Читать книгу Alternative Models of Sports Development in America. Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health онлайн

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The third and arguably the biggest challenge to college sports’ being an integral part of education was the growth of television and other media in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is difficult to fathom today that as recently as the mid-eighties one could only watch one college football game per weekend, or potentially another regional game, if lucky. If Ohio State was playing Michigan in football, one of the greatest rivalries in college sports history, it had to be selected by the NCAA for national TV coverage or it would not be available for the general public, unless, of course, you had a ticket to the game. The logic behind this was multipronged. There was a belief that television, despite the potential mass marketability, would dramatically affect the home-gate revenue of participants in a negative way. However, the potential for television revenue drove several schools, most notably the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia, to challenge the NCAA’s authority to control television broadcasts in a landmark legal case, NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which went all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1984.³ The NCAA lost in a 5–4 decision that forever altered the landscape of intercollegiate athletics and moved the collegiate system even further away from a primary focus on the academic mission in regard to athletes. The NCAA wanted desperately to control broadcasts and revenue, not just to protect the live gate, but also in an attempt to provide a level playing field among competitors. The fear was, if schools and conferences negotiated their own television and other media contracts, it would lead to a system of haves and have-nots, along with damaging the live gate. This could influence schools to have a “do whatever it takes” mentality to get star players and star teams on the field or court, in order to make more revenue via television and, by extension, corporate sponsorship rights (Byers 1995).⁴ While it can be argued that a system of haves and have-nots has existed anyway, since the beginning of college sports, it is true that this decision opened up unprecedented amounts of revenue for some schools in the more high-profile conferences. This in some ways forced smaller schools to overspend and overextend in a desperate attempt to keep up with the major institutions, often trumping educational priorities in the name of athletic success, or face the prospect of dropping out of Division I football altogether. Some, like Drake University, decided to downgrade to a lower, non-scholarship division; others to this day are trying to keep up in a race they cannot win.⁵