College Sports: A History by Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin. Hopkins Press, 496 pages. 2024.
If you’re like me—i.e., just another beleaguered, non-tenure-track professor—when you watch the meathead legions and soused sorors come out for a College GameDay broadcast, you think: I wonder how much those talented young people are contributing to the economy. The answer in America, of course, is quite a lot. Thanks to fans like these and the millions of others who tune in around the country, college athletics generated about $13.6 billion in revenue in 2022 alone. Of that total, $4.2 billion came from TV rights packages, which see money flow from networks to the conferences that negotiate media deals and then to the schools themselves. For the most successful athletics programs, the big business of college sports can be extremely lucrative. The top three programs by revenue in 2022, Ohio State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Alabama, generated $251 million, $239 million, and $214 million in revenue per year, respectively. Ohio State’s athletics profits are so substantial that the program funnels money back into the university’s general budget, where it is (of course) used for education.
But Ohio State is exceptional. Notoriously, most college athletics departments operate at a loss. Even in the power conferences—the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big Ten, the Big 12, and, until 2023, the Pac-12—the majority of schools spend more money on athletics than they take in. In 2019, for example, sixty-five schools played Division I sports in one of these conferences. Only twenty-five reported positive revenue, and among the forty schools losing money, the average deficit was nearly $16 million. Lots of people are making money off of college sports, clearly: gambling companies that put sportsbooks in the pockets of every smartphone user; football and basketball coaches, who are the highest paid public employees in a majority of states; even some of the student-athletes themselves, given recent shocking legal developments. It just so happens that the schools operating the sports programs mostly are not.
Like most other aspects of American life these days, college sports are now divided between a very small group that thrives and the vast majority struggling to stay afloat. Opinions differ on how long this state of affairs can continue, but there’s an emerging consensus that whatever college sports once was is now over, at least at the highest levels. There’s too much money in the system, and elite college sports competition now looks almost exactly like a professional league. Like professional teams, big-time athletics programs live and die by TV money, and the quest to maximize broadcast revenue and secure the most lucrative contracts has injected a new ruthlessness into college athletic competition off the field, upending the conference system in the process.
Historically, conferences evolved to group together schools with similar athletic philosophies and levels of competition in the same region: the Big Ten covered the Midwest, the Pac-12 the Pacific Coast, and so on. Among these major conferences, however, not all the members possessed equally powerful brands: lots of people tune into ACC football to watch Clemson or Florida State; far fewer make time every Saturday for Wake Forest or Duke. In their quest to assemble the most profitable groups of schools for broadcasters, the conferences began to herd the powerhouses into the same leagues and hang the others out to dry. This is exactly what happened when the University of Southern California and UCLA—both strong sports schools in a large media market—announced they were joining the Big Ten in 2022 (UCLA’s athletics department has run a total deficit of nearly $220 million over the last six years). The two LA schools saw the writing on the wall. The Big Ten already pulled in more TV revenue than the other conferences; with the Pac-12’s media rights up for renegotiation in 2024, they had to act fast or get locked into a lower-tier contract.
The historic West Coast conference collapsed within a year. The loss of the two LA schools hurt the ten remaining members’ bargaining power; Colorado was next to leave, in July 2023. In early August, the conference announced a media deal with Apple that offered $20 million per year to each member school (Big Ten schools received between $80 and $100 million per year in 2023; SEC schools received, on average, $51 million). The next day, Oregon and Washington left for the Big Ten, while the University of Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah joined the Big 12. In September, Cal and Stanford headed for the ACC. Only two Pac-12 schools, Oregon State and Washington State, now remain. Conference realignments are far from unprecedented in the century-plus-long history of college sports. What is new, however, is the total collapse of a conference once considered one of the most powerful in the sport, which boasts a legacy of household-name alumni (like Tiger Woods, Aaron Rodgers, Marshawn Lynch, and Katie Ledecky) and the largest number of national championships across all sports of any college conference.
College sports stand on the precipice of a new era. Some plans are in the works to scrap the longstanding football system and move toward a “super league” model, in which brand-name schools compete against each other in a nationwide league while all the other schools, starved of TV money, presumably reduce the size, competitiveness, or number of their sports programs. (These proposals are in the early stages for now, but it’s an idea whose time is coming.) For those schools just below the top rungs but fighting to reach them, athletics departments will be newly incentivized to run up enormous deficits in the hopes of advancing into the next echelon of success, prestige, and earnings.
