Unit 12 · School, Work, and the Clip

On August 3, 1852, rowing crews from Harvard and Yale raced on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Historians count it as the first intercollegiate athletic contest in the United States. Harvard’s boat won. The students did not organize the trip alone.

A railroad company offered to pay the crews’ travel and lodging. Its manager hoped the race would draw passengers to the lake resort along its line. So the very first college contest had a sponsor, a business that paid expenses because it expected to profit from the attention.

For the next several decades, students ran college sport themselves. Clubs elected captains, raised money, set schedules and wrote rules in student meetings. Faculty mostly stayed away. That student control would not last once crowds, gate money and injuries grew in the late 1800s.

On November 6, 1869, students from Rutgers and Princeton played a kicking game in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Each side had 25 players, and Rutgers won six goals to four. It is remembered as the first college football game, though its rules looked more like soccer than modern football.

By the 1880s, big games drew thousands of paying fans in cities like New York. Students spent the money, hired coaches and sometimes played men who were barely enrolled. Faculty at several schools formed athletic committees to approve schedules and check that players were real students.

In 1892 the new University of Chicago hired Amos Alonzo Stagg to run its athletics. He was given a faculty appointment, not a student job. Historians often point to Stagg as an early example of a coach who was a paid member of the university staff. That change moved sport from the student club into the institution.

In January 1895 university presidents met at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. Purdue’s president, James Smart, called the meeting. They agreed on rules for which students could play. Seven schools formed what they called the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, better known as the Western Conference.

The seven were the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin. Each school sent a faculty representative. Its early rules required players to be enrolled students in good standing, not hired outsiders.

The conference later took the name Big Ten. The University of Chicago itself left big-time football. President Robert Maynard Hutchins ended the football program after the 1939 season, and the school withdrew from the conference in 1946. A founding member chose classes over the stadium.

Football injuries and deaths in 1905 led to a crisis. In December 1905 Henry MacCracken, chancellor of New York University, called colleges to meet. On March 31, 1906, sixty-two schools formed the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, or IAAUS. It renamed itself the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910.

At first the NCAA had little power. It published rules for games and passed resolutions about good conduct. But each college still decided for itself who could play. The NCAA asked schools to follow the principle of home rule, meaning local faculty enforced standards on their own campus.

The NCAA held its first national championship in track and field in 1921. Championships gave it a reason to set national rules, because every team entering had to meet the same standard. Over time the body that once only wrote rules for games also wrote rules about players’ grades, aid and years of play.

In 1929 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published American College Athletics, its Bulletin Number 23. Howard J. Savage led the study. Researchers visited over one hundred colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. They read records and interviewed coaches, students and officials.

The report found widespread subsidies: jobs that required little work, loans never repaid and payments from boosters. It described recruiting, meaning coaches and alumni seeking out high school players. It blamed college presidents and faculty for allowing commercial pressure to grow on their own campuses.

Newspapers across the country covered the findings. The report did not create a new rule by itself, because the Carnegie Foundation had no power over colleges. But it gave critics a detailed public record. Later reformers cited it when they argued that college sport had become a business wearing a student’s clothes.

After World War II the NCAA tried a strict limit on aid. Its 1948 rule, nicknamed the Sanity Code, allowed aid based on financial need and school grades, not on athletic skill. Several schools said openly they would not obey it. The NCAA could not expel them with enough votes, and it dropped the code in 1951.

In 1956 the NCAA changed course. Members could now give an athletic scholarship covering tuition, fees, room, board and books, whatever a player’s family income. In 1973 the NCAA limited these scholarships to one year at a time, so a coach could decline to renew one. In 2012 members won the option to offer scholarships for several years.

Also in 1973, the NCAA split its members into three divisions. Division I held the largest programs. Division III schools agreed not to give any aid for athletic ability. The split let schools with very different budgets follow different rules under one national body.

In January 1983 NCAA delegates voted for a rule known as Proposition 48. It took effect for students entering in 1986. A first-year player in Division I needed a minimum grade average in a set of high school core courses and a minimum score on the SAT or ACT to play and receive aid.

Supporters said the rule told high schools and players that classes mattered. Critics, including leaders at several historically Black colleges and universities, argued that a fixed test score would fall hardest on Black students from underfunded schools. Some coaches, such as Georgetown’s John Thompson, protested publicly in later years.

