How Republicans Killed College Football

I’ve been thinking about writing an essay about how Republicans ruined college football for a while now. I keep seeing fans complain on social media about players getting paid, transfers, and the overall chaos in college sports over the last few years. Many of these folks (but certainly not all) lean conservative, which makes the disconnect between how and why college football has become so chaotic a bit ironic.

College football has been deeply conservative for decades. In 2017, I wrote an op-ed under the headline “College football gives conservatives their own safe space on campus."¹ Today that space no longer feels safe to most fans. It has been infiltrated by things like NIL (payments for using one’s Name, Image, and Likeness), Pay-for-Play, and the transfer portal. Many are very upset by the changes, the loss of nostalgia, and the instability of it all — and are willing to openly rant about it.

Among the arguments you hear are: players are no longer loyal, they don’t care about character development or education, they’re only in it for the payday, and they want to get paid before doing the hard work. It’s a nightmare for conservatives, who’ve longed viewed the sport as a central character building tool and demonstrative of America’s hearty stock (or in modern business parlance: human capital). As one coach said in the 1960s, “Athletics are the last stronghold of discipline on the campus.” Now, many feel it too is gone.

If you pay attention to sports, and follow the conversations in traditional media, podcasts, and social media, then you have likely heard just how triggered fans are these days. Like many conservatives, they are clamoring for the good ole days. They want to travel back in time. But unlike traditional conservatives, they are desperate for regulation. Their asking for new policies, for government involvement, is distinctly unconservative; antithetical to their “Big P” political and economic philosophies.

As a historian of college football and politics, I find the irony incredibly rich. These triggered fans, who feel out-of-sorts with the new status quo of college football, seem to forget how we got here. They’re oblivious to how their own embrace of a free-market, laissez-faire worldview over the last 50 years, including its emphasis on deregulation and reliance of 24-hour media to influence its base, has facilitated the very destruction of the game they love. They don’t recognize how years of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism undermined the sport, and how out-in-the-open big-money capitalism threatens its fundamental stability. And, of course, they’re also oblivious to how sport is a mirror of broader society, shinning back problems that impact all areas of American life.

Yes, that’s right; my argument is that conservative political, economic, and legal policies have killed college football. They have further hastened the sport’s “death” through their intentional and cruel exploitation of athletes within the sport. It is now an unstructured professional game, following the market’s invisible hand towards an unknown future. Conservative football fans have only themselves to blame.

I want to make clear, I am not arguing that liberals and leftists would have saved college football or kept the former system intact. Quite the contrary, they probably would have killed it earlier. Some even tried. Charles Eliot the early-twentieth century President of Harvard University questioned the game, and a few other schools temporarily banned the sport during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Theodore Roosevelt helped save football with a White House Conference in 1905, which sought to address the numerous deaths and injuries that year. The meeting led to the organization of what eventually became the NCAA. Still, college football was targeted by reformers. Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, shuttered the schools football programs in 1938.² This may not seem significant today, but back then Chicago was a prominent member of the Big Ten Conference, known more for its football team than its conservative economics department.

But this story begins — as do many of the narratives related to America’s recent decline — with the emergence of modern conservatism, which achieved political saliency in late-1960s and 1970s, and intensified its stranglehold during the Reagan era. While there were certainly many well-documented efforts to reform and fix the sport during the first half of the twentieth-century, including the famous Carnegie Report in 1929 and the NCAA’s transition from a discussion body to a regulatory bureaucracy in the early 1950s, the chaos of today is different.³ Beliefs that framed college athletics began to change reorienting the delicate balance between cooperation, competition, and public good as college football became increasingly conservative during the 1960s. Multiple factors account for these developments.

No story of modern American social, political and economic development is complete without considering the impact of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Yes, the desegregation of public schools, and undergraduate higher education soon thereafter, impacted every facet of American life. So too did the Cold War. The United States’ approach to both, however, changed during the 1970s and 1980s. American values changed too. College football was not immune. None of us are immune.

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I have told pieces of this story before. I published a book chapter in 2022 outlining how college football coaches and presidents politicized the game in order to support Cold War era physical fitness ideas and as a response to vocal New Left protesters.⁴ In an article I published in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, I documented how the anti-intellectual and authoritarian impulses of college football coaches impacted the cultural politics of this era.⁵ Race played a part in both of those development. For those of you have read this published work, my arguments here may seem familiar. I imagine, however, that few of you have had that chance because much of my formal academic writing is either paywalled or tucked away in obscure, niche volumes. I won’t repeat those pieces here nor will I include full citations or exhaustive examples, but redundancies are a certainty as I outline the contours of these narratives.

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Modern Conservatism achieved power with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. Since then, the New Deal Coalition has fallen a part and splintered into various groups, which we have come to describe as “identity politics.” The roots of modern conservatism are much deeper, of course. And, the impetus for the fractured New Deal Coalition (which held political consensus from 1932-1968) is tied to both its successes and failures as well as generational changes. White supremacy cannot be ignored as a significant factor as well.

The so-called “New Left” sought to push the New Deal Coalition further to the left. It protested issues along many of the “identity politics” categories as well as in favor of free speech and in opposition to the Vietnam War (and colonialism more broadly). They’ve been painted as militant and radical, labeled by journalists and historians with terms like Black Power and Red Power, or Counter Cultural. To be sure, some were less overtly political and more cultural, embracing a "personal is political” approach. But Civil Rights activists, feminists and LGBTQ advocates, and other student-movements formed the heart of the New Left. Their concern for issues of race, gender, sex, sexuality, free speech, peace, anti-capitalism, and so on meant that the New Deal Coalition lost a lot of support when it was slow to react or embrace New Left ideas. It is in part why Lyndon Johnson did not seek reelection in 1968, and why today Democrats are squeamish about championing policies even half as progressive as those during that era.