Yet for schools that make the cut, even the richest TV payouts may not be enough to keep their athletic departments’ coffers full: lawmakers, regulators, and the public now increasingly believe that college athletes ought to be getting paid. Former University of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh said as much at a victory press conference after his team won the college football national championship in January 2024: “They’re maximizing every single revenue source there is, but they’re not sharing it with the talent. There’s no business that that would ever fly.” This turning of the tide means, in practice, that colleges and universities will have to start cutting athletes in on their TV money. Fair is fair, of course, but splitting up the revenue would also mean that athletics departments have less money available to subsidize nonrevenue generating teams or will require even bigger subsidies from their universities’ general budget. (And it would be a new, and expensive, cost burden on smaller programs that make less money and so have less to distribute. Programs that do survive will have trouble recruiting because they will pay much less.)
College sports is funny like that—the more money they make, the more they seem to cost.
Mens sana in corpore sano
If college sports as we know them disappear, I won’t be there to mourn. Where I grew up, there wasn’t really a college sports culture; we had real sports teams to root for. One of my areas of research and teaching is higher education itself, and I think—admittedly more from experience than data—that many, if not most, faculty members believe that athletics programs are all too much: too big, too rich, too powerful, and too distracting from what I still believe, perhaps naively, that schools are for, i.e., teaching, learning, and research. All these core functions have, not coincidentally, recently come under threat from a combination of demographic, economic, and political challenges.
Fellow professors and even some administrators are quick to complain about the ballooning size of athletics budgets, of the growing popularity of college sports over college study, as well as the growing incentives toward branding and commercialization that keep university administrations more focused on athletics than academics. Even I can name a handful of famous coaches off the top of my head—how many people can say the same about leading teachers and researchers? Every Saturday in autumn, millions of people tune in to watch the top few dozen college football teams compete; for most of March, sports coverage is dominated by the NCAA basketball tournament, a media frenzy that by itself generates nearly a billion dollars in revenue for the NCAA and the participating schools. The amateur ideal states that athletes compete in sports as part of the general personal, physical, and intellectual development they undergo during their college years: mens sana in corpore sano. True enough at Division III schools, maybe, but in Division I and I-A, the purpose of college athletic competition is to offer a blockbuster spectacle to the sports-watching public, to develop athletes into the professional leagues, to sustain the huge amounts of economic activity that now depend on college sports, and to build and maintain brand recognition and alumni relations.
If colleges are going to have big-time sports, the athletes who take part should be getting paid.
Which is to say, if colleges are going to have big-time sports, the athletes who take part should be getting paid. Admitting that college athletes are really employees would definitively end the fiction that athletes recruited to play big-time sports are, in fact, on campus primarily as students. For every school like Michigan or Stanford that maintains high academic and research standards alongside a commitment to serious athletic competition, there are plenty, like the University of North Carolina, that have lowered academic standards for athletes (in UNC’s case, creating dozens of fake classes to help athletes maintain their playing eligibility), and many more where undergraduate educational standards are a mere afterthought.
Of course, a view of the college sports landscape that restricts itself only to the small handful of commercialized, big-time programs risks missing the larger context in which college sports are played by most athletes at most institutions. Even among the more than 350 football-playing schools competing in the NCAA’s Division I, the highest tier of competition, only a few dozen are national brands that regularly send players to the NFL. The further down the food chain you go, the more the players do look like bona fide student-athletes attending college to get an education and playing sports on the side. Part of the challenge of getting your mind around the college sports landscape is that there is no one college sports landscape: the situation at a big-time football school playing in one of the power conferences looks very different from that at a regional state school playing in DII or a DIII liberal arts college where a third or more of the student body may play a varsity sport (without dreams of ever playing professionally).
Fair though they are, many of the critiques leveled at today’s college athletics programs are also inexorably presentist. It’s common to act as though commercialization and athlete exploitation is a phenomenon of recent vintage or to rhapsodize about a golden age in which college sports represented a pure extension of the whole-person developmental ideal to which some U.S. colleges and universities have aspired. But there was never any golden age where sports occupied their proper, subservient place on campus, unpolluted by big money; the entire history of college sports has been one of a push and pull between athletics and academics, amateurism and professionalism, corruption and purity. For nearly as long as higher education has existed in this country, college sports has existed alongside it, as have the issues we kvetch about today. Illegal recruiting practices, persistent scandals, the influx of TV money, conference realignment, tensions between athletics and academics, regional and national jockeying for position and status among programs, failed attempts to achieve gender parity, even the explosion of sanctioned, omnipresent sports gambling—all have roots stretching back decades.
