"Win One for the Gipper": Organizational Foundations of Intercollegiate Athletics

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to understand the various roles played by athletics in higher education, how athletics became an institutionalized extension of higher education's academic mission, and what this has meant for colleges and universities, and the student-athletes who participate in these athletic programs. The findings of this study revealed that from its founding, intercollegiate athletics was a commercialized operation that operated outside the central core of higher education. In order to be competitive, both athletically and commercially, athletic programs quickly began to professionalize their programs recruiting athletes that did not reflect the demographics of their student bodies. In order to legitimize these programs and the lower class "ringers" who were being brought to campus to produce victories and fill stadiums, athletic programs were linked to the academic mission of these institutions and their athletes cloaked in a garb of amateurism. Consequently, athletes have always been marginalized from the teaching and research core of the university with the purported educative value of athletics serving only to veil their true role, the production of victories and the creation of a winning image for their universities.