On the other end, you had the ascendance of modern conservatism. They had been working hard since the Great Depression to build traction, to find relevance, and rebrand themselves in ways that were not overtly racist or greedy. Hebert Hoover, the jilted Republican who lost the presidency to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, spent the rest of his life trying to poke holes in the New Deal and chart a new path for his party. William F. Buckley, Jr. tried to provide some intellectual legitimacy to their cause in the 1950s. Yet, during the early-1960s, the flailing Republican Party inched closer-and-closer to the, what was then considered radical, views of the John Birch Society, and nominated Barry Goldwater as their presidential candidate in 1964. He was a disaster, and lost in a landslide — the largest ever in U.S. history — causing many to pronounce the party dead. The New Left and Johnson created an opening for Nixon, however, giving the party new life in 1968.

Nixon campaigned on two central concepts. First, he wanted to be the candidate of the “Silent Majority.” Those who were not-dissatisfied with America. The people who were not out in the streets protesting or seeking to redefine the social, economic, racial, and gender dynamics of the country. He represented a simpler time in America, a throwback to the prosperous 1950s when he served as Vice President to Eisenhower.

Second, he called for a return of Law and Order. Nixon’s campaign was a repudiation of the New Left: the anti-war and free speech protestors starting fires on college campuses, feminists burning bras and asking for equal pay, African Americans demanding equal rights during urban uprisings in cities like Detroit, Newark, and Watts, and Native Americans requesting that their tribal sovereignty be restored and respected while occupying places like Alcatraz Island the Bureau of Indian Affairs Building in Washington, D.C. Many of these movements involved violence, large scale demonstrations that law enforcement officers declared “riots,” and confrontational approaches that made the “Silent Majority” uncomfortable. Nixon also wanted to curtail other progressive policies from the New Deal Coalition. Things like school busing, which helped desegregate schools and ensure equity, and the War on Poverty, which was begging to make in-roads as an important secondary pillar to Civil Rights protections.

College football followed these trends. Both parties embraced the sport during the early 1960s as John F. Kennedy championed physical fitness and tapped the country’s leading college football coach, Bud Wilkinson, to lead his President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Together they promoted physical education programs by designing workouts and curricula, and making media appearances on TV and in magazines. Wilkinson specifically connected the lessons learned in football with military service.

Others joined Wilkinson in his crusade to promote football as a central element of Cold War physical fitness and American toughness more broadly. The National Football Foundation (NFF), presidents, and coaches worked together on this project throughout the 1950s and 1960s, eventually framing football as a type of elixir to help solve the country’s ills. I explained these developments in my 2022 book chapter:

Chester LaRoche, chairman of the National Football Foundation’s board, further outlined the importance of the sport to America and why the foundation was necessary. “There is a crisis in our country’s affairs in which football spirit and training should play a part,” he said in 1956. Arguing that football developed the holistic type of fitness identified by the President’s Council for Youth Fitness, LaRoche continued: “Home and the church make their fundamental contributions. But football, too, is one of the principal organized training grounds of national spirit and morale.” Historian Kurt Kemper has further suggested that LaRoche equated critiques of football with threats to U.S. security and its future. He did little to hide his concerns or his politics, openly speculating that the University of Chicago had become “overloaded with beatniks, leftists, and undesirables” in the years after the school discontinued football. Through these activities and public statements, LaRoche and the NFF sought to politicize the sport and align it with Cold War values.

Following Kennedy’s death, Wilkinson and his coaching compadres turned further right. In fact, Wilkinson quit coaching and entered politics, running for U.S. Senate in 1964. He foolishly supported Goldwater and accepted a campaign endorsement from segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. Despite his notoriety, Wilkinson lost (by a mere 21,000 votes), but remained committed to helping “rebuild the 2-party system in Oklahoma,” which at that pointed voted 4-to-1 in favor of Democrats.

Although Wilkinson never again sought office, he continued to work behind the scenes. He was a part of the movement that sought to re-orient the United State’s political parties. As a member of the Nixon campaign in 1968, he played a key role in youth outreach and lent his celebrity to help raise money, including hosting a telethon. The Republican Party briefly considered making him their National Party Chair in 1969, but he opted to serve as a “special consultant” to the president instead.

Nixon’s electoral victory ushered in Modern Conservatism. By 1972, Oklahoma had largely abandoned the Democratic Party as had many other Southern states. Political operative Kevin Phillips explained how they were able to shift the “Solid South” from reliably Democratic to Republican in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. The text describes the divide and conquer strategy central to disrupting the New Deal Coalition and providing haven for racists and aggrieved Southerners and suburbanites.⁶ As Phillips explains, “given the immense midcentury impact of Negro enfranchisement and integration, reaction to this change almost inevitably had to result in political realignment.”

Football coaches were also a part of this reaction. As more teams recruited African American players during the 1960s, and protest movements gained momentum as the decade progressed, college football and athletic administrators sought ways to control them and reduce their benefits. I outlined this process in my Journal of Sport and Social Issues article on anti-intellectual coaches:

In January 1969, the NCAA voted to eliminate “laundry money” stipends and guaranteed four-year scholarships. As the New York Times explained, “The intent, according to many persons voting in the majority, is to put an end to financial assistance to students who protest.” The move to one-year scholarships represented a significant reorientation of power, allowing coaches to use their power to renew one’s scholarship as a means of intimidating athletes into compliance with their team rules. The coach emerged as an authoritarian figure to quell dissent, consolidating whiteness and anti-intellectualism in an effort to silence the increasing number of Black athletes on teams following desegregation. In fact, NCAA executive director Walters Byers admitted this purpose. “It is concerned principally with athletes who take flagrant disruptive actions,” he explained.

