Of course, athletics departments need money to operate and provide
good athletic opportunities for student-athletes. But our desire to gen-
erate these needed revenues has gone wildly out of control, creating a
financial and commercial “arms race” among schools that creates a
never ending upward spiraling need for more revenues in order to
beat the other guys.

—Gary Roberts, law professor at Tulane University and member of the
Sugar Bowl Committee, testifying before the U.S. Senate
on the College Bowl Alliance in May 1997

A postseason game draws the football season out over a large part of
the regular academic year [and after the] strenuous … regular
schedule [the players must focus on their studies.] But much as we
need money and could use it here, it does not seem to us best for the
boys [on the football team] and for the University to try to procure it
in such a way. So far as we can see, a postseason game would be played
at the sacrifice of many values, physical and academic, which properly
belong to the students participating in football.

—Letter from John Cavanaugh, vice president of Notre Dame University,
to Sugar Bowl Committee, 1941

WHEN THE NCAA was founded back in 1905, its primary purpose was
to sanitize and standardize the playing rules for football in order to pre-
serve it as an intercollegiate sport. The Association also articulated a
philosophy of amateurism, but it had no pretensions to coordinate the
economic policies of its membership. Rather, the explicit NCAA policy
was known as “home rule,” meaning that each institution was in control
of its own athletics program. The “home rule” policy was not seriously

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