New class who dis

(This book only has 12 chapters! It’s one of the smallest of the books I’ve had so far. Also I rented it because I ain’t tryna do this)

The college experience apparently used to be awful, like everything else. The first intercollegiate sporting event was a “regatta” (boat racing event) between a Harvard team and three Yale teams, complete with food and socializing, in 1852. This spread and became a model for other sports to develop collegiate programs.

This whole chapter reads as a back and forth between athletics programs and the faculty of the colleges. Illustrates examples such as boosters “hiring” students and the formation of the ICFR by faculty to regulate student-athletes.

The 1904 football season had 21 deaths (this is where TR intervened and formed the IAA in 1905, renamed the NCAA in 1912 (booooooo (well Avatar Kyoshi did found the Dai Li, so I find this analagous))).

So it looks like the underground economy paying athletes for performance illegally has a long and storied history. It’s a little weird that the book isn’t talking about how this is going on to this very day…

The Sanity Code was created by the NCAA in 1948 as a compromise between southern schools that wanted to award full athletic scholarships and northern schools that were opposed to athletic scholarships.  The Sanity Code outlined that athletic scholarships should be need-based financial aid, not pay-for-play.

Notre Dame and Penn actually negotiated their own television contracts before the NCAA took over and signed contracts, and threatened Penn with being not in good standing. So that was a whole thing. The NCAA’s first billion dollar agreement for men’s D1 postseason basketball (March Madness) was in 1989, and doubled by 1995. When was this book published??

This book actually briefly describes the horrors of the “Indian Problem,” the struggles of dealing with the KKK (the “fighting Irish” origin is actually more badass than I realized), HBCUs, and the growth of women’s sports. Not bad! Pretty dense chapter.

And the chapter ends with the description of a paradigm. And that’s the end of our show! Bonk!