Here is the presentation that accompanied the lecture on the NCAA Sanity Code and the Invention of the Student-Athlete.

1. Amateurs No More
JRN 589 / 450
NCAA Sanity Code
& The Invention of the “Student-Athlete”
Prof. Hanley

2. NCAA Sanity Code
American College Athletics by
Howard J. Savage did not lead to
any substantial changes in college
sports and its American model of
amateurism, in part because press
reaction to it was mixed.
In short, there was little public
outrage at the findings of the
three-year probe.

3. NCAA Sanity Code
The press in the South widely
criticized the report.
The AP referenced an Atlanta
Constitution column that
“suggested that the Carnegie
Foundation next could be
expected to send an expedition to
the North Pole and report that
there is no Santa Claus.”

4. NCAA Sanity Code
AP sports editor Alan Gould wrote
that “Whether they are
subsidized, or unsubsidized, major
college teams will stage the
October gridiron climax before the
greatest crowds so far this
season.”

5. NCAA Sanity Code
“Colleges,” wrote scholars John
Carvalho and Daisa Baker in a
2019 study of press reaction to
the Carnegie Report, “would
continue to feed society’s growing
hunger for sporting events and
the sports media that presented
them.”

6. NCAA Sanity Code
Still, the instinct to reform college
sports, particularly football,
persisted among college
presidents who wanted to draw a
bright line between amateurism
and professionalism.

7. NCAA Sanity Code
In December 1934, the created
the Eligibility Committee and
adopted a code for recruiting and
subsidizing athletes even though it
lacked enforcement power.
Ten months later, NCAA secretary
Frank Nicolson proposed national
oversight over subsidizing and
recruiting athletes. He offered the
proposal to the National
Association of State Universities.

8. NCAA Sanity Code
In 1936, University of North
Carolina president Frank Graham
announced a plan for reform
based in part on the Carnegie
Report’s findings.

9. NCAA Sanity Code
Graham had been influenced by
Abraham Flexner, who wrote an
influential book comparing
American, German and English
universities.
“Flexner criticized American
universities for many things,
including athletics,” wrote scholar
Ronald Smith in his book Pay for
Play.

10. NCAA Sanity Code
Flexner, Smith wrote, “complained
that no university in America ‘has
the courage to place athletics
where everyone perfectly well
knows they belong.’”

11. NCAA Sanity Code
Graham presented his
committee’s reform agenda to the
National Association of State
Universities.
The plan proposed ending
financial aid to athletes based
only their athletic ability, making
freshmen ineligible for play, a ban
on recruiting by staff, and no
postseason contests., among
other points.

12. NCAA Sanity Code
The Graham Plan was adopted by
the National Association of State
Universities in November 1935.

13. NCAA Sanity Code
Opposition to its implementation,
however, was fierce from North
Carolina students and alumni,
who had no issue with giving
athletes preferential treatment.

14. NCAA Sanity Code
“Carolina will be unable to
compete with any of the teams
that would bring from the public
widespread interest and bring to
the University an athletic
reputation,” a cotton
entrepreneur wrote Graham,
“which is a tremendous force in
our national life.”

15. NCAA Sanity Code
In his study, Smith wrote that
Graham asked the Carnegie
Report author Savage to support
his plan.
Savage replied that the proposed
regulations “cut too deeply into
entrenched practices to be
adopted.”
The Carnegie Foundation anyway
had decided to discontinue
athletic studies, Savage wrote.

16. NCAA Sanity Code
The Southern Conference - North
Carolina, North Carolina State,
Clemson, Duke, Maryland, South
Carolina, Virginia, the Virginia
Military Institute, Virginia Tech,
and Washington and Lee –
narrowly approved the plan, 6-4.

17. NCAA Sanity Code
That vote occurred as the
Southeastern Conference -
Alabama, Auburn, Florida,
Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky,
Louisiana State, Mississippi,
Mississippi State, Sewanee,
Tennessee, Tulane, and Vanderbilt
– voted to allow financial aid to
athletes not to exceed expenses,
becoming the first conference to
do so.