The rule began a long line of academic eligibility standards. The NCAA later changed the required scores and added rules for steady progress toward a degree. Each change reopened the same argument: whether a grade rule protects students or keeps some of them out.

In March 1939 the NCAA held its first men’s basketball tournament. Eight teams took part. The final was played at Patten Gymnasium on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, Illinois. The University of Oregon beat Ohio State. The event lost money in its first year.

That same year, on September 30, 1939, an experimental NBC station in New York, W2XBS, broadcast a college football game between Fordham and Waynesburg. Very few homes owned a television set, so almost no one saw it. Still, it is counted as the first televised college football game.

The tournament grew as television grew. The field doubled to 16 teams in 1951 and reached 64 in 1985. CBS began carrying the tournament in 1982. By the 2000s its broadcast rights paid most of the NCAA’s yearly income, which the body shares out to its member schools.

Beginning in 1951 the NCAA controlled which college football games appeared on television. It signed deals with networks and limited how often any one school could appear. Leaders said the limit protected attendance at games. Big football schools said it kept them from selling their own games.

The Universities of Oklahoma and Georgia sued. In NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1984), the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 against the NCAA. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the plan was a restraint on trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act, the 1890 law against deals that limit competition.

After the ruling, conferences and schools sold their own football games. The number of televised games rose quickly. Money flowed to the conferences with the biggest audiences. Later moves between conferences, such as UCLA and USC joining the Big Ten in 2024, followed those television dollars.

In 1953 the Colorado Supreme Court decided University of Denver v. Nemeth. Ernest Nemeth, a football player who also held a campus job, had been hurt in practice. The court allowed him workers' compensation, the payments a state requires employers to give injured workers.

Walter Byers led the NCAA as its first executive director from 1951 to 1987. In his 1995 book Unsportsmanlike Conduct, he wrote that the NCAA crafted the term student-athlete in response to cases like Nemeth’s. The phrase stressed school over work, so players would look less like employees in court.

Later courts often agreed with the NCAA. In Rensing v. Indiana State University (1983), the Indiana Supreme Court denied workers’ compensation to a football player left with quadriplegia after a practice injury. The court said he was a student, not an employee. The term had become a legal argument as well as a description.

In 2009 Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball star, sued the NCAA. He had seen his likeness in a video game without being paid. In 2014 Judge Claudia Wilken ruled that NCAA limits on pay for a player’s name, image and likeness broke antitrust law. An appeals court upheld much of her ruling in 2015.

In 2014 Northwestern University football players, led by quarterback Kain Colter, asked to form a union. A union is a group of workers who bargain together with an employer. The regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago ruled that the players were employees and could vote.

In August 2015 the full National Labor Relations Board declined to decide the case. It said a union at one private school could upset a league made mostly of public universities, which federal labor law does not cover. The ballots the players cast were never counted, but the Chicago ruling stayed a landmark.

On June 21, 2021, the Supreme Court decided NCAA v. Alston, 9 to 0. It ruled that the NCAA could not cap education-related benefits, such as computers or paid internships, that schools give players. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a separate opinion warning that the NCAA’s other pay limits might also break antitrust law.

States moved at the same time. California passed its Fair Pay to Play Act in 2019. Illinois passed the Student-Athlete Endorsement Rights Act, which took effect on July 1, 2021. That day the NCAA adopted an interim policy letting players nationwide earn money from endorsements and appearances, called NIL deals.

In June 2025 Judge Claudia Wilken approved the settlement in House v. NCAA. The NCAA and the largest conferences agreed to pay former players for past NIL limits. Starting in July 2025, schools could share a capped amount of their athletics revenue directly with players. The two papers in the locker now sat beside a third: a pay record.

The first professional baseball league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, began in 1871. Players moved freely from club to club, sometimes in the middle of a season. Owners called this revolving. Clubs that lost stars also lost fans and money, and some folded before finishing their schedules.

William Hulbert, an executive of the Chicago White Stockings, wanted a league run by owners. On February 2, 1876, club representatives met at the Grand Central Hotel in New York and founded the National League. Hulbert soon became its president. Membership belonged to franchises, clubs with the sole right to a city.

The new league promised fans a full schedule, banned gambling and alcohol at games and expelled clubs that broke its rules. It also gave owners, not players, the power to set the terms of work. Players could still move to another club after each season, but owners were already looking for a way to stop that.

