NCAA

6 Pages 1575 Words

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has been around for almost one hundred years and in that time the organization has become one of the most dominant forces in sports. As this report intends to show the NCAA has established itself as a cartel colluding to limit competition and control almost all aspects of the product they serve. This report will also show that the NCAA is one of the biggest legal monopolies left. The NCAA, for the most part, has exclusive control of young and talented basketball and football players with hopes that they might one day make it to the professional level.
First, we begin with the history. The National Collegiate Athletic Association was created in 1905, established to find a solution to the recent rise in football related fatalities. President Teddy Roosevelt summoned representatives of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to the White House to discuss the growing violence of college football, Roosevelt’s own son had recently broken his nose in a freshman football game at Harvard. Roosevelt threatened to proscribe intercollegiate football unless the game was reformed the NCAA was born. With a few rule changes, intercollegiate football was poised for a boom. Attendance at college football games soared throughout the 1920’s and on. Along with increased popularity and investments came the increased importance of winning. Cheating and financial scandals were on the rise. A 1929 report issued by the Carnegie Commission concluded that “the heart of the problem facing college sports was commercialization: an interlocking network that included expanded press coverage, public interest, alumni involvement and recruiting abuses. The victim was the student-athlete in particular, the diminishing of educational and intellectual values in general. Also, students (including non-athletes) were the losers because they had been denied their rightful involvement in sports.” While the search for an enforc...