The so-called “disruptive actions” of athletes and students on campuses facilitated a shift as college football coaches forged their own kind of “Law and Order” politics on campus. The new rules enabled coaches to discipline their rosters with annual scholarship decisions, empowering a draconian “my way or the highway” authoritarian type of leadership. NCAA transfer restrictions made it worse. Dissatisfied players had to convince the very coaches they had issues with to release them from their scholarships before they could play elsewhere. Even after receiving permission, athletes had to sit out a year, and sometimes two if they wanted to transfer to a conference rival. Yet, coaches enjoyed freedom of movement, changing jobs without repercussions or limitations.

Of course, these changes affected all sports and all athletes. Conservatives had learned that colorblind policies helped them deflect accusations of racism and offered flexibility for selective application. Indeed a number of scholars have discussed the changing nature of racial discrimination in the post civil rights era. New racism, as it’s called, embraced sanitized, coded language that mimicked liberal inclusive values but served opposite ends. Moreover, it also reframed discrimination from explicitly racial or biological relations to instead focus on cultural differences. As C. Richard King explained, “the increasing visibility of people of color in the media, popular culture, and sport has proven fundamental to efforts to advance new racist formulations of racial progress,” denying the existence of persistent forms of institutionalized racism, and undermining attempts to address unintended racist outcomes. Indeed, the move to end school busing, attacks on affirmative action, and proponents of school vouchers all embraced new racist approaches. The consolidation of power by football coaches under the pretense of helping them enforce team rules and quell dissent followed new racist strategies.

Athletic administrators and coaches took inspiration from politicians. They saw how governors, like Ronald Reagan, responded to campus protestors, and listened to how they encouraged them to defend traditional values. For them, football taught subordination — that is loyalty, obedience, and following orders — which contrasted from the insubordination rampant among the New Left. My previously published work has provided a glimpse into this rhetoric:

California Governor and future President Ronald Reagan built his political career on responding to campus protestors and channeling the frustration of the “Silent Majority” to squash the dissent of the New Left. He deployed the National Guard several times to the Berkeley campus, including on “Bloody Thursday.” In a speech to the Northern California Chapter of the National Football Foundation in February 1970, he explained that football stood out as a bastion of sanity on campus against the mayhem that he described as “bully tactics of Hitlerism.” “By and large, men who make up our football teams have been conspicuously aloof from this new campus barbarism,” he told the crowd.

Somewhat ironically, Reagan celebrated the violence of football while decrying the militancy of free-speech protestors. “Football is the last thing we have where man can engage in nonfatal combat and do so by literally flinging his body against an opponent,” he explained, pushing back against calls to deemphasize football by American psychiatrists. Reagan valued the “clean hatred” of football because he thought it contributed to the United State’s strength. Violence and hatred were only acceptable when it could be controlled and productively channeled.⁷

It is important to note that the Cold War enlisted college football coaches, as what I call “Emissaries of Toughness,” in the 1950s and 1960s to close the “muscle gap” and ensure Americans were fit and able to respond, if needed, to the Soviet Union. Politicians valued college football not as public entertainment, but as a participatory activity and a form of public pedagogy. Football was a public utility for both culture and defense. In fact, the NCAA embraced this role as it worked to promote participation and ensure the solvency of not only big-time college football programs but also teams at small schools. It sought to protect the entire football infrastructure because it was the organization’s civic and patriotic duty.

This philosophy informed the NCAA’s approach and logic when it created its TV Plan for college football in the 1950s. It continued as the NCAA operated as a cartel, negotiating television contracts, limiting schedules, and redistributing money to its members. For most of the 1950s and 1960s, few members objected to the NCAA’s role. Those who did were quickly threatened and intimidated into compliance.

From 1971 to 1976, the NCAA won 29 out of 30 lawsuits brought against it. It felt invincible. The organization was aided by juris prudence. Prior to the 1975 Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar decision, educational institutions had enjoyed blanket immunity against antitrust suits. Goldfarb changed that, opening the NCAA to more challenges and uncertainty. Now, those who felt victimized by the NCAA’s intimidation had better prospects for legal recourse.

While athletes felt victimized, and would eventually challenge the NCAA, they were not the first to file suit aimed at weakening the association. Instead, greedy big-time football programs sought more power and more money, deepening the exploitation and victimization of players decades before their voices were finally heard. Big-time football programs systematically weakened the NCAA until it ultimately broke, contributing to the implosion of the entire college sport edifice. This process largely took place in the courts and required a new political and legal paradigm that buttressed an increasingly greedy and exploitative economic and cultural outlook.

The battle over television property rights took place under this new paradigm. One with both a weakened NCAA and with college leaders who no longer bought into its greater good arguments. California State University, Long Beach President Stephen Horn was one such figure. As historian Ronald A. Smith explained, unlike most college presidents, Horn took a keen interest in NCAA governance and relied on his experience in Republican politics to launch a crusade aimed a reforming the association. He wanted more money for smaller schools like his, and “accused representatives of a number of big-time conferences with ‘secretly planning a “super” division either within or without the framework of the NCAA.’” Horn advocated for a “share-the-wealth” approach. Although his views were unpopular, they elicited a reaction: the formation of the College Football Association (CFA), which looked suspiciously similar to a super division.

Horn’s meddling and concerns over TV money unleashed decades of pent up frustration. The big-time college football conferences (and independents) wanted to consolidate control and inoculate themselves from being outvoted by smaller schools. Officially, the CFA denied accusations that it was about money, but it was all about money.

