Read an Excerpt
Changing the Playbook
How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports
By Howard P. Chudacoff UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09788-1
CHAPTER 1
Abolishing the Sanity Code and Launching the Modern College Sports Establishment
Harold C. "Curley" Byrd had a star-studded career in college football before becoming president of the University of Maryland in 1936. He excelled as an athlete while an undergraduate at Maryland. Then he made history in 1909 when, as a graduate student at Georgetown University, he became one of the first quarterbacks to master the forward pass. He subsequently served for two decades as Maryland's athletic director and football coach, winning 119 games and overseeing construction of a stadium that later was named after him. (Today, he shares the heading with a corporate sponsor; the place was renamed Capital One Field at Byrd Stadium in 2009.) As University of Maryland president — one of only a few former football coaches to be demoted to university president — Byrd raised substantial sums of money and expanded the campus. But not without dissent. Critics groused that many of his accomplishments, such as building a new basketball arena while keeping faculty salaries low (he once allegedly uttered, "Ph.D.'s are a dime a dozen") showed that he fancied athletics more than academics.
So it is no surprise that President Byrd staunchly defended his school's football program against meddling by the NCAA, whose Sanity Code of 1949 proposed to enforce the principle that college athletes were amateurs who played sports as an "avocation" and should not be differentiated from other students. Almost from its inception, the NCAA had canonized this ideal of amateurism. According to article VI(b) in the NCAA's 1916 bylaws, "an amateur is one who participates in competitive physical sports only for the pleasure, and the physical, mental, moral, and social benefits directly derived therefrom." Paying college expenses of students for their athletic ability, the NCAA feared, would make athletes professionals, attract individuals who had no interest in learning, and set apart athletes from the rest of the student body.
The Sanity Code was proposed to the NCAA membership in 1946 by reformers wishing to eliminate unsavory financial awards given to football players. It banned athletic scholarships and required college athletes in need to support themselves with jobs just as other students did. In 1948 a majority of NCAA members voted to accept this proposal, putting it into effect in 1949. Many colleges, however, eager to enhance their football prominence, saw the Sanity Code as a threat, and they sought to legitimize institutionally sponsored aid to athletes with no strings of need or academic merit attached. Curley Byrd assumed the role of spokesman for those who resented what they believed was an imposition conspired by Midwestern and Eastern schools whose gate receipts, wealthy benefactors, and statehouse allies provided sufficient income and jobs to make athletic scholarships unnecessary — he conveniently overlooked the practice at his and other schools whereby alumni surreptitiously funded athletes In a speech before the NCAA convention in January 1950, Byrd came to the defense of his neighbor, the University of Virginia, which at the time offered more than eighty football scholarships, from being expelled by the NCAA for defying the Sanity Code. Using as his foil Ohio State University, a member of the Big Ten Conference — in which athletic scholarships already had been banned — he asked convention delegates, "Does Ohio State want to vote for expulsion of Virginia when Ohio State has facilities (meaning resources) to take care of four or five times as many athletes as Virginia?" Adding a sarcastic reference to dubious state employment given to Buckeye football players in lieu of athletic subsidies, Byrd observed, "Ohio State has some rather unusual jobs"
A critical test of wills had been set in motion a year earlier when the NCAA compliance committee threatened twenty institutions with suspension because they had disregarded the Sanity Code and awarded athletic scholarships. Later, thirteen of the twenty regained good standing, but the remaining seven — University of Virginia, University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, Virginia Military Institute, The Citadel, Villanova, and Boston College — warned they would withdraw from the NCAA rather than comply. Amid the swirl of dissension, the NCAA scheduled a vote on expelling these Sinful Seven at the association's annual convention in 1950. A vote to expel needed approval from 136 members — a two-thirds majority — but only 111 voted in favor. The Sinful Seven prevailed, thereby making the Sanity Code unenforceable. All the NCAA could do in consequence was to declare the seven "not in good standing" Soon, other schools, mostly in southern states, ignored the Sanity Code and announced unrestricted subsidies to athletes. The funding of college students for their potential contribution to an institution's athletic endeavors rather than for their academic merit or financial need now had moved from under the table to the top. As long-time NCAA executive director Walter Byers later reflected, the decision to bury the Sanity Code marked what to him was "one of the three or four most important decisions in the history of intercollegiate sports" The era of modern intercollegiate athletics had begun.
