JRN 589 - NCAA The Sanity Code

Here is the presentation that accompanied the lecture on the NCAA Sanity Code and the Invention of the Student-Athlete.

1. Amateurs No More JRN 589 / 450 NCAA Sanity Code & The Invention of the “Student-Athlete” Prof. Hanley

2. NCAA Sanity Code American College Athletics by Howard J. Savage did not lead to any substantial changes in college sports and its American model of amateurism, in part because press reaction to it was mixed. In short, there was little public outrage at the findings of the three-year probe.

3. NCAA Sanity Code The press in the South widely criticized the report. The AP referenced an Atlanta Constitution column that “suggested that the Carnegie Foundation next could be expected to send an expedition to the North Pole and report that there is no Santa Claus.”

4. NCAA Sanity Code AP sports editor Alan Gould wrote that “Whether they are subsidized, or unsubsidized, major college teams will stage the October gridiron climax before the greatest crowds so far this season.”

5. NCAA Sanity Code “Colleges,” wrote scholars John Carvalho and Daisa Baker in a 2019 study of press reaction to the Carnegie Report, “would continue to feed society’s growing hunger for sporting events and the sports media that presented them.”

6. NCAA Sanity Code Still, the instinct to reform college sports, particularly football, persisted among college presidents who wanted to draw a bright line between amateurism and professionalism.

7. NCAA Sanity Code In December 1934, the created the Eligibility Committee and adopted a code for recruiting and subsidizing athletes even though it lacked enforcement power. Ten months later, NCAA secretary Frank Nicolson proposed national oversight over subsidizing and recruiting athletes. He offered the proposal to the National Association of State Universities.

8. NCAA Sanity Code In 1936, University of North Carolina president Frank Graham announced a plan for reform based in part on the Carnegie Report’s findings.

9. NCAA Sanity Code Graham had been influenced by Abraham Flexner, who wrote an influential book comparing American, German and English universities. “Flexner criticized American universities for many things, including athletics,” wrote scholar Ronald Smith in his book Pay for Play .

10. NCAA Sanity Code Flexner, Smith wrote, “complained that no university in America ‘has the courage to place athletics where everyone perfectly well knows they belong.’”

11. NCAA Sanity Code Graham presented his committee’s reform agenda to the National Association of State Universities. The plan proposed ending financial aid to athletes based only their athletic ability, making freshmen ineligible for play, a ban on recruiting by staff, and no postseason contests., among other points.

12. NCAA Sanity Code The Graham Plan was adopted by the National Association of State Universities in November 1935.

13. NCAA Sanity Code Opposition to its implementation, however, was fierce from North Carolina students and alumni, who had no issue with giving athletes preferential treatment.

14. NCAA Sanity Code “Carolina will be unable to compete with any of the teams that would bring from the public widespread interest and bring to the University an athletic reputation,” a cotton entrepreneur wrote Graham, “which is a tremendous force in our national life.”

15. NCAA Sanity Code In his study, Smith wrote that Graham asked the Carnegie Report author Savage to support his plan. Savage replied that the proposed regulations “cut too deeply into entrenched practices to be adopted.” The Carnegie Foundation anyway had decided to discontinue athletic studies, Savage wrote.

16. NCAA Sanity Code The Southern Conference - North Carolina, North Carolina State, Clemson, Duke, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, the Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Tech, and Washington and Lee – narrowly approved the plan, 6-4.

17. NCAA Sanity Code That vote occurred as the Southeastern Conference - Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Louisiana State, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Sewanee, Tennessee, Tulane, and Vanderbilt – voted to allow financial aid to athletes not to exceed expenses, becoming the first conference to do so.

18. NCAA Sanity Code The SEC, according to Smith, “believed that its action was an important reform in that aid to athletes would now be open” rather than take place under the table. The SEC scholarships and alumni pressure doomed the Graham Plan, which the Southern Conference abolished in 1938.

19. NCAA Sanity Code The Graham Plan “stands out as a beacon of athletic reform efforts in the 1930s. It attempted to do what a few individual presidents had attempted in the period following the Carnegie Report on American College Athletics in 1929 and what no other conference was willing to take up in that decade,” wrote Smith.

20. NCAA Sanity Code Meanwhile, one of the great college football powers of the 20 th century, the University of Chicago of The Big Ten, abolished the football team in December 1939. That left students to play only intramural football – as Henry Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation wanted all of colleges to do.

21. NCAA Sanity Code In 1946, the NCAA sponsored the Conference of Conferences of twenty conferences to create principles for college sports, including the payment of athletes to attend college and the control of recruiting.

22. NCAA Sanity Code The Conference of Conferences issues its principles in January 1947 to cover amateurism, recruiting and other elements of college sports.

23. NCAA Sanity Code On Jan. 10, 1948, during its annual convention, the NCAA passed the Sanity Code, its first regulatory action. The code required athletes to be admitted to college on the same basis as other students, but it allowed scholarships to cover tuition and fees as the SEC had permitted a decade earlier.

24. NCAA Sanity Code In the Sanity Code, the NCAA published its “Principles of Amateurism” that stated “any college athlete who takes or is promised pay in any form for participation in athletics does not meet this definition of an amateur” even though athletes would be permitted to receive scholarships.

25. NCAA Sanity Code “For the first time and in a nearly unanimous vote, the NCAA was given the power to enforce an amateur code, but it allowed payment of athletes, through tuition and incidental fees, in direct violation of the concept of amateurism,” wrote Smith in Pay for Play .