College Sports: A History, a new book by historians Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin, argues that anyone who wants to get a handle on what U.S. higher education is—and what makes it so unique and so maddening—ought to understand college sports. Typically, histories of the American university tell the story of the sector’s rise in predictable stages: from the origins of the religiously affiliated colonial colleges, through the clubbiness of the nineteenth-century college as finishing school for a moneyed elite, to the institution of the land-grant university in the wake of the Civil War. The story continues with the explosion of private philanthropy during the Gilded Age, the importation of the German research university model through the early twentieth century, and the worldwide dominance of the American multiversity in the postwar period. Finally, this story goes, U.S. universities turned to the market with the advent of neoliberalism as the close ties between the state and higher education began to fray; this new, corporate university saw the importation of business school-style management techniques, the growing financialization of university assets, the slow death of faculty job security, and the stratospheric rise of both student tuition and student indebtedness.
What’s missing from this scholarly consensus, Moyen and Thelin demonstrate, is how college sports have been a central organizing principle not only of many individual institutions but of the entire system. The university and its athletics evolved in tandem: just as the contemporary U.S. college athletics system owes its existence to the network of colleges and universities that support it, so, too, does the American university system owe its current form, at least in large part, to its role as a patron of institutionalized athletic competition.
The structure of American higher education—with its divisions of colleges and research universities; its hierarchies of wealth and prestige; its regional distinctions; its public and private split; and, importantly, its unprecedented accumulation of wealth, resources, and state and economic power—helped to create an athletics ecosystem that is unique in the world. Most countries have a higher education system, but nowhere else are college sports so prominent, so commercialized, and so widely watched by nonaffiliated spectators.
U.S. higher education is unique in other ways too. In no other country is the higher education system so large, so wealthy, and so multitudinous in its guises. Put simply: only in the United States is college imagined as a separate sphere, a bucolic retreat far from the real world in which young people go to experience an utterly separate existence for four years of their lives. It’s part of the reason graduates remain so attached to their schools, and it’s part of the reason why school pride is such a driver of charitable giving. None of this is imaginable without sports teams—even at schools that don’t engage in big-time athletics. For a huge number of students, the college experience is inseparable from the campus sports experience, whether they participated as athletes or just as fans. It’s a crucial fact, one that can make a scholar of higher education wonder whether they’ve been giving the athletics department short shrift in their understanding of what’s holding the whole enterprise together.
Our Athletics Departments, Ourselves
As long as there has been campus life, there have been campus sports. Early collegiate competitions drew huge crowds: a Harvard-Oxford boat race in 1869, for example, summoned an estimated half-million spectators to the banks of the Thames. Even in the early twentieth century, college football games were regularly packing in tens of thousands of fans, most of whom did not attend the university. And for as long as there have been college sports, there has been tension between the roles of student and athlete and debate about whether it is fair, reasonable, or sane to expect college students to fully embody both. This is the central contradiction around which all other controversies turn.
Perhaps no one understood this fact better than Charles Eliot, who served as president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Harvard was the leading college football school, alongside Princeton and Yale; Eliot, however, opposed football, which he attacked in his 1905 annual report to the university’s Board of Overseers, saying, “If a college or university is primarily a place for training young men for honorable, generous, and efficient service to the community at large there ought not to be more than one opinion on the question of whether a game played under the actual conditions of football, and with the barbarous ethics of warfare, can be of a useful element in the training of young men for such high service.” Eliot objected to the violence of the game, which regularly caused on-field deaths of players at both the secondary school and college levels. He also objected to the win-at-all-costs mentality that drove the emergence of the professional coach, who recruited top players and joined with alumni and boosters in ensuring these players received special privileges, financial consideration, and even endorsement deals. Such practices were anathema to the ethos of honor and amateurism that Eliot sought to preserve.
Yet, as Moyen and Thelin point out, football was not unique in growing more professionalized and more specialized. The growing professionalism of football was a symptom of the increasing professionalization of the university itself. As colleges transformed into large universities, offering specialized courses of study, training graduate students, and conducting scholarly research, students, faculty, and administrators all tended toward greater specialization too. As the history, sociology, chemistry, and physics departments evolved, so did the athletics department.