The emergence of the College Football Association and the acrimony between big-time football programs and small colleges within the NCAA, signaled a shift in values. They no longer saw themselves as aligned for a greater public purpose to encourage Cold War physical fitness. Big-time programs did not see a need to continue subsidizing smaller programs. They no longer saw it as their responsibility. Instead, big-time programs began to look inward, focusing on their own finances and expanding their individual profits, especially as new expenses and regulations emanating from the passage of Title IX emerged in the late-1970s. Competition and greed ruled the day, not cooperation and public good.

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Conservative political and economic views were central in re-shaping American values and priorities during the 1970s and 1980s. These changing values shifted the paradigm when it came to notions of social responsibility and the role of government. The economist Milton Friedman became a leading voice during this era and won the Nobel Prize in 1976. He advised Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as well as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. An advocate of a laissez-faire economic approach, Friedman also had a libertarian bent.

As the historian James McElvaine has written, “The Depression’s impact on classical economics was so great that old-time economics remained in disfavor for most of the half century after 1929. There were always adherents of the old laissez-faire doctrine, and sometimes they even managed to make one of their sect the Republican presidential nominee. But until the 1970s there was something slightly disreputable, in an intellectual as well as a social context, about being and out-and-out laissez-faire advocate.” Friedman changed that. He restored the laissez-faire approach and gave it saliency in the 1970s.

In an influential 1970 New York Times article, he outlined his “Friedman Doctrine” and espoused his views on corporate responsibility. Friedman rejected notions of corporate personhood as a way of denying their social responsibility. His “Friedman Doctrine” asserted that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. With profit as the only goal, he proposed that CEOs be compensated with stock so that they were further incentivized to increase shareholder wealth and their own.

Corporations insulated CEOs from social responsibilities. Other concerns were ancillary to the mission of businesses and out of the scope of their professional duties. CEOs are not civil servants, he declared, and if they took action to create social change within their businesses it would be an undemocratic imposition on society. In short, Friedman gave corporations and CEOs an argument (albeit flawed) for pursuing profit over everything. Helping others, especially competitors, was not in their best interest.

Friedman did offer one caveat:

there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

This view, however, quickly came into direct conflict with his libertarian views. Friedman embraced deregulation, and never said businesses couldn’t lobby to rewrite the rules of the game. As an advisor to both Nixon and Reagan he sought to release society from government control becoming a proponent of school vouchers, social security privatization, a negative income tax for the poor, and constitutional limits on government spending. Deregulation meant more than ending these programs, of course. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the telecommunications, rail, trucking, financial, and airline industries were all deregulated. This meant less eyes on them and more opportunities for deception and fraud to take place as CEOs went to greater and greater lengths to increase profit.

The paradigm shift around social responsibility and the role of government involved changes in textbooks and curricula at the countries leading law schools and MBA programs, and was further accelerated by funding from conservative foundations and thinktanks. They “financed the summer ‘camps’ in law and economics… to which scores of judges, congressional aides, and law professors came in the 1970s and 1980s to retrain themselves in price theory and microeconomic analysis,” historian Daniel T. Rodgers explained. Attendees were given copies of Friedman’s influential book, Capitalism and Freedom, as parting gifts. Soon, Rodgers notes, “a new rhetoric of costs and efficiency was bearing down hard on antitrust judgements, liability law, and, most dramatically, regulatory policy — shaping them all on models of highly idealized markets.”

The changing political and economic culture of the 1970s shaped the legal climate. As Nixon, Reagan, and even Carter, began pushing for deregulation the legal community embraced Friedman’s market-based ideology. His notions of social responsibility also factored into this paradigm shift. These new views benefited NCAA members who sought to reshape the association and challenge its outdated TV Plan.

The formation of the CFA injected momentum in the movement to deregulate the NCAA and end its stranglehold on TV money. Armed with the Goldfarb decision as well as the new political, economic and legal climate ushered in by Modern Conservatives, schools like Oklahoma and Notre Dame, who only begrudgingly accepted the NCAA TV plan in the 1950s, had new standing to fight back.

To be sure, a handful of schools saw through the flimsy justification for the NCAA TV Plan from the very beginning. Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania (yes, the Ivy League member) were forced to give up their own lucrative TV contracts or be expelled from the association in 1950. Similarly, Oklahoma State Senator Miskovsky tried to pass legislation requiring all University of Oklahoma football games be televised. Nebraska and Ohio had similar proposed legislation. OU administrators intervened, buying off legislators with prime seats in their football stadium, ensuring the law did not pass and the school wasn’t kicked out of the NCAA. Still, Miskovsky and his peers rightly questioned why the university and the state did not own their television property rights, after all they were a product state budgets and taxes. They were a public good.

Twenty-five years later, Notre Dame and Oklahoma remained key players in the fight against the NCAA. The intricacies of this showdown are fascinating. Ronald A. Smith documents them in his book on the intersection of big-time college sport and media, Play by Play.⁸ Horn and the CFA set the process in motion, inspiring the NCAA to divide Division I into I-A and I-AA in the early 1980s (today they are called Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision respectively). The move confirmed Horn’s assumption that the larger schools wanted to create a “super conference” of sorts to protect their revenue. Division 1-A would have 92 members (today there are 134 FBS and 129 FCS members), requiring each to average an attendance of 17,000 fans per football game and a stadium capacity of at least 30,000. This consolidated power among the large schools as they sought to wrest control of football TV revenue from the NCAA.