18. NCAA Sanity Code
The SEC, according to Smith,
“believed that its action was an
important reform in that aid to
athletes would now be open”
rather than take place under the
table.
The SEC scholarships and alumni
pressure doomed the Graham
Plan, which the Southern
Conference abolished in 1938.

19. NCAA Sanity Code
The Graham Plan “stands out as a
beacon of athletic reform efforts
in the 1930s. It attempted to do
what a few individual presidents
had attempted in the period
following the Carnegie Report on
American College Athletics in 1929
and what no other conference
was willing to take up in that
decade,” wrote Smith.

20. NCAA Sanity Code
Meanwhile, one of the great
college football powers of the 20th
century, the University of Chicago
of The Big Ten, abolished the
football team in December 1939.
That left students to play only
intramural football – as Henry
Pritchett of the Carnegie
Foundation wanted all of colleges
to do.

21. NCAA Sanity Code
In 1946, the NCAA sponsored the
Conference of Conferences of
twenty conferences to create
principles for college sports,
including the payment of athletes
to attend college and the control
of recruiting.

22. NCAA Sanity Code
The Conference of Conferences
issues its principles in January
1947 to cover amateurism,
recruiting and other elements of
college sports.

23. NCAA Sanity Code
On Jan. 10, 1948, during its annual
convention, the NCAA passed the
Sanity Code, its first regulatory
action.
The code required athletes to be
admitted to college on the same
basis as other students, but it
allowed scholarships to cover
tuition and fees as the SEC had
permitted a decade earlier.

24. NCAA Sanity Code
In the Sanity Code, the NCAA
published its “Principles of
Amateurism” that stated “any
college athlete who takes or is
promised pay in any form for
participation in athletics does not
meet this definition of an
amateur” even though athletes
would be permitted to receive
scholarships.

25. NCAA Sanity Code
“For the first time and in a nearly
unanimous vote, the NCAA was
given the power to enforce an
amateur code, but it allowed
payment of athletes, through
tuition and incidental fees, in
direct violation of the concept of
amateurism,” wrote Smith in Pay
for Play.

26. NCAA Sanity Code
Before the NCAA approved the
Sanity Code, the president of
baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers,
Branch Rickey, called out colleges
at the meeting for their hypocrisy
after the American College
Baseball Coaches Association
demanded that the NCAA protect
its players from professional
scouts seeking to sign them.

27. NCAA Sanity Code
“If you don’t make your men
professionals, we won’t either,”
Rickey told the convention. “Your
position,” he said, “would be
stronger if your own house was in
order. If the man is, by the
definition we have accepted, not
an amateur, then you are not
entitled to play him, and
particularly so since you made
him a de facto professional.”

28. NCAA Sanity Code
Rickey added that baseball
wouldn’t try to sign amateur
players if they were “bona fide
college players,” meaning players
who aren’t getting subsidized in
some way. “If you will stay out of
the professional field, we will stay
out of the college field,” he said.
And Rickey claimed he had the
receipts to prove the point.

29. NCAA Sanity Code
“There isn’t a professional club
which does not have written
evidence, and in quantity, that
many colleges have induced boys
to enter. Such men are just as
much ‘professional’ in our opinion
as if they were on our payrolls,”
said Rickey, as quoted in The New
York Times. “Surely, it is not part
of the educational process to
create or permit hypocrisy.”

30. NCAA Sanity Code
Rickey said unlike professional
football, college baseball did not
serve as a minor league for
baseball.
“Pro football has toed the mark
for you,” he said about pro teams
not signing college players while
still students. “But that is not a
generous or considerable action.
Pro football knows that its minor
leagues, its feeders, are the
colleges. Baseball is different.”

31. NCAA Sanity Code
In calling out the hypocrisy
colleges tried to hide regarding
baseball players, Rickey located
the fundamental problem of
carving out a suitable definition of
amateurism in line with the reality
of big-time, big-money college
sports when trying to promote the
British model in an American
commercial concept.

32. NCAA Sanity Code
Amateurism, Smith noted in his
book, was “an outdated and
nonegalitarian concept, despite
being nearly universally accepted.
Historically, no society had ever
had a concept of amateurism in
sport, certainly not the ancient
Greeks, until it was invented by
the upper-class British in the
nineteenth century.”