While the growing professionalism of the academy seemed natural enough to professors and administrators, the professionalization of the athletics department posed a problem. After all, weren’t sports becoming too big, too popular, and too much of a distraction from the real work of the university? (Professors then apparently thought much the same way as professors now.) This concern led to one of the great ironies of college sports history: one solution that administrators and faculty arrived at to regulate the growth and popularity of college sports was to found a national oversight organization to establish uniform rules and standards. This early association eventually became the NCAA, the organization that is more synonymous than any other with the commercialization of college sports—and with many of its abuses.
Many of the big conferences were established for the same reasons the NCAA was. The SEC originally began as an attempt to assert academic control over the athletic departments of what was then called the Southern Conference. In the 1920s, controversial practices that had taken hold in the service of fielding better teams included the recruiting and subsidizing of athletes, the lowering of academic expectations for players, and the deputizing of alumni to act on behalf of athletic departments. The same SEC originally founded to limit commercialization is now one of its greatest beneficiaries: the conference is synonymous with the college football way of life and boasts one of the most lucrative TV contracts in the nation.
Not all experiments in faculty control failed, however. The Ivy League also came together around resistance to commercial exploitation of athletics and commitments to academic standards and a reasonable, but not excessive, level of competition. Here again, college presidents played a key role. As the country entered World War II, college football suffered as many college-aged men were drafted into the military or found other ways to contribute to the war effort. The presidents of the oldest and most prestigious schools—the same schools that had inaugurated and dominated the first decades of college football—seized the opportunity to retreat from big-time sports and return to academic emphasis and athletic amateurism. As Moyen and Thelin put it, “There is some irony in the fact that the institutions that created big-time football in America were the first to collectively walk away from it.”
The retreat of the most prestigious universities from big-time college sports coincided with the postwar boom, the most sustained period of major educational investment in the country’s history. Large public colleges and universities expanded into a dizzying array of disciplines, schools, technological apparatuses, and research specialties. Athletics, too, became more hyperspecialized, developing even further as a special division of the university, complete with its own staff, budget, and professional identity. As colleges and universities expanded and more students began to attend college, the class, ethnic, and geographical diversity of athletic programs and college athletes expanded too. Athletes of color began to get their first opportunities to compete on a massive scale.
TV grew more important as well, and with it the role of the NCAA, which had evolved into a bona fide governing body covering almost all the college athletic programs in the nation. A massive expansion of women’s sports came about with the passage of Title IX in 1972. In guaranteeing gender equity in educational offerings, that law also guaranteed equal access to athletic opportunities, forcing schools, at least in theory, to strive for parity between men’s and women’s sports. With women’s competitions growing in size and importance, the NCAA subsumed the women’s games too. This same era, the 1970s and 1980s, saw the rise of the market-driven neoliberal university, as the collapse of the New Deal order ushered in the era of debt-financed degrees, financialized endowments, and the drawback of state subsidies that had bankrolled higher education’s postwar expansion. Market imperatives soon grew more dominant in sports too. Commercial incentives were already on the rise when a 1984 Supreme Court decision ruled that the NCAA, which had controlled college football broadcast rights on behalf of all member institutions, was in violation of antitrust laws and had to allow schools to negotiate their own TV deals. The justices thus created an entirely new business environment in which powerhouse schools could compete against one another for revenue. The demonopolization of college TV contracts delivered windfalls for some schools, but it also led to the chaos of conference realignments and a TV and streaming revenue arms race that continues to this day.
Name, Image, Likeness
Since 1984, more money, more publicity, and more commercialization has been the rule. Just like Ma Bell, the broadcast networks, or the airlines, the NCAA was another monopoly deregulated in the eighties, widening the chasm between big-time schools and everyone else. This change also strengthened the case for cutting athletes in on the profits. Colleges and universities have long sold the image and name of athletes to the highest bidder without the athletes themselves seeing a penny, but now the revenues became much bigger than they had been before.
Reform is slow, but it has been coming. In 2019, California passed a law that would eventually allow college athletes to negotiate their own Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals directly with sponsors. The practice soon spread and was institutionalized by the NCAA nationwide in 2021. In most cases, the NIL of a college athlete isn’t worth much—a few hundred dollars, perhaps a few thousand, now, at least, payable directly to them. For a small number of athletes however, the deals have been lucrative: such athletes typically have large social media followings, are already famous, or have become famous by excelling in their sport. Examples include LSU gymnast Olivia (Livvy) Dunne, LeBron James’s son Bronny (during his one year of college ball), and, until they went pro themselves, women’s basketball stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
Not all experiments in faculty control failed, however.