The CFA asserted itself into the equation by positioning itself as a viable alternative — something like a collective bargaining association — to solicit better media contracts and force a confrontation with the NCAA. They built an organization that included executive director Chuck Neinas, a former commissioner of the Big Eight conference and assistant executive director of the NCAA, and legal counsel Philip Hochberg, who’d previously worked as a consultant to the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee investigating TV monopolies (including ABC and the NCAA). These insiders knew the ins-and-outs of big-time college sport and embraced the new economic and political culture. Hochberg “made a special point of reminding the CFA of the ‘growing awareness of property rights’ and citing litigation that supported ‘property rights theory,’” which was becoming more influential in the legal paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s.⁹

In 1981, the legal fight began. It centered on whether members had granted their property rights to the NCAA. The NCAA assumed they had based on their voluntarily membership in the organization. A fact they had previously used to intimidate colleges into compliance with their TV Plan. The CFA argued that the schools had not and were free to grant their property rights to them by signing a TV contract offer that they had negotiated. Indeed, the NCAA and CFA had competing contract offers as the legal case took shape.

The University of Oklahoma served as the lead plaintiff along with the University of Georgia. The CFA took interest in the case. Hockberg responded to critics, reminding CFA members, and OU in particular: “you are not troublemakers; you are not rabble-rousers; you are not insurgents trying to tear down the fabric of collegiate athletics… you are seeking to get your fair share.”¹⁰ Neinas and others accused the NCAA of dragging out the case in order to increasing legals fees as way to force their opponents to give up. It was strategy the NCAA had used before. OU and UGA remained steadfast, however. While the two schools split the costs, the CFA created a “TV Legal Fund” to help. Notre Dame, Penn State, and the Southeastern Conference (SEC) all contributed.

The case challenged the NCAA’s illegal price fixing and limitations on television broadcasts as a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. As it wound its way through the legal hierarchy, other organizations grew worried about the potential impact of a ruling against the NCAA. The American Council on Education (ACE), for example, worried that an antitrust ruling could disrupt collaborative educational activities that might have a commercial interest. During the legal fight, NCAA leadership considered petitioning Congress for antitrust exemption. The ACE made sure that they didn’t.

Finally, the Supreme Court ruled on Oklahoma v. NCAA in 1984. In a 7-2 decision, they sided with Oklahoma, Georgia, and CFA. Justice John Paul Stevens (a Ford appointee) wrote majority opinion. He was unconvinced by the NCAA’s justification for limited broadcasts. "The NCAA's argument that its television plan is necessary to protect live attendance is not based on a desire to maintain the integrity of college football as a distinct and attractive product, but rather on a fear that the product will not prove sufficiently attractive to draw live attendance when faced with competition from televised games,” he wrote. Stevens was not convinced by the Cold War logic that limited TV encourage attendance and participation.

Justices William Rehnquist and Byron White dissented. A John F. Kennedy appointment, White’s politics were hard to pin down. He disappointed liberals, voting against Miranda v. Arizona (1966) and Roe v. Wade (1972) and often focused more on the particulars of a case rather than broad legal philosophies. Unlike other Justices, he had a personal understanding of the NCAA’s mission. White, an All-American college football star at Colorado nicknamed the “Whizzer” during his playing days and a Rhodes Scholar, was sympathetic to the NCAA.

He believed in the Cold War public good argument for the NCAA TV plan. “Fundamentally, the plan fosters the goal of amateurism by spreading revenues among various schools and reducing the financial incentives toward professionalism,” he wrote. “It helps ensure the economic viability of athletic programs at a wide variety of schools with weaker football programs, and it promotes competitive football among many and varied amateur teams nationwide.” He argued that the NCAA’s “regulations represents a desirable and legitimate attempt to keep university athletics from becoming professionalized to the extent that profitmaking objectives would overshadow educational objectives.”

White saw the long-term ramifications of deregulation. He understood that ending the NCAA’s control of television would open the flood gates of money into college football, further exploit athletes by deemphasizing academics, and turn the game into a professionalized sport. While the college athletes were already exploited under the NCAA TV Plan, especially with its creation of the legal term “student-athlete” to avoid paying workers compensation and prevent them from being defined as employees, the scale of exploitation intensified. Money complicates everything.

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White’s insistence on amateurism as a key regulation to protect the educational nature of athletes was itself a flawed argument. As District Judge Claudia Wilken (a Clinton appointee) wrote in her ruling on the O’Bannon v. NCAA (2014) case, the “NCAA does not necessarily adhere to a single definition of amateurism.” They kept it malleable to whatever context they needed because amateurism served as the centrifugal concept for the NCAA’s profitmaking, the linchpin of its athlete exploitation. Amateurism, of course, was also an illegal restraint on trade.

Yet, while free-market and deregulatory impulses of the conservative political, economic, and legal climate movement built over the last half-century played a fundamental role in this change, it was also tied to notions of equity championed by the Left. Indeed, liberals used pro-capitalist and antitrust arguments to combat exploitation. They worked inside the new modern conservative paradigm to expose its hypocrisy; to poke holes in the concept of amateurism. Ultimately, the conservative economic, political, and legal framework led to the undoing of big-time college sports.

As authoritarian and anti-intellectual college football coaches seized power over big-time college sports during the 1970s and 1980s, subjecting athletes to draconian transfer rules, the instability of year-to-year scholarships, and grants-in-aid that did not equal cost of attendance, left-leaning labor and civil rights activists took notice. As noted above, these changing power dynamics came in response to desegregation and activist players demanding better treatment. Remedies to these demands were slow, and as revenue increased following the deregulation of the NCAA’s TV Plan in 1984, the salaries of coaches and athletic administrators skyrocketed intensifying athlete exploitation. Greed directly led to their downfall as multi-million dollar contracts, corporate sponsorships, and TV rights, which lined the pockets of coaches, administrators, and athletic departments, did not “trickle down” to the unpaid athletes.

