Abolishing the Sanity Code and Launching the Modern College Sports Establishment

Abstract

This chapter details the regularization of athletic scholarships and establishment of the NCAA as the principal arbiter of the college sports establishment. It describes the NCAA's Sanity Code of 1949, which sought to enforce the principle that college athletes were amateurs who played sports as an “avocation” and should not be differentiated from other students. It discusses the evolution of intercollegiate sports between 1950 and 1956, which resulted in athletics and athletes becoming virtually separate from the rest of the institution in which they resided. After 1956, an athletic scholarship and the time demands of competition often forced many “student athletes” to make their academic commitments secondary to their athletic ones.