Beyond the legitimate deals offered by individual agencies, advertisers, and sponsors, wealthy alumni donors and booster groups skirt the loosened restrictions to court the most promising prospects and offer them major NIL deals in exchange, functionally, for nothing more than playing at a particular university (this is a reprise of the same practices that college presidents sought to stamp out in the early twentieth century). The explosion of new NIL rules—which are largely maintained on a state-by-state basis rather than being nationally centralized—has created any number of loopholes that boosters now gleefully exploit. Such boosters work hard to attract top talent; see for instance John Ruiz, CEO of the insurance claims company LifeWallet, who has committed millions of dollars of his company’s money to endorsement deals designed to transform the University of Miami Hurricanes into a championship-level basketball outfit. (His company now faces an uncertain future, which could put the success of Hurricanes basketball at risk too.) Ruiz is just a symptom, these rules being regularly stretched by coaches, players, athletic directors, and others across the system.
In recent years, two more major changes to the status quo have seemed to be in the offing, one now looking more plausible than the other. The first would reflect a change in college athletes’ status as it relates to labor law: under Biden, the labor-friendly NLRB general counsel issued guidance that college athletes should be considered employees under federal labor law and thus allowed to unionize. In March 2024, Dartmouth men’s basketball had voted to unionize, the first college team to do so, but they rescinded their recognition petition after Donald Trump’s election, which has likely put the brakes on college athlete unionization for now; Trump’s NLRB reversed the Biden-era guidance in February 2025.
More dramatically, it seems overwhelmingly likely that many college athletes will now get paid directly by their institutions. In 2020, two players, Grant House of Arizona State and Sedona Prince of Texas Christian University, filed suit against the NCAA for lost NIL funds and for the right to receive a portion of the money from TV broadcast deals. (Prince recently played her final college basketball game under a cloud: initially celebrated as a voice for athlete compensation and equality for women’s sports, she has been accused of abuse or assault by a total of five women over the past few years.) The logic of the suit is simple: college athletes are the product sold to broadcasters when conferences negotiate broadcast deals, and without these athletes, schools would receive no broadcast money. Furthermore, athletes experience something like an employment relationship to their school: they choose to play sports, certainly, but their scholarship, their roster spot, and their enrollment often depend on their abiding by the rules of the program. This includes regular attendance at practice, maintaining behavioral standards, and meeting performance goals.
In an admission that the NCAA had lost the argument, the parties in the suit reached a landmark $2.8 billion settlement that would not only see current college athletes receive a payout but would extend compensation to all NCAA Division I athletes going back to 2016, a class that includes nearly four hundred thousand people. While the average size of the award may be quite small, the settlement has massive implications for the future: it would establish a $21 million limit for revenue sharing, meaning that each DI school could distribute up to that amount yearly among its varsity athletes. This limit is far above what most schools bring in in TV revenue but still well below what the top earners do.
The settlement—which, as this article went to press, is pending approval by the judge overseeing the case, Claudia Wilken—could create some problems of its own: critics say it would all but guarantee that Title IX is weakened since the majority of TV revenue comes from men’s football and basketball. If schools distribute revenue proportionally to the value of each sport to their TV deals, athletes in those sports would receive the highest proportion of revenue, with little left over for even mainstay sports like baseball, to say nothing of fencing, sailing, or golf. If the men in these nonrevenue sports receive small payouts, the women on many college teams could receive only a token amount, or nothing at all. The revenue sharing provisions would also limit roster spots, which could gut opportunities for athletes of all genders, including those who play less commercially viable sports—even historically important ones like rowing or track and field. In late April, Wilken delayed issuing a final ruling on the settlement and ordered both sides to modify the terms to address the roster issue.
Still, it will almost certainly be accepted: the NCAA’s Division I board of directors already conditionally approved more than 150 rule changes that will go into effect when the settlement receives final federal court approval. This shift will quickly overturn all past practice. Student-athletes have often found various ways to profit from their athletic talents, sometimes while at school and often afterward, but never before would any school have countenanced direct payments in exchange for athletic performance. It is a stunning capitulation that could announce the demise of big-time amateurism—always, as College Sports reminds us, an ideal more than an actual practice. As early as the late nineteenth century, professional players would clandestinely participate in college sports as schools attempted to gain an edge. Boosters would offer inducements; later on, bribes, perks, gambling, match-fixing, and point shaving were common. Even ordinary benefits like scholarships and preferential admissions policies have been cast as forms of compensation, particularly in arguments about player unionization.
