The End: The Dénouement of College Athletics

A dreary 2019 Senior Day in Blacksburg

What’s All This, Then?

Several of our regular commentors and many of our casual passersby have commented on something that sparked a reaction that has gone from giving pause, to actually coming to an understanding. College Sports are dead (at least as far as the more media popular sports – Football, Men’s Basketball, and now increasingly Women’s Basketball.) It’s time to examine the reality of the rapid change, the causes, and the probable fallout over the entire melt down.

Let us start by answering the begged question at hand. Why is this series called “The End: The Dénouement of College Athletics”? To start that answer, let’s check the definition of the fancy French word being used in the title when we could have just Called it The End of College Sports.

Dénouement DENOUEMENT Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com

Denouement or dé·noue·ment

[ dey-noo-mahn ]

noun

1. the final resolution of the intricacies of a plot, as of a drama or novel.

2. the place in the plot at which this (see 1) occurs.

The reason for the choice is the subtle difference in where we are in the process of “The End.” We aren’t quite there yet, but the plot of the story is rapidly being resolved and condensed out from all of the setup activities going on in the previous chapters. This is not to say that we are holding out hope for some sort of miracle change, reversal, or rescue, merely that the end is shaping up and has not occurred, yet.

The Origin

As with all current events coming to a critical ending, there was a beginning point and that origin might very well be earlier than many folks ever thought. A quick review is probably an important place to start because the pressure build-up on this implosion took quite a while to build up enough pressure to be dangerous, but the acceleration was stunning, and actually looked like some sort of good news.

The NCAA was Founded to Fix College Athletics

Following the major reforms of football rules in 1905, the National Collegiate Athletic Association was founded in 1906 as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association. The organization was built to respond to the first pulse of explosive growth in college athletics, which were basically club sports, and the competition was largely local and rail accessible regional events. Here is a quick hitter from Britannica.com on the subject if you want a reference for further digging. National Collegiate Athletic Association | Student-Athletes, Sports Programs, College Athletics | Britannica

The NCAA.org site also provides a decade-oriented timeline of major events. History – NCAA.org It is also important in this analysis to understand the overview and mission of the NCAA. Overview – NCAA.org And finally we get to the nub of the main issue which is the NCAA’s base financial declaration. Finances – NCAA.org It is a non-profit organization.

“As a nonprofit organization, the NCAA puts its money where its mission is: equipping student-athletes to succeed on the playing field, in the classroom and throughout life.”

Finally, we dig into the Division I Priorities statements page. Our Division I Priorities – NCAA.org

It’ is critical to note, that in no location, and if you dig further into each section of both the main NCAA.org or Division pages, do you see anything related to making profits. There are definitely financial mentions, but specific references are all about providing the student-athlete with funds for the attendance of the university in which they are enrolled.

The end result of all of this is that the seeds of the destruction of collegiate sports were sewn in the very beginning of the sport by the foundation of a governing organization and concept that has been honored more in the breach than in the execution of the mission.

The question is begged, then. Why is the establishment of the NCAA the beginning of the end of collegiate athletics when it was meant to save them? The problem comes from the dual headed monster that plagues all governing organizations, power, and money. In the case of the NCAA there was very little power and too much over insignificant things at the same time. The imbalance between the enough/too much equation was tinkered with over the first century or so of the organization’s existence. The problem is that the tinkering resulted in odd bureaucratic trivial rules being unevenly enforced, and often violated with impunity by high dollar blue blood organizations while the “little guys” where pecked to death with process violations.

Needless to say, the entire controversy over scholarships stems back to before the NCAA and is one of the reasons why the NCAA was founded 14 years after Amos Alonso Stagg brought the concept to the University of Chicago in 1892. The History of Sports Scholarships | Sapling

Once the trade-off of compensating student sports activities in trade for tuition, room, and board assistance became a regular feature of what had been club sports, the world changed, and the argument started.