Conventional arguments held that players received compensation in the form of athletic scholarships. After the 1970s, however, these grants-in-aid no longer covered the full cost of attendance. This meant many athletes had to pay expenses to attend college while the colleges made millions of dollars from their athletic performances. The cost of college skyrocketed during these years, however, helping the NCAA and its allies convince fans and critics that the value of educational compensation offset concerns over exploitation.

Changes in the cost of college were a direct result of conservative political and economic choices. Beginning in the 1970s, state legislatures began reducing funding for colleges and universities, shifting the expenses from taxpayers to students. When he was elected Governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan fought to end the longstanding policy of free-tuition at the state’s colleges and universities. Between 1975 and 2017, tuition and fees rose from $600 to $11,500 at the University of California. The motivations for this came as a part of the Silent Majority’s desire to quell New Left student movements, and so-called radical and insubordinate elements they believed were nurtured and encouraged on college campuses. The same elements they believed football and football coaches served as a defense against. In short, they were anti-intellectual.

The academic scandal in the athletic department at the University of North Carolina exposed academic scholarship as compensation for athletic performance as insufficient. Uncovered in 2010, the scandal revealed a series of fake classes created for athletes and coursework completed by tutors rather than students. The academic dishonesty resulted in North Carolina receiving sanctions from its accrediting agency, but no reprimand from the NCAA. In fact, the NCAA found no violations of its rules. The association went on to further state that it “did not assume a duty to ensure the quality of the education” athletes receive.

While on one hand the lack of regulation of educational quality by the NCAA makes sense given it is beyond the association’s purview, yet the lack of quality control undermined its insistence that educational benefits provided enough value to avoid monetarily compensating athletes. If players were to be paid through nearly-free education, but athletic departments facilitated academic dishonesty and created fake classes, then athletes were being cheated out of fair payment. Compensation with fake classes essentially meant that they were being paid with fake money. So while the NCAA went out of its way to ensure that they did not receive real money, they did nothing to ensure that they did not receive fake money.

Relying on the NCAA’s free-education logic, the North Carolina scandal was as much a financial scandal as it was an academic scandal. It confirmed White’s biggest fears about TV deregulation and the prioritization of profit over education. It proved that the structure of big-time college athletics had lost its way, and athletes received the brunt of the harm.

Former athletes had long recognized this. It took them longer, however, to organized a collective defense. They also needed a legal strategy. While conservatives have largely embraced a free-market ideology and deregulatory practices, they’ve been less kind to labor.¹¹ Although sports unions have been among the strongest over the last 50-years, organized labor peaked in the 1950s. The NCAA had long tried to prevent athletes from being classified as employees, and unionizing.

The classification of athletes as employees scared the NCAA because the association is considered a co-employer with member institutions due to its oversight of compensation and eligibility rules. During the 1950s, the NCAA invented the legal phrase “student-athlete” to avoid paying workers compensation and covering other liabilities. Back then, it knew considering athletes at employees would be costly — even without the possibility of unionization. Amateurism was their ticket out.

Today, the landscape has changed. Wilken’s ruling in O’Bannon v. NCAA (2014) paved the way for current and former athletes to receive payment for their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). Joined by Alston v. NCAA (2021) they allowed athletes to receive compensation beyond full-scholarships for their academic-related purposes. The Alston case reversed the decision by the NCAA and coaches to end so-called “laundry money” payments in 1969.

Both cases relied on antitrust arguments, further attacking the NCAA for creating illegal restraints on trade. This time, using logic similar to television property rights employed by the CFA in the 1980s, they argued in favor of the rights of athletes. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge wrote, “The treatment of Student-Athletes is not the result of free market competition. To the contrary, it is the result of a cartel of buyers acting in concert to artificially depress the price that sellers could otherwise receive for their services. Our antitrust laws were originally meant to prohibit exactly this sort of distortion." Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (a Trump appointee) added, “The NCAA is not above the law.” He recognized that the NCAA had long been “suppressing the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges every year.”

Another significant blow to the NCAA came via House v. NCAA. The class-action lawsuit brought by former college athletes sought to force the NCAA to not only pay damages for past restrictions on NIL opportunities but distribute and share revenue from broadcast rights. In short, it affirmed the O’Bannon and Alston cases, and now forced the NCAA and college athletic conferences to share broadcast revenue with athletes. Details of the settlement for the House case are still being ironed out, but it has essentially rendered big-time college sports as professional.

Yet, athletes are still not officially recognized as employees and are largely ineligible to unionize. Johnson v. NCAA is the latest legal battle where athletes are seeking legal recognition as employees. While it is far from settled, early indications suggest athletes have a strong chance at winning. It is unclear, however, if all athletes will receive equal treatment since the labor of athletes in “big-time” sports earns more than those on other teams. The unstable political nature of Nation Labor Relations Boards has further limited attempts by athletes to unionize. In recent years Northwestern football players failed while Dartmouth basketball players succeeded. Public institutions fall under a different set of regulations, making it even more challenging for athletes at these schools. Yet, athletes continue to fight.

As one might expect, the NCAA has been skittish in creating new regulations. The quick succession of lawsuits — and decisions against the NCAA and its member schools — has dramatically limited its powers. Indeed, just last year the NCAA settled another lawsuit ending all transfer restrictions, allowing the free movement of athletes. The GoldFarb and Oklahoma decisions were pivotal turning points, harnessing the Friedman inspired conservative legal turn towards “free market,” deregulation-oriented legal interpretations. They’ve effectively killed the NCAA and amateurism in big-time college football.

In his desperate defense of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, the association’s president and former Republican Governor of Massachusetts, said “If you convert all of college sports into employment, there is simply no doubt, based on math, that you will lose an enormous number of student-athlete opportunities.” He cited Title IX, which big-time college football coaches vehemently opposed and lobbied to have football exempt from during the 1970s, as well as small colleges. Baker has renewed calls for an antitrust exemption and sought a return to the protectionist nature of the 1950s and 1960s.

