually, you touch on this even more thoroughly in the piece you wrote for Origins. And so not only do we not really know what amateurism means. There's no consensus about a definition of that. But I also wonder if there isn't really any sense of why we're still hanging on to it anyway, is this purely nostalgia or sentimentality here? What is served by continuing to cling on to this notion that we're going to draw a sharp line between amateurs and professionals? We gave that up with the Olympics years ago, and yet somehow people like Emmert. At the NCAA, won't let this go.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Well, this is a great segue to the next question we had just to follow up on how we see these current problems with the NCAA, you know, such as this negative effect on campus, even this definition of amateurism that we're kind of clinging to perhaps so we're curious. Is this a continuation or departure from past disagreements or challenges in college sports history? And so Mark I would like to pass this off to you.

 

Marc Horger 

It's difficult to know where to start on that one. Let me try to do two things quickly. First of all, the premise of amateurism the idea that for sport, to have some value other than just, it's fun to play, it's fun to watch. The idea that for that to be true, it needs to be amateur has been embedded, as far back as at least the 19th century in the Anglo-American tradition. It is as old as playing sports on campus in the first place. And the second point I would make is that you always have to have between one and three layers of ironic quotation marks around the word amateur, right when you try to describe it, because it has always been deeply important to the people responsible for amateur athletics, even as it falls. apart at the slightest touch when you actually try to take that literally. I think we underestimate two things about amateurism, when we talk about it critically this way. One is that I think we underestimate the degree to which it remains a serious value to the people that are in the business of you know, I don't think the people who run the NCAA are being hypocrites, when they express their commitment to something that is integral to their sense of what it is they do, even though they can't articulate it very well. And the second point I would make to try to connect this to my earlier point about there being criticism of collegiate athletics versus crisis in the way it's being managed. One of the reasons why amateur ism has been so resilient in college athletics is because of the way it actually functions to people trying to put together teams, leaving aside whether or not we actually agree that amateur isn't is a real social value we can describe. One of the ways the NCAA rule book actually functions is that it prevents at least in theory, Urban Meyer from offering anything in an 18-year-old, an 18-year-olds living room that that the Lane Kiffin can't offer. And the apparatus of amateurism, you know, the big thick rulebook that says where you can and can't buy kids meals and how often you can and can't call somebody and all of that, actually on a day to day basis is, it functions as labor market controls for the people whose job it is to try to put together a team here at Ohio State A few years ago, the football team lost a year or so, to a recruiting scandal that was relatively low stakes financially. It was related to free tattoos and some other kinds of favors. And the reason one of the practical reasons the NCAA has to at least pretend to be a gasped by that, is because Alabama doesn't want Ohio State to offer anything that Alabama can't offer, right. And, and one of the reasons other than then cultural confusion about the concept of amateurism that I think explains why the people whose job it is to run these institutions are nervous right now is that a federal judge may will throw a grenade in the idea that anybody can regulate what coach A can or can't offer a kid relative to coach B, because that's exactly the kind of antitrust premise that one of the current court cases is designed to address.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

And so Anna, I think this is a great opportunity for you to build on Mark's answer here and we were wondering, just what sorts of factors in popular culture, the rhetoric of sports and perhaps in the university itself, that may lend themselves to promoting this concept of you know, quote, unquote, amateur sports that Mark's talking about?