The settlement also reflects the NCAA’s weakened position. Long the ultimate authority on every aspect of collegiate sporting competition in the country, the NCAA has been battered over the last few years. Covid was particularly challenging: it took years to return to anything like normal operations, and student life—not to mention student learning—was profoundly disrupted. Even as attendance has recovered and the chaos of the early pandemic years has faded, the NCAA has navigated escalating antitrust action, a growing unionization movement, the rise of anti-trans hysteria, an explosion of legal gambling that offers new revenues alongside new complications, and a round of conference consolidation that has created the specter of a winner-take-all world in which some of the biggest brands survive and other, once-storied programs twist in the wind. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the NCAA, which is, after all, the only major sports league in the country in which the teams collect revenue while the players play for free. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder what new horrors might unfold in a possible super league future, in which the sports tail will fully wag the educational dog at many of these universities.
We Both Go Down Together
Of course, only a minority of the more than half-million students competing in NCAA athletics every year play in big-time programs. College sports thus faces a bifurcated future, in which most students continue to play in the tradition of true amateurism, for the love of the game, while others engage in something much more like professional sports, with free agency, transfers, endorsement deals, wages, and fewer and fewer of the educational trappings that had once served as justification for their unpaid athletic appearances.
Reform is slow, but it has been coming.
But here is another challenge: popular faith in higher education has declined precipitously among Americans even as college sports have grown larger and more spectacular. Sports, at first blush, is easily positioned as everything higher ed is not: accessible, popular, meritocratic, omnipresent, beloved. There’s a great deal of mythmaking here, ignoring much that’s rotten in the American sports establishment from the youth levels all the way through the major leagues. But it is hard to imagine millions of Americans supporting the dismantling of sports infrastructure in the same way they cheer attacks on higher education. And these attacks are not merely conjectural but all too real: Trump has so far targeted colleges and universities for special opprobrium in his second administration, subjecting campus protest, professorial speech, and federally funded research to special scrutiny while attempting the revocation of billions of dollars of research funding that supports university activities at public and private institutions and even threatening the tax-exempt status of schools that refuse to comply. Now, when we most need it, there is no real popular constituency for defending higher education; while some of Trump’s moves have caused great controversy, his assault on universities and colleges has, at best, been met with a shrug by many outside the academy.
Too many Americans see colleges and universities as cartels extorting outrageous tuitions from students in exchange for credentials that, despite delivering minimal educational value, have now become necessary for professional employment and a shot at some financial stability. They are not entirely wrong in this: for every student who attends a four-year resort to make friends and become the person they are meant to be, there are many more students hustling and going into debt to gain a foothold into the middle class or to get any job at all. Politicians happily caricature college students and professors as out of touch, willfully downplaying the connection between university research and the suite of economic activities such research supports. Yet college sports remain beloved. They are, as Moyen and Thelin observe, the most popular and lucrative product American universities have ever produced. If faculty—including those, like me, who think and write about the university—do not typically think of sports as major parts of the larger university world, I wonder whether college sports fans bother to think of their teams as part of that world, either. If they did, we might both heed Moyen and Thelin’s reminders that, in all likelihood, neither of us could survive without the other.
Recently, the faculty senate at Rutgers University seemed to acknowledge that, approving a resolution that called on the administrations of the Big Ten schools (now numbering eighteen members scattered across the entire country) to band together to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education through the Big Ten Academic Alliance, an academic consortium of conference members founded in 1958. Though its membership includes all the Big Ten schools, unlike the sports conference, the BTAA is controlled by presidents and administrators to leverage institutional cooperation and economies of scale in purchasing and other activities. With nine other Big Ten schools passing similar resolutions as of this writing, these universities might have a meaningful relationship that extends beyond athletics. Whether that means they’ll save higher education is another question—and I’m not holding my breath. But if they do, it would be a way of acknowledging that we are all of us, for better or worse, yoked together: the students, the faculty, the administrators, the coaches, the players, the boosters, the fans.
Because let’s not kid ourselves: people watch college sports because it’s college sports, not because they want a pro football or pro basketball minor league. (There already is a pro basketball minor league, and nobody watches.) So fans, coaches, and athletes should care about the threats to higher education. And academics like me should care about not only about the well-being of student-athletes, but the future of college athletics. Neither of us have survived yet without the other, and if one of us goes down, we likely both go down together.