“What is to be done about college athletics?” This question rings today with as much urgency as it did in the 1920s, when critics like Upton Sinclair lamented the excesses and abuses of college sports. Modern-day muckrakers have continued this tradition, using terms like conspiracy, show business, sham, and hypocrisy in their denunciations of the commercialized college sports enterprise, together with adjectives like ugly, dishonest, corrupt, and villainous. The striking constancy of the themes used by such critics ably illustrates the famous dictum from Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Not only has the criticism of college athletics persisted, so have the calls for reform. Although a few of the most vehement critics would gladly throw out the whole enterprise of big-time college sports, the more common appeal has been for rule changes that would clean up perceived problems. As we have seen, one of the early objectives of reformers was accomplished soon after the NCAA was formed in 1906 – rules of play that made the game of football less dangerous for athletes. With that one exception, however, the problems have proved stubbornly resistant to correction.

This concluding chapter takes up the question of reform. It does so by discussing, in turn, the three logical questions that must be addressed whenever reform in any field is contemplated.