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Well, my answer that would partially linked to Marc's First point that he made about the sentimentality or that these people who are who are continuing to espouse amateurism are not technically hypocrites in the sense that they truly believe this, right. And that stems from a very strong sense of sentimentality and nostalgia about amateurs and everybody who has played who played you know, baseball or T ball as a child may have very strong memories of camaraderie or you know, fun getting pop after the games, etc. And so they cling to that in some sense as amateur. But I think that there's you know, even something deeper than that sentimentality for a you know, lost age. We all remember the movie The Sandlot or some most of us remember the movie The Sandlot? Which is that, in culture in popular culture itself, amateurism was first enshrined in the 19th century, as a, what became an aristocratic ideal. The idea that amateurs did this for the love of the game, because it was sorted to be paid for a living. Right? So who could afford to do that, um, you know, aristocratic gentleman, that that's part of where the amateur concept, the modern concept of amateurism comes from. But, you know, it's acquired even more, I want to say moral currency in the in the 19th and 20th centuries, because it's been rhetorically opposed to, to the figure of the gladiator and Roman sport, Roman spectacle. So saying that you're an amateur, you know, automatically gives you more moral, gives you the moral high ground over somebody who's being paid, over somebody who's being paid in, especially football, right, which is where a lot of these comparisons to gladiators happen. So the idea that Rome equals professional in Greece equals amateur and that somehow there is something more morally wholesome about being an amateur. Well, sure, if you if you conjure up the specter of people disemboweling each other for entertainment, of course, you know, it's going to it's going to sound better. And so and so I think that that defending amateurism, or claiming oneself as an amateur still has some of that some of that moral cachet that was that was begun in the 19th century and continue through today.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

And Ann, would you go as far as to kind of graph this to say that that may be precisely because everything else in the culture right now is so thoroughly commercialized that that this amateur, that this is part of why we hang on to this notion of amateurism, because we can at least pretend on a Saturday afternoon that these guys are just playing for team spirit.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Yeah. I think-

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Not the fact that there's a there's a payoff here.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Right. I think that's absolutely right, Stephen. In fact, in one of the more prominent legal cases involving the NCAA games vs. NCAA, Judge, Judge Wiseman, talked about how he still believes that there is a virtue in the Athenian ideal with noncommercial activity. So, so even if they, you know, judges or moral co- or you know, commentators or sports media, even if they recognize that, that there is something wrong with the ideal of amateurism, as implemented by the NCAA, they still think that this is that there's some sort of abstract ideal of amateurism outside of that that is the last Bulwark, the last defense against the, you know, the evil forces of commercialism and professionalism.

 

Marc Horger 

And I think, Steve, I would also be a little hesitant to think of it primarily as a problem of contemporary culture because of how far back, we can push in history and find examples of exactly the same conversation.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yes. We all know that the complaints about the corruption of college football in particular, I don't really recall too many complaints about college field hockey. But that that goes back at least 100 years and really probably now 125 years and James Thurber, Columbus' own, made his career writing about the follies of OSU football. But I do think that there is a point at which the quantity of money involved really did make a qualitative shift in the kinds of issues that we're talking about because 100 years ago when Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania were hiring, you know, goons off the loading docks to come play football for the money involved was so trivial and now every you know, that every university president who is a head of one of these sports behemoths is just terrified of running afoul of alumni donors and of network executives and ESPN contracts and so on, and so forth. So now the courts are being, I would say in some cases reluctantly dragged in to do what the NCAA is not interested in doing, and which college and university presidents have proved too cowardly to do, which is, which is to sort of, you know, deal with some of the obvious contradictions and the obvious corruptions here and they have simply stuck their heads further and further in the sand. So now we're in the courts.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

With these kind of cultural ideas and legacy in mind, and even this current financial situation you bring up Steve, we're curious what sorts of solutions can we begin to craft in order to address these problems? And what from history might inform these decisions?

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Well, you know, I've said for a long time that and I've mostly said this, you know, over a pitcher of beer, but that the extraordinary thing about college athletics and again, let's really talk about men's basketball and football because everything else is kind of drafting in the wake of those. What's really remarkable is that two multi-billion-dollar entertainment industries have persuaded American higher education to provide them with their minor leagues for free. Baseball runs its own minor league system, hockey runs its own minor league system, and yet the rest of the higher education is doing that for the NFL. And that we ought to just cave off the football operations and make them semiprofessional, make the minor leagues, go into some partnership with the NFL to to have the OSU football team I don't know be the farm system for the Cleveland Browns or something along those lines. Because at this point, I don't see any solutions that that rein in this beast, I think we just have to let it run away.

