The Evolution of Collegiate Athletics

The topic of college athletes’ rights has been a contested issue since the establishment of intercollegiate athletics in the United States, dating back to the mid-1800s. From the first commercially sponsored rowing competition in 1852 between Harvard and Yale to the multi-billion-dollar industry centered on March Madness and the College Football Playoff (CFP) that exists in the twenty-first century, college athletes have been embedded in a system that has disproportionately benefited from their name, image, and likeness (NIL) for over a century. More specifically, within the United States, a distinct sport development model exists whereby elite athletic opportunities are offered through institutions of higher education. Unlike other international contexts where elite athletic opportunities are sponsored through governmental departments (i.e., Ministries of Sport) or separate professional sport entities (i.e., Olympic organizations, professional sport franchises, and leagues, etc.), the (attempted) integration of high-level athletics and academics in the United States has created a myriad of challenges, not the least of which involves exploitative relationships between institutions, athletic departments, athletic governing bodies, and corporate sponsors and the college athletes who fuel the system. As a result, terms such as cartel, plantation, and indentured servitude have been used by scholars and mainstream media to underscore the problematic arrangement between the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and college athletes. Among the most contentious aspects of the U.S. college sport model over the past several decades has been the legal rights of college athletes to benefit from their own NIL. In June of 2021, the NCAA passed legislation that enabled college athletes to benefit from their NIL while maintaining their athletic eligibility. This landmark decision was a watershed moment in U.S. sports history, but it did not come without years of advocacy and activism.

In the early 1900s, football was a popular sport among Ivy League schools. In fact, school presidents, alumni, and boosters were so passionate about the sport that recruitment efforts to secure the athletic talent and services of players involved various inducements, including money and gifts. In addition to the safety hazards associated with the sport, the lack of governance of the bourgeoning college sport industry resulted in President Theodore Roosevelt meeting with university representatives to discuss the need to create an organization to oversee rules and regulations. In 1906, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), now known as the NCAA, was established. Throughout the twentieth century, the organization developed policies that restricted college athletes’ rights under the veneer of the amateur sport ethic and purported educational value associated with athletic participation. In 1952, the NCAA signed a major television broadcasting rights deal with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for over $1 million to air college football games. This contract was negotiated by the then-NCAA President, Walter Byers, who later created the term “student-athlete” to prevent college athletes’ from claiming workers’ compensation benefits for injuries incurred during competition. The idea behind these decisions was to increase the commercialization and financial viability of college sports while maintaining strict control over college athletes’ rights. Thus, from the impetus of the NCAA, the input of and consideration for college athletes was minimal at best and nonexistent at worst. Stated differently, the historical foundations and modern structure of big-time college sport in the United States were designed to maximize the economic and social prestige benefits derived from college athletes’ talents and NIL for institutions, athletic departments, corporate sponsors, and the NCAA.

In response to these restrictive policies, college athletes across generations challenged the NCAA to secure increased rights. For example, in 1974, Kent Waldrep of Texas Christian University (TCU) suffered a severe spinal cord injury in a football game against Alabama. He subsequently sued the institution for worker’s compensation benefits, but the courts ruled in favor of the latter, citing that his athletic participation was an avocation or extracurricular activity associated with his student status rather than his activity being viewed within the context of an employee-employer relationship. Similar workers’ compensation claims were levied against the NCAA and/or its member institutions in an effort to secure more equitable rights for college athletes (e.g., Rensing v. Indiana State University Board of Trustees (1983) and Coleman v. Western Michigan University, to name a few). These workers’ compensation lawsuits laid the groundwork for subsequent challenges for NIL rights to be pursued for college athletes.

One of the most visible instances of college athletes challenging the NCAA for their NIL rights occurred during the early 1990s when the famous Michigan Fab Five men’s basketball team. During the 1993 season, following their previous run to the national championship game in 1992, Jalen Rose, Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson engaged in an act of protest against the University of Michigan, Nike, and the NCAA by wearing their warm-up shirts inside out and donning black socks with no labels on them. The players stated their protest was enacted to raise awareness about how universities, the NCAA, and corporate sponsors economically benefit from their NIL. At the same time, they were unjustly restricted from receiving benefits and generating income for themselves and their families beyond the artificially capped tuition, room and board, academic support services, and limited athletic apparel. Given the popularity of the team, their act of protest received widespread media attention and intensified the calls for changes to the NCAA policies on NIL for college athletes. In addition to public protests, former college athletes continued to leverage the court system for structural change. In 2009, Ed O’Bannon, former most outstanding player of the 1995 Men’s Final Four and member of the national championship University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Bruins team, coalesced with other former college athletes to file a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA and Electronic Arts (EA) for their use of the former’s NIL in a series of video games without their knowledge, consent, and without appropriate compensation. The case resulted in a $40 million settlement, including payouts to former college athletes whose NIL was utilized in the EA Sports video games.

