Ncaa And College Sports Case Study

3) a) The NCAA, led by Walter Byers, created the cultural understanding that college sports is a commercial consumption and that colleges can benefit financially from having top performing athletes. He did this by implementing regulations in order to segregate professional sports from amateur sports. In addition, while the colleges had athletic programs that generated revenue, the rules assisted with limiting the cost of having athletes on the team, thus increasing profit. The rules that are set by the NCAA are meant to preserve and reproduce the socially constructed notions of what it means to be a student athlete and what it means to be a professional athlete. For instance, a TCU football player that was paralyzed was not initially able to receive any sort of medical help from the university because he was not considered to be a university employee. As a result of not being considered professional, and despite having the game televised (which made money off of television rights) and shown to the public, he was not entitled to have the same benefits as a regular employee would. If he were to receive such treatment, it would be considered as receiving improper benefits, and …show more content…
The very turning point into which the NCAA’s legitimacy was recognized and enforced was when the point-shaving scandal at the University of Kentucky occurred. When this occurred, the NCAA suggested that the program suspend their team in order to win back the support of the public. Afterwards, the NCAA was seen as a legitimate power amongst college sports, but did not change its own ideological position, since they claimed that the rules and regulations that they implemented are to maintain the amateurism and integrity of college sports, which was the same stance that they had previous to when the NCAA rose to