Control Over Scholarships

The first major turn was oriented toward the accelerator of all things that corrupt, namely money. We’ll check in with, ironically, the SB Nation site “A Sea of Blue” from the University of Kentucky for this one. There are other sources but a head nod to a sister site isn’t a bad thing. NCAA Football: A Brief History of NCAA Football Scholarships – A Sea Of Blue

Title IX and the inclusion of women’s sports in the power/money equation introduced limits on the number of men’s sports scholarships available and removed the rich source of student compensation in the form of academic tuition, room, and board relief. The figure of 85 scholarships for Division I football programs condensed down by 1992, and that functionally changed nearly everything. Football is the King dollar maker of collegiate sports. More often than not, the money brought in from multiple sources, funds nearly all of the other programs on any Athletic Department’s books. Men’s basketball comes in at a distant second place.

The problem is that big time football programs usually have over 100 players on their rosters. Some programs have four season’s worth of full squads. Football teams are complex creatures with many not just head coaches, but assistant coaches, graduate assistants, advisors, coordinators, and analysts. Add to those costs, you get the immense burdens of facilities management, insurance, power/electrical, police, and security, you have a small town of people dependent on the football program because nearly every other sport is non-revenue producing and cannot cover those non-field related charges.

Funding all of that became an industry, a business, an economy, all when the organization running the show and the tax code were based on things being focused on the education of student-athletes, not profit or personal gain for the athlete beyond a college education.

Power and Money and More Money

So, we can peg 1992 as the conversion year, when the tax on football became burdensome to the process of operating a quality program. Basic economics dictates when scarcity occurs, prices go up for the available product. When they supply of currency increases while chasing fewer goods, the price goes up. The value of the commodity remains the same, but the oversupply of currency causes inflation. As any homeowner will attest, when you need the money, it has to come from somewhere – regardless of where. Cable television with hundreds of channels and giant media corporations funneling advertising cash provided the money. The regulatory environment changed as the courts and federal agencies began to intervene, and the pressure went from modest to crush depth in less than a generation.

We come to the core concept of the series. We can see the tide turned in 1992, even though it operated at a moderate ebb and flow as the NCAA gradually gained more power and influence throughout the 20^th century. The final decade would bring a technological revolution (Cable TV), a business model that changed the revenue flows from a relative trickle to a gusher for top end programs (Broadcast Rights), and then court/regulatory decisions (Transfer Portal, Name Image, and Likeness, and now unionization – employee status) that completely overturned the reason for collegiate athletics to exist.

The first article will be titled The End: Media Money, the Courts, and Fan Misperception will look at the major monetary and regulatory drivers of the accelerated implosion. Then we will address the warped and often delusional fan expectations and involvement, from individuals and booster clubs, that have always been troublesome but now have become powerful with the advent of social media.

The third article will be about the disconnect and incongruity between the original purpose of college sports, The End: The Old World is Gone and the New One is Confused. We’ll review the realities, conference realignments, social media, and the rapid switch of the student-athlete becoming professional. College sports was never intended to be a business. It is now. Fans have more access to influence and input than ever, and student-athletes are no longer just students they have to have accountants to run their businesses and pay their taxes. The reaction to, or lack thereof, has opened the door to issues for which the NCAA and Athletic Departments were never designed to deal.

The fourth article is still being formulated. It is provisionally titled The End of Legacies and will deal mostly with the current disintegrating structure. It will highlight the reality of the willingness of both coaches and players to walk away from legacies for short-term personal gain. We will address the mercenary nature of the top end of collegiate athletics and the eventual choking off of the concept of the amateur playing and coaching for school spirit and the love of the college game.

Stay with us. These aren’t small articles to build and require a fair bit of research to put together. It is an extremely important topic. As the series title states, we aren’t at the conclusion, we are in the dénouement of the final few chapters. We are just going to identify the plot pieces and how they got here, at “The End.”

GO HOKIES!!!