Later, in 2015, a group of football players at Northwestern University filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to certify their status as university employees via their athletic labor conditions. In the decision, the NLRB acknowledged that the conditions of the football players in the claim did constitute an employee-employer relationship, but the judge was not prepared to apply this judgment to all colleges and universities (including public and private) since this type of decision would fundamentally alter the structure of college sports. All these efforts, among scores of related challenges, including the pressures initiated by groups such as The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics (KCIA), The Drake Group (TDG), Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), National College Players Association (NCPA), College Athletes’ Players Association (CAPA), College Athletes Rights and Empowerment Faculty Coalition (CARE-FC), College Sport Research Institute (CSRI), and Coalition for the Future of College Athletics (CFCA), contributed to the passage of the 2019 California Fair Pay to Play Act Senate Bill (SB) 206 which deemed it permissible within the state for college athletes to benefit from their NIL. This monumental legislation led to a domino effect involving over three dozen U.S. states also permitting college athletes to benefit from their NIL. Along the same lines, in 2021, the decision in the NCAA v. Alston case deemed restrictions on educational compensation for college athletes as a violation of antitrust laws. As a result of the increasing number of state laws that were passed to permit NIL rights for college athletes, the NCAA was forced to change its policy in 2021. Post-NCAA NIL policy change has yielded an unstable reality whereby the lines between ethics, fairness, competition, and educational versus commercial athletic values are increasingly blurred. Hence, as of 2025, there are nearly a dozen federal bills under review to provide national standards for how NIL will be monitored and managed in the future to ensure the integrity of college sports is preserved.

In The Evolution of Collegiate Athletics: Embracing the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) Era, Billy Hawkins, Aquasia Shaw, and Simran Kaur Sethi bring together a range of reputable scholars to explore the connections between historical efforts and contemporary realities associated with college athletes and their NIL. More specifically, this timely text offers thought-provoking insights into how laws (federal and state), policies (NCAA), and public opinions on NIL for college athletes have shifted over time and led to a transformational change in U.S. college sport. Although the new NIL policy has been largely regarded as a victory for college athletes, the contributors to this text highlight how it is important to explore the short-term and long-term implications of these changes for various groups. Stated differently, the new NIL policy opens a plethora of opportunities as well as challenges (including pressures) for prospective and current college athletes as well as for coaches, athletic administrators, parents, and other key stakeholders of college sport. The book is organized into four sections: (1) Foundations of NIL: Historical, Political, and Legal Contexts (Chapters 1–4), (2) The Business of NIL: Economics, Market Dynamics, and Athlete Branding (Chapters 5–10), (3) Equity, Diversity, and Global Perspectives in NIL (Chapters 11–15), and (4) The Future of NIL: Leadership, Policy Evolution, and Beyond (Chapters 16–17). Chapter contributors include an interdisciplinary collective of scholars who study U.S. college sport. The expertise contained in this text ranges from higher education, economics, law, politics, race, gender, international studies, media, and sociology. The nuanced perspectives in the book unveil how the changes in NIL policy impact college athletes differently based on their race, gender, social class, international citizenship status, enrollment in institutional type—Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) compared to Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs), (social) media popularity/marketability status, sport participation, and recruitment ranking are presented and discussed. As a result, this book provides rich, multifaceted analyses of one of the most debated social issues in the United States over the past half-century. There is yet to be a book that offers the scope of explorations on the topic of NIL as presented in this book. This major contribution will undoubtedly inform and inspire continued progress for college athletes’ rights in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Joseph N. Cooper and Dr. J. Keith Motley,

Endowed Chair of Sport Leadership and Administration, University of Massachusetts Boston, and author of From Exploitation Back to Empowerment: Black Male Holistic (Under)Development Through Sport and (Mis)Education

We are honored to receive support from the following sources: the African American Studies Faculty Research Grant and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Book Completion Award at the University of Houston, and support from the Department of Kinesiology and Health Promotion at the University of Kentucky. This support was instrumental in offsetting the costs of editing and indexing, advancing the completion of this manuscript, and affirming the value of research within the humanities and social sciences.

We would also like to acknowledge and thank the contributing authors for lending their expertise and voice to this project. Each contributing author provided a unique perspective on the impact of NIL on the evolution of college athletics. Readers will be informed and inspired to continue unveiling the nuances of how college athletics is a space of reproduction and resistance to dominant ideologies.

Billy Hawkins, Aquasia Shaw, and Simran Kaur Sethi

In July 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reluctantly conceded to a pivotal transformation in collegiate athletics by abolishing restrictions on college athletes’ ability to profit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). The enactment of state NIL legislation served as the catalyst for this transformation and the inevitable decline of the previous collegiate model, in which the principle of amateurism served as its foundation and means of capital accumulation, growth, and expansion. This significant modification dismantled the traditional barriers of amateurism that had defined collegiate sports for decades, thereby enabling most athletes to leverage their personal brands in previously unmatched ways. The implications of this change extend beyond individual gains, signifying a fundamental reconfiguration of the collegiate sports ecosystem and, thus, its evolution.