College athletics have never been pure and the money has always been there in one form or another. Not my opinion. just ask the US Supreme Court.
From the start, American colleges and universities have had a complicated relationship with sports and money. In 1852, students from Harvard and Yale participated in what many regard as the Nation’s first intercollegiate competition—a boat race at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. But this was no pickup match. A railroad executive sponsored the event to promote train travel to the picturesque lake. T. Mendenhall, The Harvard-Yale Boat Race 1852– 1924, pp. 15–16 (1993). He offered the competitors an allexpenses-paid vacation with lavish prizes—along with unlimited alcohol. See A. Zimbalist, Unpaid Professionals 6– 7 (1999) (Zimbalist); Rushin, Inside the Moat, Sports Illustrated, Mar. 3, 1997. The event filled the resort with “life and excitement,” N. Y. Herald, Aug. 10, 1852, p. 2, col. 2, and one student-athlete described the “‘junket’” as an experience “‘as unique and irreproducible as the Rhodian colossus,’” Mendenhall, Harvard-Yale Boat Race, at 20. Life might be no “less than a boat race,” Holmes, On Receiving the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Yale University Commencement, June 30, 1886, in Speeches by Oliver Wendall Holmes, p. 27 (1918), but it was football that really caused college sports to take off. “By the late 1880s the traditional rivalry between Princeton and Yale was attracting 40,000 spectators and generating in excess of $25,000 . . . in gate revenues.” Zimbalist 7. Schools regularly had “graduate students and paid ringers” on their teams. Ibid. Colleges offered all manner of compensation to talented athletes. Yale reportedly lured a tackle named James Hogan with free meals and tuition, a trip to Cuba, the exclusive right to sell scorecards from his games—and a job as a cigarette agent for the American Tobacco Company. Ibid.; see also Needham, The College Athlete, McClure’s Magazine, June 1905, p. 124. The absence of academic residency requirements gave rise to “‘tramp athletes’” who “roamed the country making cameo athletic appearances, moving on whenever and wherever the money was better.” F. Dealy, Win at Any Cost 71 (1990). One famous example was a law student at West Virginia University—Fielding H. Yost— “who, in 1896, transferred to Lafayette as a freshman just in time to lead his new teammates to victory against its arch-rival, Penn.” Ibid. The next week, he “was back at West Virginia’s law school.” Ibid. College sports became such a big business that Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University, quipped to alumni in 1890 that “‘Princeton is noted in this wide world for three things: football, baseball, and collegiate instruction.’” Zimbalist 7.
