​For several decades in America, athletic programs in colleges and universities received financial support and resources primarily from their respective schools and such sources as alumni and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). More recently, however, college coaches assigned to athletic departments and the presidents and marketing or public relations officials of schools organize, initiate, and participate in fund-raising campaigns and thus obtain a portion of revenue for their sports programs from local, regional and national businesses, and from other private donors, groups, and organizations. Because of this inflow of assets and financial capital, intercollegiate athletic budgets and types of sports expanded and in turn, these programs became increasingly important, popular, and reputable as revenue and cost centers within American schools of higher education.​​

Many books have been written on the evils of commercialism in college sport, and the hypocrisy of payments to athletes from alumni and other sources outside the university. Almost no attention, however, has been given to the way that the National Collegiate Athletic Association has embraced professionalism through its athletic scholarship policy. Because of this gap in the historical record, the NCAA is often cast as an embattled defender of amateurism, rather than as the architect of a nationwide money-laundering scheme. Sack and Staurowsky show that the NCAA formally abandoned amateurism in the 1950s and passed rules in subsequent years that literally transformed scholarship athletes into university employees. In addition, by purposefully fashioning an amateur mythology to mask the reality of this employer-employee relationship, the NCAA has done a disservice to student-athletes and to higher education. A major subtheme is that women, such as those who created the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), opposed this hypocrisy, but lacked the power to sustain an alternative model. After tracing the evolution of college athletes into professional entertainers, and the harmful effects it has caused, the authors propose an alternative approach that places college sport on a firm educational foundation and defend the rights of both male and female college athletes. This is a provocative analysis for anyone interested in college sports in America and its subversion of traditional educational and amateur principles.

DIVA challenge to the present system of college athletics /div

Intercollegiate sports is an enterprise that annually grosses over $1 billion in income. Some schools may receive more than $20 million from athletic programs, perhaps as much as $10 million simply from the sale of football tickets. Drawing on nontechnical economic data, the authors present a persuasive case that the premier sports organization of colleges and universities in the United States--the NCAA--is a cartel, its members engaged in classically defined restrictive practices for the sole purpose of jointly maximizing their profits. This fresh perspective on the NCAA offers explanations of why illicit payments to athletes persist, why non-NCAA organizations have not flourished, and why members have readily agreed on certain suspect rules. Tracing the historical development of this institutional behavior, the authors argue that the major football powers in the early 1950s were able to gain control of the internal processes of NCAA enforcement. Over time--as other schools' teams improved and began to win on the playing field--the more powerful institutions applied pressure to bring the newcomers under NCAA investigation and, ultimately, to place them on probation. By carefully managing NCAA enforcement regulations, major schools blunted the threat to their continued growth presented by other teams. Offering a valuable case study for sports analysts and students of economics and cartel behavior, this book is a revealing glimpse inside the embattled NCAA.

Applying concepts, data, and other information from various sources in the literature when and where appropriate, the book reveals and examines the behavior, contribution, and impact of student athletes (SAs) on campuses of American colleges and universities. It highlights, in part, SAs' progress academically while they devoted time and resources to participate in one or more of their schools' individual and/or team sports in Division I, II, and/or III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and/or National Junior College Athletic Association.