The NCAA

The National Collegiate Athletic Association was born to stop young men from dying on the football field. College football in the early 1900s was so brutal that dozens of players were killed each season, and in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt summoned university leaders to the White House to demand reform. The result, founded in 1906, was the organization that became the NCAA, created first to make the game safer and then to govern the whole world of college athletics.

From regulating a violent sport it grew into the ruler of American college sports, enforcing the principle of amateurism — the rule that college athletes, unlike professionals, could not be paid. It organized championships in dozens of sports, most lucratively the men's basketball tournament known as March Madness and the college football postseason, events that grew into a multibillion-dollar enterprise built on the labor of unpaid students.

That contradiction became the central tension of the modern NCAA. Critics charged that an organization generating enormous revenue for coaches, conferences, and television networks while forbidding its athletes any share of it was fundamentally unjust, a criticism that grew louder as the money grew larger. The federal law known as Title IX, meanwhile, transformed the association's world by forcing a vast expansion of women's college sports.

In recent years the amateur model the NCAA was built to defend has largely collapsed, as courts and legislatures cleared the way for athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness. The association's history — from a reform born of deaths on the gridiron to a commercial colossus wrestling with the rights of its athletes — mirrors the uneasy place of big-money sports within American higher education.