Athletic Scholarship Argumentative Analysis

President Teddy Roosevelt formed the NCAA in 1906 in order to implement needed safety
measures in the sport of college football. At that time, it was impermissible to recruit individuals
on the basis of athletic ability, much less to offer athletic scholarships. The athletic scholarship
was introduced in the 1950s, when an institution’s revenue in athletics was based primarily on
ticket sales to home games.
In contrast, today’s lucrative television contracts have become the driving revenue force behind
an institution’s ability to thrive in college athletics. Recently, for example, numerous
universities have changed their athletic conference affiliation for well-publicized financial
reasons.
It is interesting to compare, on the one hand, the

NCAA of Teddy Roosevelt’s time and the not
dissimilar NCAA of the 1950s with, on the other hand, the NCAA 100 years after its formation.
In that 100th year, 2006, NCAA President Myles Brand addressed the delegates at the NCAA
Convention and noted that although the participants in college athletics should remain amateurs,
the enterprise itself clearly is commercial in nature: “‘Amateur’ defines the participants,” Brand
said, “not the enterprise.”1

Since the 1950’s, the NCAA has utilized the term “student-athlete,” a term that long-time NCAA
President Walter Byers created, as he has explained, to avoid “... the dreaded notion that NCAA
athletes could be indentified as employees by state industrial commissions and the courts.”2

Identification as employees would, of course, give NCAA athletes rights such as workers’
compensation, unionization and wages.
Athletic scholarships, however, have represented a form of pay-for-play that has avoided
unionization, workers’ compensation and wages for college athletes. Although this scholarshiponly
situation may have made sense in the 1950s, when college athletics generated relatively
little revenue and required much less effort from athletes than is required today, it makes sense to
re-examine this subject in light of the significant revenues generated today and the year-round
efforts currently required of athletes. As the New York Times recently stated about workers’
compensation for college athletes, the nationally televised, dramatic injury of Kevin Ware, a
University of Louisville basketball player, has “...inflamed the debate about the treatment and
care of unpaid college athletes who help generate hundreds of millions of dollars for their
universities”3