 

Marc Horger 

I would maybe push back just slightly Steve on the verb persuaded, not that that I might not share your personal desire for that particular solution. But this gets at what I was talking a little bit earlier about how really far back you can push these things. Because your description of contemporary college football was accurate in the 20s. Before the NFL was a thing.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yeah, yeah, no, that's fair.

 

Marc Horger 

And I think critics of college football tend to underestimate how genuinely organically a part of the image of the institution it is.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yep.

 

Marc Horger 

Let me tell what I suspect Steve will consider a depressing story about the history of the University of Chicago.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yes.

 

Marc Horger 

I will compare late 19th century Chicago to contemporary Texas. In that late 19th century, Chicago was full of people who were convinced the rest of the country was unaware of how great Chicago was and so and they looked around in 1891, around Chicago and they didn't see a Yale, they didn't see a college-

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

 Yep.

 

Marc Horger 

- equal to the quality of the city. And so they rustled up a bunch of Rockefeller money, and they built a college from scratch. And first guy they hired was a president, who had previously been a professor from Yale, whose name was William Rainey Harper, I believe.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yep.

 

Marc Horger 

The second guy they hired was Amos Alonzo Stagg, second guy they hired, and they made him a full professor of physical education, to coach the basketball and football teams. And at the first week, literally the first week of classes at the University of Chicago in 1892, Stagg called a mass meeting, which is something they used to do on colleges where he literally said everybody come to the gymnasium, where they voted, Steve, on what they wanted their class yell to be at the football games, and that was-

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Was it in Latin at least?

 

Marc Horger 

No, it was not. It was not in Latin. And that was the first thing University Chicago-

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

 Yeah.

 

Marc Horger 

-and there's evidence in the archives of Harper saying we're going to get a football team and everybody's gonna know it.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yeah.

 

Marc Horger 

And if you were, if you were to go down the list of the US News and World reports of the top 20, 30, 40 prestigious institutions of higher education in this country, in order to name colleges that either are not currently or never were places where they contain college football, your criticism of which was accurate. You got MIT, Johns Hopkins-

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

 Yeah.

 

Marc Horger 

-give or take what you think of their lacrosse program. Caltech.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yep.

 

Marc Horger 

And, and that's pretty much the end of the list. And, and so it's organic to the institution in a way that I think it's, when we talk about whether or not we got to put a crowbar in there and pry it off the institution. I think that conversation sometimes underestimates how organically buried it is in the institution, so…

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

So that's a great story. And yes, I find it deeply depressing. But let's add the footnote to it, which is that sometime in the 1940s, the University of Chicago decided to get out of the Big 10.

 

Marc Horger 

There are two off ramps. And one thing that, one way to actually have the conversation about how can we divorce major college football from the institution is maybe not to think in terms of prying it off entirely. But what kind of off ramps are available? Is it possible for an institution to decide to walk away on its own right without destroying its institutional concept of itself? And there were only two off ramps historically, one is the University Chicago in the late 30s, that just abolished it. And by the late 30s, the University of Chicago had basically begun to eat a different kind of prestige. And they'd begun to think of their self-image as being how selective they were.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

And they and they started counting Nobel Prize,

 

Marc Horger 

And they started counting Nobel Prizes. And it's also the case, Steve, that when they got rid of football, there was a lot of alumni anger, they really did have to have shout down all the people that you'd have to shout down today. And they basically decided to abolish it entirely rather than play, you know, rather than just care about it less.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yeah.

 

Marc Horger 

On the grounds that if we're not going to be the best at this, we don't want to do it at all.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Right, right, right.

 

Marc Horger 

And the other the only other off ramp is the Ivy League, which after World War II began, they didn't get rid of college football altogether. And in fact, the Ivy League today has a, in some ways in terms of participation, percentage of the student body participating in athletics. Some of the Ivy League athletic programs are the largest athletic programs in the country. But they decided to gradually disinvest their own image in that. And they did it too because they began to invest their self-image more heavily in their ivyness and their eliteness in their, in their selectivity. But it might be productive to have a conversation about the circumstances under which oh, you know, we here in Ohio, we live in the middle of them in the American conference.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Right.

