Intercollegiate athletics are no different from any other activity colleges and universities engage in, but are they a revenue activity, a mission activity, or a hybrid of the two?

There is no doubt that they are big business. Attendance for college football and men's basketball exceeds that for the combined National Football League (NFL) and National Basketball Association (NBA) professional teams, and ticket revenue is comparable to that of the NFL (Sandy and Sloane 2004). Athletics can be vital to promoting the goals of many colleges and universities, giving them a particular identity and creating loyalty in students, alumni, area residents, businesses, and donors – loyalty that translates into advertising, student recruitment, and donations. There is also no doubt that intercollegiate athletics – especially football and men's basketball – are expensive and can be distractions from the educational and research missions of the school. In fact, for nearly as long as intercollegiate athletics have been in existence, critics have questioned their role in higher education.

When Harvard College's long-serving president Charles William Eliot criticized commercialism in college sports in 1893, he might have been speaking today, except that the colleges he singled out were those in the Ivy League. He railed against colleges engaging in what we would today call big-time, money-making sports and losing their focus on academic pursuits.