33. NCAA Sanity Code
Colleges also had another tactical
reason for sticking to the
outmoded definition.
By claiming its athletes to be
amateurs, colleges avoided state
and federal taxes and workers’
compensation payments to
injured players.

34. NCAA Sanity Code
The Sanity Code faced problems
soon after ratification.
The Southern, Southeastern, and
Southwest Conferences concluded
in May 1949 that the code did not
work for them. Financial aid
should tuition and fees, as
permitted by the NCAA, but also
room, board, books, and laundry
expenses, as Smith pointed out.

35. NCAA Sanity Code
In 1950, the NCAA enforcement
department sought to show its
muscle by bringing banishment
cases against seven schools –
Boston College, Maryland,
Virginia, The Citadel, Virginia
Military Institute, Virginia Tech,
and Villanova – for violating the
code.

36. NCAA Sanity Code
NCAA rules required a two-thirds
convention vote to ban the
schools, but it failed in that
attempt even though a majority
voted in favor of it, 111-93.
The Sanity Code, unenforceable as
the vote revealed, was dead.

37. NCAA Sanity Code
According to Smith, University of
North Carolina President Gordon
Gray said: “Every institution had
to make one of two decisions:
admit that they were in
noncompliance and withdraw
from the NCAA or be hypocritical
and remain.”
They remained.

38. NCAA Sanity Code
And then came a man named
Walter Byers, who in 1951
became the NCAA’s first full-time
employee as its executive director
at the age of 29.

39. NCAA Sanity Code
Byers first had to survive the 1954
withdrawal (effective in 1956) of
the schools that had launched
college athletics and its amateur
code: Yale, Harvard, Princeton,
Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia,
Brown and Penn. They would form
the Ivy League and ban freshmen
from varsity play, allow only three
years of eligibility, eliminate
scholarships and require progress
toward a degree.

40. NCAA Sanity Code
A year later in 1955, Byers faced a
more existential threat to college
sports.

41. NCAA Sanity Code
Ray Dennison was an Army
veteran and father of three who
played for the Fort Lewis A&M
(now Fort Lewis College) football
team.
In September 1955, he tackled a
kick returner, but his head hit the
returner’s knee, fracturing his
skull. He died within two days.

42. NCAA Sanity Code
His widow, Billie Dennison, sued
the school for workers’ comp
benefits because her husband had
been on scholarship.

43. NCAA Sanity Code
If Billie Dennison won the case, it
would lead to a collapse of college
athletics, as it would be
impossible for most schools to
afford workers’ compensation
insurance and claims.

44. NCAA Sanity Code
This was not the first workers’
compensation case filed by a
football player or his family.
In 1950, University of Denver
football player Ernest Nemeth
filed a workers’ comp claim,
following a spring practice injury.
He contended the university hired
him to play football.

45. NCAA Sanity Code
Nemeth won the case, which was
upheld in 1953 by the Colorado
Supreme Court.
The court determined that
because Nemeth’s on-campus job
was linked to his ability to
maintain a roster spot on the
team, he was an employee.

46. NCAA Sanity Code
After the Nemeth case, Byers and
the NCAA legal team required
schools to reference players as
"student-athletes” and add a
pledge of amateurism with every
scholarship letter.
That became the standard
defense in compensation claims
such as that filed by Dennison’s
family.

47. NCAA Sanity Code
The plan worked. Billie Dennison
lost the lawsuit.
But in a speech delivered after the
publication of his memoir in 1995,
Byers said this:

48. NCAA Sanity Code
"Each generation of young
persons come along and all they
ask is, 'Coach, give me a chance, I
can do it.' And it's a disservice to
these young people that the
management of intercollegiate
athletics stays in place committed
to an outmoded code of
amateurism.”

49. NCAA Sanity Code
It would take another generation
of legal action by college athletes,
however, to rid the nation of the
British model of amateurism that
had remained in the public
discourse.
An expression that Byers
developed as a legal ploy to get
around a lawsuit persisted to keep
hypocrisy alive.