 

Marc Horger 

It's Bowling Green and Toledo-

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yep.

 

Marc Horger 

-and Ball State that can't afford college football, but are definitely afraid that if they were to get rid of it, we would not think of them as the same kind of institution. And if I were genuinely interested in achieving less of a connection between major amateur athletics and the educational system, I think I might try to put the thin end of the wedge down there.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

And I think this is a great segue into our final question. And another important component or issue to consider here that we've really already been touching on, is how these college sports affect higher  education as a whole, which we've kind of been discussing a little bit here. And so in your experiences, how have sports impacted the university? And Ann if you want to take us off first here?

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Sure. I think that I think that you hear a lot of different stories regarding this particular question like stories that students enroll in a particular campus not because it's the best college fit for them, but because they want to participate in the sports culture of that university. I see a lot of that here at Ohio State. You know, students want to be Buckeye fans, they want to experience the culture of football, you know, Saturdays and whatnot. Um, is it possible for an institution to have a big time football or basketball program and also have high graduation rates of those students? Is it possible? I think it may be is and one of the things actually that convinced me that was University of Pennsylvania study on the involvement of black males in college football in college, college basketball, and yeah, Ohio State graduates 38% of its black male athletes, which is just outside the top 10 lowest in the country out of the biggest earning conferences. Northwestern, on the other hand, is the highest at 81%.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Wow.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Which is higher than the rate for its for its student body. It's possible. But of course, is Northwestern going to be the ultimate college football power like in Alabama? No, it's not. But I think that schools have to make those types of decisions for themselves. I think that on some level if it can certainly be a corrosive force on campus. I think that it as Steve mentioned, the very beginning of this of this podcast. I think there's a lot of cascade effects regarding rape culture on campus, regarding cultures of entitlements, regarding graduate rates. I mean, however you want to look at this, there can be negative effects. But I think that too, there can be positive elements. Um, I think that individual programs are going to have to make some very tough decisions, regardless of what alumni think or not. That's eventually what it's going to have to come down to it. And now I'm cynical enough to understand that not all programs are going to be able to make those types of decisions. But at some point, you know, we're kind of reaching the critical mass in that.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Let's play this little thought experiment for a moment. You um, you show up on a campus, like the like the protagonist in The Music Man, to a board of trustees meeting, he says, I got a program for you. It's going to run in the red every single year. It's going to lower your admission standards, and it's going to increase the incidence of campus violence. Doesn't that sound great? Let's do that. Well, that's college athletics at most places. There are there are a handful of places like Ohio State which run this thing in the black. But in order to do that they have essentially sold themselves in every conceivable way that they can sell themselves to, to Nike and to ESPN and to God knows what else. The vast majority of places, division three places and so on and running in the red, it does have a distorting effect, the Knight Foundation study this is oh probably 10 or 15 years ago now, on the admissions process, if you are a high school athlete, you it's this is the new affirmative action. You get you get admitted now because the coach needs a lacrosse player to play goalie and the football coach needs a place kicker. So I really do think it has had this extraordinary ripple effect, even in places that aren't big time.

 

Marc Horger 

I don't disagree with any of that. But again, I can think of so many early 20th century examples of the same question that I come back to the organization and yeah, and I would make the point since we all work at an institution like this, I would just not to argue against anything that Steve has just said. But I would just make the observation that institutions such as this make a wide variety of economically irrational decisions out of peer matching.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Yes, that's right, jones, keeping up with jones

 

Marc Horger 

Keeping up with the Joneses, especially when Jones is actually three steps ahead, and everyone knows.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

 Yep.

 

Marc Horger 

And I would argue that this has this is the explanation for why so many institutions in in intercollegiate athletics has behaved have behaved in this way. I was, I did some research at Oberlin, Oberlin athletic program in the 1890s. Oberlin’s need to be seen as equal to Yale-

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

 Yeah.

