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THE BRICK A RCHES of the NCAA Hall of Champions loom large over Central Canal, just like the hazy, romantic conception of amateur-sports glory on display there looms over Indiana’s cultural memory. The National Collegiate Athletic Association employs more than 500 at its downtown offices, and it only seems appropriate that the state that gave the world Martinsville’s John Wooden and a collegiate home to Knute Rockne and Bobby Knight would host the bureaucratic brain trust for a college athletics system that fuels both university pride and a nearly $20 billion industry annually.
Which makes it all the more strange that most Americans informed enough to have an opinion on the matter seem to agree on one thing: What the NCAA actually does lies somewhere between “seriously flawed” and “comically evil.” From Republican-controlled Florida to Democratic California, state legislatures have passed laws checking its authority. Once-stodgy head coaches have advocated for major changes to the system. And no less than the Supreme Court of the United States ruled unanimously in June that the NCAA’s cap on education compensation for players was not just unfair, but unconstitutional.
The NCAA has been around for nearly 12 decades, since 1906. But for the past half-century, a flood of money has transformed it from a small back-office operation overseeing paperwork and tournament brackets to the arbiters of a financial and media empire. With that flood, one of the NCAA’s duties has come under ever more scrutiny: how they police its flow, ever-vigilant that cash might clandestinely reach the “student-athletes” themselves, which would violate the sacrosanct principle of amateurism that sets college athletes apart from their professional counterparts.
For doing so, critics have accused the NCAA of being a stuffy, ass-covering bureaucracy, the sports-world equivalent of an economic cartel, and an exploitation machine that perpetuates structural racism for fun and profit. In mid-November, critics roasted the organization after it confirmed its decision to vacate 59 men’s basketball victories and a women’s tennis conference championship at the University of Massachusetts, where it found a paltry sum of “impermissible financial aid of about $9,100 to 12 athletes over three years,” per an ESPN report,