26. NCAA Sanity Code Before the NCAA approved the Sanity Code, the president of baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, called out colleges at the meeting for their hypocrisy after the American College Baseball Coaches Association demanded that the NCAA protect its players from professional scouts seeking to sign them.

27. NCAA Sanity Code “If you don’t make your men professionals, we won’t either,” Rickey told the convention. “Your position,” he said, “would be stronger if your own house was in order. If the man is, by the definition we have accepted, not an amateur, then you are not entitled to play him, and particularly so since you made him a de facto professional.”

28. NCAA Sanity Code Rickey added that baseball wouldn’t try to sign amateur players if they were “bona fide college players,” meaning players who aren’t getting subsidized in some way. “If you will stay out of the professional field, we will stay out of the college field,” he said. And Rickey claimed he had the receipts to prove the point.

29. NCAA Sanity Code “There isn’t a professional club which does not have written evidence, and in quantity, that many colleges have induced boys to enter. Such men are just as much ‘professional’ in our opinion as if they were on our payrolls,” said Rickey, as quoted in The New York Times. “Surely, it is not part of the educational process to create or permit hypocrisy.”

30. NCAA Sanity Code Rickey said unlike professional football, college baseball did not serve as a minor league for baseball. “Pro football has toed the mark for you,” he said about pro teams not signing college players while still students. “But that is not a generous or considerable action. Pro football knows that its minor leagues, its feeders, are the colleges. Baseball is different.”

31. NCAA Sanity Code In calling out the hypocrisy colleges tried to hide regarding baseball players, Rickey located the fundamental problem of carving out a suitable definition of amateurism in line with the reality of big-time, big-money college sports when trying to promote the British model in an American commercial concept.

32. NCAA Sanity Code Amateurism, Smith noted in his book, was “an outdated and nonegalitarian concept, despite being nearly universally accepted. Historically, no society had ever had a concept of amateurism in sport, certainly not the ancient Greeks, until it was invented by the upper-class British in the nineteenth century.”

33. NCAA Sanity Code Colleges also had another tactical reason for sticking to the outmoded definition. By claiming its athletes to be amateurs, colleges avoided state and federal taxes and workers’ compensation payments to injured players.

34. NCAA Sanity Code The Sanity Code faced problems soon after ratification. The Southern, Southeastern, and Southwest Conferences concluded in May 1949 that the code did not work for them. Financial aid should tuition and fees, as permitted by the NCAA, but also room, board, books, and laundry expenses, as Smith pointed out.

35. NCAA Sanity Code In 1950, the NCAA enforcement department sought to show its muscle by bringing banishment cases against seven schools – Boston College, Maryland, Virginia, The Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Tech, and Villanova – for violating the code.

36. NCAA Sanity Code NCAA rules required a two-thirds convention vote to ban the schools, but it failed in that attempt even though a majority voted in favor of it, 111-93. The Sanity Code, unenforceable as the vote revealed, was dead.

37. NCAA Sanity Code According to Smith, University of North Carolina President Gordon Gray said: “Every institution had to make one of two decisions: admit that they were in noncompliance and withdraw from the NCAA or be hypocritical and remain.” They remained.

38. NCAA Sanity Code And then came a man named Walter Byers, who in 1951 became the NCAA’s first full-time employee as its executive director at the age of 29.

39. NCAA Sanity Code Byers first had to survive the 1954 withdrawal (effective in 1956) of the schools that had launched college athletics and its amateur code: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Brown and Penn. They would form the Ivy League and ban freshmen from varsity play, allow only three years of eligibility, eliminate scholarships and require progress toward a degree.

40. NCAA Sanity Code A year later in 1955, Byers faced a more existential threat to college sports.

41. NCAA Sanity Code Ray Dennison was an Army veteran and father of three who played for the Fort Lewis A&M (now Fort Lewis College) football team. In September 1955, he tackled a kick returner, but his head hit the returner’s knee, fracturing his skull. He died within two days.

42. NCAA Sanity Code His widow, Billie Dennison, sued the school for workers’ comp benefits because her husband had been on scholarship.

43. NCAA Sanity Code If Billie Dennison won the case, it would lead to a collapse of college athletics, as it would be impossible for most schools to afford workers’ compensation insurance and claims.

44. NCAA Sanity Code This was not the first workers’ compensation case filed by a football player or his family. In 1950, University of Denver football player Ernest Nemeth filed a workers’ comp claim, following a spring practice injury. He contended the university hired him to play football.

45. NCAA Sanity Code Nemeth won the case, which was upheld in 1953 by the Colorado Supreme Court. T he court determined that because Nemeth’s on-campus job was linked to his ability to maintain a roster spot on the team, he was an employee.

46. NCAA Sanity Code After the Nemeth case, Byers and the NCAA legal team required schools to reference players as "student-athletes ” an d add a pledge of amateurism with every scholarship letter. That became the standard defense in compensation claims such as that filed by Dennison’s family.

47. NCAA Sanity Code The plan worked. Billie Dennison lost the lawsuit. But in a speech delivered after the publication of his memoir in 1995, Byers said this:

48. NCAA Sanity Code "Each generation of young persons come along and all they ask is, 'Coach, give me a chance, I can do it.' And it's a disservice to these young people that the management of intercollegiate athletics stays in place committed to an outmoded code of amateurism.”

49. NCAA Sanity Code It would take another generation of legal action by college athletes, however, to rid the nation of the British model of amateurism that had remained in the public discourse. An expression that Byers developed as a legal ploy to get around a lawsuit persisted to keep hypocrisy alive.