As Dr. Karen Weaver, a scholar of college sport and higher education, wrote in Forbes: “If college sports are fundamentally changed by athlete employment, or the revenues the association counts on to pay for all 88 post season tournaments are slashed, what then?” Weaver explained that some small private colleges and regional state universities “have 35-50% of their entire undergraduate population playing NCAA sports.” Baker and Weaver suggest that the re-classification of athletes as employees, the burden to pay them, or worse, the elimination of athletic opportunities, could devastate these institutions. Indeed, a disturbing trend in recent years has been the reliance on athletics by small colleges to attract and maintain enrollment.¹² There is a real fear that The Death of College Football and the End of Amateurism, could sink higher education, ultimately delivering a long-range win to the conservative forces of anti-intellectualism.

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We’ve witnessed the collective impact of these developments during the last few college football seasons. It’s drawn the ire of fans, who largely identify as political conservatives and vote for candidates that support free-market philosophies and deregulation. As I have shown in this essay, the polices associated with the political views of many fans have worked to “destroy” (using their rhetoric) they very sport that they love.

The recent decline, or rapid pace of change, in college football is most directly the result of the deregulation of the NCAA’s TV Plan, which served as a cartel controlling media dollars and limiting broadcasts. It came about due to Oklahoma v. NCAA. The case was decided under Reagan in 1984, reflecting his approach to business and economics. It was, of course, aided by the advent and rise of Cable Television.

Football deregulation meant teams or conferences now bore the responsibility (or perhaps freedom) to negotiate their own media rights deals. Under the old NCAA TV plan, not every game was on TV. You had regional coverage and a couple of national games of the week, but you couldn’t see every school every week. In fact, when the TV plan was first implemented, they tried to limit TV appearances to preserve game attendance. Sanctions from NCAA probation often included TV bans. Under the plan, the NCAA kept most of the money.

Deregulation created a Wild West. Schools could now be on TV every week if they found media partners willing to broadcast them. Big brands like Notre Dame negotiated their own individual deal (which allows them to keep the $20 million playoff payment without sharing it). Many long time independents opted to join conferences instead, helping them to collectively bargain. Penn State joined the Big 10 while Miami and Florida State joined the ACC, for example. Then, conferences consolidated to form larger negotiating blocks. The Big 12 formed in 1997 out of the Southwest Conference and Big 8. After another decade, realignment chaos touched nearly ever region. The ultimate result was the loss of regional rivalries, and even the death of the old Pacific Coast Conference (or PAC10/PAC12) this past off season, transforming big-time college football from a sport dominated by seven major conferences in the 1970s to four today.

Regionalism gave way to national branding and super conferences with coast-to-coast media appeal. Schools gained access to a lot of money and a lot more exposure. It transformed what was then a regional game into a national game, and opened up new revenue opportunities. It opened the door to endorsements (e.g. to become Nike or Adidas schools and put All-State “Safe Hands” nets behind their goalposts) because more media exposure created yet more value.

ESPN, which started in 1979 and needed content to fill its air waves, played a pivotal role. Today, FOX and ESPN own the media rights to nearly ever Power 4 conference. ESPN owns the rights for the College Football Playoff, and reportedly was the lone bidder. CBS and TNT own the NCAA Basketball Men’s Tournament while ESPN owns the rights to the women’s. These networks provide the cash at the center of the athletics “Arm’s Race.”

The “Arm’s Race” started because of this money and the increasing difficulty to compete. First, they started improving stadiums and training facilities. Then came luxurious locker rooms, newer turf fields, and fancy jerseys (with new color combinations) thanks to corporate sponsorship deals that harnessed expanded TV exposure. Coach’s and athletic director’s salaries came next. Former San Francisco 49ers coach, Bill Walsh became the highest paid coach in the early 1990s making a then unprecedented $500,000 salary. Today, top coaches make in excess of $10 million annually, with some top assistants earning over $1 million each. This spending allowed athletic departments to fake poverty, claiming they did not make money and thus could not pay players for their labor. Indeed, today fewer than 10 athletic departments report a profit, instead choosing to spend their revenue on bloated salaries and projects rather than share the spoils with players.

Ballooning salaries and fancier facilities intensified recruiting battles. Up and coming programs clamoring for attention raised money, scheduled games on Thursdays and Fridays to monopolized the spotlight, and sought membership among the coveted top-earning power conferences. Between 1998 and 2007 spending on college sports grew 3 times faster than on academics.

The race for more and more media money also meant expanding schedules. Teams went from playing 10, perhaps 11, games per seasons to 12 or more. Newly introduced conference championship games and a bowl games add more money to the equation and further lengthened the schedule, demanding more labor and putting athletes at greater risk for injury. Today football season starts in late-August, a month earlier than it did during the 1950s. The number of bowl games has also grown. Now more than 30 per postseason, bowls games are contested, which helps fill conference coffers and increase member distributions.

As you can see, the sport has dramatically changed over the last 50 years. It has modernized, nationalized, and capitalized. It became more competitive and cut throat, and more expensive to compete. National recruiting, thanks to this new media exposure, has made it harder to compete with top-tier brands. The pressure to win means intense bidding wars for coaches, requiring higher salaries and buyout clauses.