Abolishing the Sanity Code
The Sanity Code arose at a time when college and university enrollments were burgeoning. Aided by the Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill) that helped fund tuition and living expenses, hundreds of thousands of World War II veterans were streaming into higher education, and, with a portion of them joining rosters of varsity teams, it was important in an environment of intense competition to regulate how athletes were recruited and rewarded. Perhaps more important, by the postwar years, there was a long history of scandal in college sports, during which football players, especially, received illicit payments, special academic advantages, and other favors. As some schools upped their rewards and inducements to athletes, others complained about violations of the amateur ideal, sometimes jealous that they could not do so themselves. Oklahoma State, for example, accused rival Oklahoma of keeping a secret $200,000 payroll for its athletes. The Sanity Code was intended to end these practices. Though it failed, it was accompanied by an important structural change in the NCAA. Before 1946, the NCAA was a loose organization and served chiefly as an advisory and rule-making body, providing members with information, regularizing playing rules, and sponsoring championships in various college sports. The association had no official means to investigate abuse of its principles or punish violators. Enforcement and sanctions were left to individual institutions and conferences. Alongside the Sanity Code, however, the NCAA Executive Committee created a Constitutional Compliance Committee with authority to interpret the association's constitution and determine whether "stated practices, actual or contemplated, are forbidden by, or are consistent with its provisions" It also created a fact-finding committee to investigate possible violations. For the first time, a nationwide system for regulating college sports was in place.
Moreover, in spite of the NCAA's failure to oust the Sinful Seven, the Sanity Code was still on the books; its prohibition on athletic scholarships remained lodged in Article III of the association's constitution. A survey in 1950 of 270 association members taken by Clarence Houston, president of Tufts University and chair of the Constitutional Compliance Committee, revealed three attitudes about the code: indifference, opposition, and approval. Institutions with small or nonexistent football programs and who offered no aid to athletes generally favored some kind of code but were otherwise on the fence. Schools with large football programs, however, scurried to redirect NCAA policy, either by compromising on some kind of acceptable code or erasing it completely. Generally, schools in the South, where athletic aid had been customary and sometimes substantial, wanted no restrictive code. They preferred institutional (self-regulation, known as "home rule") rather than NCAA control of subsidies and believed that money furnished to star football players by enthusiastic alumni and other fans represented a legitimate reality. The region's three major conferences, the Southern, Southeastern, and Southwestern, even considered abandoning the NCAA and forming their own association if they could not have their way — not the last time such a threat would arise. Third, conferences from the Midwest and West, chiefly the Big Ten and Pacific Coast Conferences, had previously outlawed athletic scholarships and backed some kind of associationwide restriction. Many schools in this group furnished work programs to athletes instead of direct subsidies, generous aid that President Houston's committee observed was "quite out of proportion to the importance of any athletic program." The exception in this category was Michigan State University, which had joined the Big Ten in 1949 and whose ambitious president, John A. Hannah, was using athletics to achieve national prominence for his school and had created the Spartan Foundation to tap alumni and business supporters for funds to finance athletic scholarships. Considerable discord separated these three groups, prompting Houston to remark that "we talk about individual integrity, yet individual institutions do not trust each other."
As delegates gathered for the 1951 NCAA annual convention in Dallas, several proposed changes to the Sanity Code were on the agenda, reflecting these three stances. One set of proposals would permit aid to needy athletes, renewable on the basis of academic progress. Southern schools backed an alternative measure to allow unrestricted aid, with amounts determined by the institution without consideration of financial need or academic merit. A third scheme would enable schools to choose between honoring the present code and following a liberalized one. Debate on these options was passionate. University of Kentucky's A. D. Kirwan, another president who had formerly been his university's football coach, spoke against limiting subsidies to tuition, declaring, "If it is not morally wrong to grant a student his institutional fees so that he might be able to go to college and play football, why should it be evil to give him three meals a day and a bed to sleep in so that he may remain in college?" Gordon Gray, president of the University of North Carolina — a lawyer and former secretary of the army who was schooled on regulations — broke ranks with fellow southerners and sided with those northern schools that supported some sort of NCAA oversight. Gray charged that "the very integrity of American education is in some way threatened by excesses in the matter of handling intercollegiate athletics."
