Athletics, Academics, and Rankings: The Power of Competition

Abstract

Please bear with me a moment as I write about sports. As you surely know, athletic events are a prominent part of U.S. college and university life. More than 1000 institutions are engaged in one or more of the 23 sports overseen by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ranging from water polo to tennis to cross country and football (see http://www.ncaa.org). Collegiate history reveals a longstanding interdependence between athletics and institutions (Toma 2003). For example, American football is traced to 1869 with a game between Rutgers and the College of New Jersey. College basketball dates from 1895, and in the mid-1850 s Harvard and Yale held the first U.S. intercollegiate competition in rowing. Athletics quickly became a vehicle for institution-building, far beyond its recreational origins as part of the “collegiate ideal.” As I write this brief editorial, “March Madness,” the frenzy that is the quest for the U.S. national championship in men’s and women’s college basketball, is underway. From late fall to early spring, basketball teams from across the nation compete with hopes to win individual games, to claim the regular season conference title, and to triumph in the conference tournament games. Then, they wait, while the NCAA selection committee considers the teams and announces with great fanfare the successful competitors for a berth in the NCAA basketball tournaments. Sixty-four men’s and 64 women’s teams are slated for competition over 3 weeks in late March and early April. For the uninitiated, the 64 teams are divided into regional competitions across four geographical areas, which spreads the excitement across the country. In each region, teams ranked 1–16 commence play; of course, the lowest ranked team plays the highest ranked, and the game is on. Like most games and disciplines, there is insider terminology: teams want to get through the first and second rounds to make it to round three, called the “Sweet Sixteen,” or to the “Final Four,” where two games yield the two finalists for the championship game. Teams board planes and trains; spectators scramble for tickets and hotel rooms; stay-at-home fans and others fill out brackets in serious and not-soserious competition to see who can predict the ultimate winners of each game and the overall tournament. While the onsite spectators number in the thousands, almost every game is televised, and the home viewing audience numbers in the millions. Innov High Educ (2013) 38:171–172 DOI 10.1007/s10755-013-9258-z