 

Marc Horger 

-is both the explanation and it's the most powerful explanation when it's, when it's obviously false.  Bowling Green can't admit that it can't support football.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Right.

 

Marc Horger 

And I would just observe that that these institutions that make a wide variety of economically unsensible decisions based on similar ideas of our psychology department needs to be equal to x psychology department. Our library needs to be of equal quality to Yale’s library? Ohio State recently built a beautiful new gymnasium where you can get pretty good sushi. And I'm not convinced that produces knowledge either. But, but we gotta have it because Michigan's got it.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Right.

 

Marc Horger 

And, and I think that's the, I think that's a powerful explanatory force and not just in the world of athletics.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Well, Marc, I have to say that your point regarding economically irrational decisions, I think explains for me why I am not allowed to have an office phone here at the university.

 

Marc Horger 

You tell them, tell them how many office phones there are in the classics department at Michigan State, and that's how and that's how you can get a dean to pony up for phones. And so it's, there are more zeros on the end of all the checks when we talk about college football, then when we talk about some of these other things, but I'm slightly more skeptical, I think, than some other people are who are interested in this, that all of this is either unique to sport, or being driven primarily by TV money. I think that explains the size of the size of the bill rules involved, but I'm not convinced that it's the only institutional explanation for the for the behavior and decision making.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Well, if I could jump in here for a second, I think that I think that you're bringing up Oberlin was a very interesting point because one of the things I discussed In the in the Origins article is the athletic director and it at Oberlin and 1929 wrote a sort of an opinion piece in which he decried the commercialism that was overtaking college sport. And one of the things that he particularly pointed to was the erection in the 1920s of very large stadiums across all across the country. OSU horseshoe was one of those, the LA Coliseum, Oklahoma, etc., etc. So and what he was essentially identifying was the change from college football as a sport, to college football as a spectacle, a spectacle in which the fans, the alumni, the students, the players, etc., everyone seems to have a much larger stake in that in in in college football as a spectacle, then as a simple amateur sports in which you know, find blooded young men get to you know, learn moral values.

 

Marc Horger 

Paradoxically the world of 1920s stadium construction that that he was decrying was actually a product of an earlier reform where people in the 1890s said, this is too commercial, people are going drunken, you know, people are getting drunk and going to these games that have nothing to do with Yale. We have to bring this on campus. And that's why the stadium's got built on the campus that was already an attempted reform of an earlier discussion about how college football was way too commercial.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

 But I think too, I mean, if it does become, you know, if the antitrust succeeds, and it does become, you know, more of that survival of the fittest, and I think that I think you could have a positive effect on some schools like Grambling State, which has been essentially bankrupt. I mean, they're in financial straits anyway as university but, but they continue to hold on to their football team, which means that they have to, they can't afford to fly anywhere. So they have to bus the players everywhere. Yeah, even if that's like a 24-hour trip one way in 24 hours the other way, which Steve brings up your other point about the corrosive nature in higher education, these kids are exhausted by the time they to campus.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Anywhere.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Yeah, there's no way they're doing any work. And they have to miss an enormous amount of class because of that. So I think if you get those types of schools set where it's such a financial burden, for whatever reason, if they are forced into giving it up, I think that that can benefit higher education in a lot of ways too.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

You know that, that might be right. This is still not making me feel better.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

On that, like wonderful you know note of hope, we're going to thank Anna McCullough, Marc Horger, and Steve Conn, all of you, thank you so much for joining us today on History Talk from Origins.

 

Marc Horger 

Thank you.

 

Dr. Steven Conn 

Great to be here. Thanks.

 

Dr. Ann McCullough 

Thanks.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

This edition of the origins podcast History Talk was brought to you by the Public History Initiative and the Goldberg center in the history department at The Ohio State University. Our main editors are Steven Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our executive producer is David Staley, our audio and technical advisor is Paul Kotheimer. Our audio producers and hosts are Patrick Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins. Song and band information can be found on our website. You can find our podcasts and more at our website origins.osu.edu on iTunes and on Soundcloud and as always, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Thank you for listening.