Proponents of home rule, the third option, won the battle. Instead of regulating athletic aid, NCAA members opted for a hands-off policy. Convention delegates voted to abolish the Sanity Code by a vote of 130-60. A coalition of southern schools, who favored no or watered down restrictions on scholarships, were joined by a few eastern schools, who believed that purging the Sanity Code was the only way to keep the NCAA from dissolving. Delegates replaced the code with of a constitutional amendment stating that "control and responsibility for the conduct of intercollegiate athletics shall be exercised by the institution itself or, in the case of the institution having membership in a regional athletic conference, by such conference" The only vestige of the Sanity Code that survived was an agreement on a provision that NCAA member schools "cannot solicit athletes with the promise of financial aid — pay travel expenses of prospective students visiting campuses — or conduct a practice session or test for display of athletic abilities in any branch of sport" The vote marked a bitter defeat for the Pacific Coast and Big Ten conferences. Reacting to the Sanity Code's demise, the Big Ten commissioner snorted, "The southern schools want to finance players. Well, we have the money to whip them. It's a free for all" How prescient that term "free for all" would be.
A crossroads had been passed. Schools of the South and Southwest, eager to build victorious football programs, felt they could not accept the Sanity Code's restrictions on athletic subsidies. Would these and other institutions have seceded from the NCAA with resulting chaos in intercollegiate athletics if the Sanity Code had been preserved? Unlikely. Rising college enrollments and the mushrooming popularity of college sports after World War II, especially as television loomed as both an attention-getting and income-producing entity, made surrender of at least some of an institution's sports autonomy inevitable. Yes, violations of the Sanity Code still could have occurred. As Curley Byrd intimated, schools with strong connections to wealthy alumni and other boosters were subsidizing college costs of star athletes through phony summer and afterschool jobs. Still, if twenty-five members had changed their votes on expelling the Sinful Seven, the NCAA might have found ways to enforce the Sanity Code to the grudging satisfaction of its membership instead of abolishing it in 1951.
Moreover, a viable alternative to the NCAA's Sanity Code already existed. In 1945, presidents of eight schools that became known as the Ivy Group — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale — signed an agreement banning football scholarships at their institutions; in 1954; they extended that rule to all sports. Their intention was to ensure that athletes were academically representative of each institution's overall student body, a goal embodied in their declaration that "Athletes shall be admitted as students and awarded financial aid only on the basis of the same academic standards and economic need as are applied to all other students." Initially considered unworkable, the model has survived to the present and prevails among the 450 institutions in Division III of the NCAA. Needless to say, schools in Division I, where big-time, revenue-producing sports serve as public entertainment, have continued to support a much different version of athletics.
Purists Attempt Intervention
At the same time that the NCAA was embroiled in its fractious squabble over the Sanity Code, a startling scandal rocked college sports. New York City's Madison Square Garden, then the country's basketball mecca, stood at the center of a web of bribery and fraud. The dishonesty emerged from the point spread, the means by which bets may be placed on the number of points by which a team wins or loses, rather than on who might win the game. On January 17, 1951, authorities arrested two players from New York's Manhattan College basketball team, which played games at Madison Square Garden, and three professional gamblers and charged them with violating a state law making it a criminal offense to attempt to bribe a participant in any sporting event. The two players were accused of accepting several thousand dollars during the 1949–50 season to ensure that their team lost games by more than the point spread, thereby fixing or dumping games so that the gamblers could win by betting on the spread. (If Manhattan had won the games or lost by less than the point spread, gamblers would have lost their bets.) Then, in February and March 1951, five members of the national championship basketball team from City College of New York were arrested and charged with taking bribes and helping gamblers by intentionally manipulating point spreads in games at Madison Square Garden during the 1950–51 season.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Changing the Playbook by Howard P. Chudacoff. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