Players, of course, watched this happen in real-time. They saw their coach’s paychecks get bigger, and stadiums and locker rooms expand. They saw athletic departments cash-in by selling their jerseys, licensing their images to video games, and requiring them to make appearances. They also saw the emphasis on football take away more and more time from their studies, especially as the number of games and the amount of travel increased. They witnessed the NCAA declare that it does not regulate academics, so although they were only compensated by education — its quality, the options of degree programs and freedom of class scheduling — was not protected or even ensured. Their valuable educational benefits became less than promised. At the same time that their educational opportunities were infringed upon, schools and fans overinflated its value due to skyrocketing tuition. Since the 1970s tuition and fees across the country have risen astronomically, and not because the value of college has increased or its impact on future earnings improved, but instead because state legislators have diverted funding away from institutions of higher education. Education was over valued and devalued at the same time.

Because of these choices athletes began to see their exploitation more clearly than ever before. They wanted a piece of the pie, they wanted full cost of attendance plus some. They wanted to own their Names, Images, and Likenesses, and get paid for it rather than laboring away in amateur indentured servitude. They also wanted to get paid for creating the game that the media pays to broadcast, and who’s writers, talking heads, and shock-jocks make a living discussing. Finally, they wanted the freedom to go wherever they want, to transfer to better situations. If coaches can, if students can, why not athletes?

So they fought for their rights. They fought for the free market. They battled for the ability to capitalize on the demand for their talent. They fought against illegal restraints on the market, which prevented them from moving to better situations and profiting from their labor, prevented them from accessing the value that they created. And, they won! If someone is willing to sign them, to recruit them, and to pay them, then they now have the ability to take it. That’s the free market baby!

The Conservative Republican love affair with de-regulated free market ideas created the political and legal climate that allowed them to win, that reshaped college sports. It was aided by the authoritarian and greedy approach to player management by coaches and administrators who pursued conservative cultural practices. It came about because leaders in intercollegiate athletics created an environment of exploitation by implementing too many regulations — the very problem most political and economic conservative rail against. Of course, their actions were fueled by their desire to control and punish Black and outspoken dissenting athletes — a form of censorship that they also similarly admonish. The harsh conditions emerged as coaches and administrations were becoming fabulously wealthy, further driving a wedge in between what we might describe as labor and management. The clear hypocrisy and exploitation — and obvious anti-capitalist restraint of trade — heightened by the revenue of 24-hour sports networks, eventually destroyed the system. Byron White was right. Republicans killed College Football.

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The larger impact of this fifty-plus year history of the political, economic, legal and cultural trends in college football are many. Broader America has not been immune to these developments either. The chaos of college football has shone a light on the challenges of a deregulated, laissez-faire approach to the economy — a lesson we learned in 1929 and actively tried to avoid repeating until the 1970s. Now we must relearn that lesson. We must also rethink our social responsibilities and how they might help us find a balance among cooperation, competition, and public goods within what remains of our institutions.

In an era where we may be tempted to fuck around and find out, to sell off public goods to private enterprise, to embrace maverick outsiders and insurgent populists, this history forces us to take a long range view. We have to consider the consequences of greed, of selfishness and private interests, of anti-intellectualism, and authoritarianism. Who wins in the short term? What does it cost in the long run? What does remediation and equity look like in the end? Is it even possible to rebuild order and restore institutions without first destroying them? Is it worth it?

The answers to these questions are unclear in the realm of big-time college sport. They become even more challenging when we follow their tentacles into the other levels of intercollegiate athletics and higher education. No one is immune to their reverberations. They’re also unclear in broader America as inequality continues to increase, discrimination persists, and voters turn to authoritarian, anti-intellectual approaches peddled to them by 24-hour cable networks. We have to wrestle with the pain of so-called “creative destruction” that we are told is necessary for innovation with the free-market, trusting that maybe we’ll eventually find something better in this new paradigm. And, if we don’t, we’ll have to live with the regret of selling out, of sacrificing our values, of abandoning our institutions, of blindly trusting, of not heeding warnings, and of destroying something we once loved.

College football is dead. America will never be the same. Now what?

1. Andrew McGregor, “College football gives conservatives their own safe space on campus,” Made By History Blog, Washington Post, 1 September 2017.

2. The University of Chicago resumed playing football during the 1960s, and has been a member of NCAA Division III since 1973. For a full accounting of this history see: Robin Lester, Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

3. See, Ronald A. Smith, Pay For Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

4. Andrew McGregor, “Emissaries of Toughness: How Coaches Teamed with U.S. Presidents to Politicize College Football during the Cold War” in: Sports and the American Presidency: From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, eds. Adam Burns and Rivers Gambrell, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

5. Andrew McGregor, “The Anti-Intellectual Coach: The Cultural Politics of College Football Coaching from the New Left to the Present.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 48(6), 379-399. https://doi.org/10.1177/01937235221098915

6. Astra Taylor’s recent essay revisiting Kevin Phillips’ book provides a lucid reflection on this for our current era. Astra Taylor, “Divided and Conquered: In search of a Democratic Majority,” The Baffler 75 (September 2024). https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/divided-and-conquered-taylor

7. In this context, Reagan is talking about football, but one could easily see how this view shaped events like those on January 6, 2020.

8. Ronald A. Smith, Play-By-Play: Radio Television, and Big-Time College Sport, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

9. Smith, Play-By-Play, 157.

10. Quoted in Smith, Play-By-Play, 160.

11. The assault on organized labor began in the 1940s, when Republicans passed the Taft-Hartley Act. The law passed despite President Truman’s veto, in 1947. It weakened labor unions, and inspired a legion of so-called “right to work” laws. In recent years, there’s been a renewed interest in these policies with several states passing new laws, which are anti-union and actually work to depress worker wages.

12. This fall I received and email from the Chronicle of Higher Education about its new report “Using Athletics to Bolster Enrollment.” The report, which was for sale, promised to share “how small colleges have used athletics to counteract unfavorable enrollment trends.”