In September 1879 National League owners met in Buffalo, New York. They agreed that each club could name five players it would reserve for the next season. No other club would sign those five. The agreement was kept private at first, but it soon became known and then public league policy.

Owners said the rule would keep salaries down and stop rich clubs from signing every star. Over the 1880s the number of reserved players grew, and by the end of the decade whole rosters were bound. The paragraph that carried the rule into each contract became known as the reserve clause.

A reserved player had two choices. He could sign on the club’s terms, or he could leave organized baseball. Other leagues joined agreements to honor each other’s reserve lists. A blacklist, a list of banned players, awaited anyone who jumped. The reserve system rested on owners agreeing not to compete for players.

John Montgomery Ward pitched and played shortstop for New York, and he earned a law degree from Columbia. In 1885 he helped found the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, an early players’ organization. In August 1887 he published an essay in Lippincott’s Magazine titled Is the Base Ball Player a Chattel?

A chattel is a piece of movable property. Ward argued that the reserve clause, once meant to protect clubs, had become a way to buy and sell players. After owners imposed a salary scale in 1888, the Brotherhood acted. In 1890 its members formed the Players' League, with clubs partly run by players and backed by investors.

The Players’ League drew many of the best players and fans in its one season. Its eight clubs included one in Chicago, which competed with Hulbert’s old White Stockings for fans. Money ran short, and backers made deals with the older leagues. The Players’ League folded after 1890, and most players returned to their old clubs under the reserve.

In 1914 and 1915 the Federal League challenged the two existing major leagues. It paid high salaries and did not honor the reserve clause. In Chicago its club, the Whales, played in a new ballpark built by owner Charles Weeghman in 1914. That park is known today as Wrigley Field.

The Federal League folded after 1915. Most of its owners took payments to go away. The owners of the Baltimore club did not, and sued the major leagues under the Sherman Antitrust Act. In Federal Baseball Club v. National League (1922), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Baltimore.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that exhibitions of baseball were local events, not interstate commerce. Travel between states was only incidental, he said. So federal antitrust law did not apply. This antitrust exemption left the reserve clause beyond the reach of that law for another half century.

In 1953, in Toolson v. New York Yankees, the Supreme Court had kept baseball’s exemption. It said Congress, not the courts, should change it. Then in 1957, in Radovich v. National Football League, the Court ruled that pro football did not share baseball’s exemption. Baseball stood alone.

Curt Flood filed suit in January 1970 against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Former Justice Arthur Goldberg argued his case. Flood sat out the 1970 season rather than report to Philadelphia. He played only briefly again, for Washington in 1971, before leaving the game.

On June 19, 1972, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 3 against Flood in Flood v. Kuhn. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that baseball’s exemption was an anomaly, an odd exception, but that Congress had let it stand for fifty years. The Court would not overturn its own earlier rulings. Flood lost his case and much of his career.

Football had no antitrust exemption after Radovich, so it limited player movement differently. In 1963 the National Football League adopted a rule named for Commissioner Pete Rozelle. A player could sign with a new club once his contract ended. But the new club owed his old club compensation.

If the two clubs could not agree, Rozelle himself set the compensation, often players or draft picks. Clubs feared giving up too much, so few players changed teams. Players called this free agency in name only. The Rozelle Rule worked like a reserve clause by another route.

Tight end John Mackey, president of the NFL Players Association, sued. In Mackey v. National Football League (1976), a federal appeals court ruled the Rozelle Rule an unreasonable restraint of trade. The court also said such rules could be lawful if the players’ union agreed to them in collective bargaining. That idea shaped football labor for decades.

In 1966 major league players elected Marvin Miller as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller had worked as an economist for the United Steelworkers of America. He visited spring training camps and explained labor law to players who had never seen their full contracts.

In 1968 the union signed the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sport. It raised the minimum salary from 6,000 to 10,000 dollars. In 1970 the union won the right to send disputes to a neutral arbitrator instead of the commissioner. An arbitrator is a person both sides agree will decide a dispute.

In April 1972 players held the first league-wide strike in major league history, over pensions. It lasted about two weeks and cancelled games at the start of the season. Miller’s union now had the tools that Ward’s Brotherhood had lacked: a signed contract with the owners and a neutral judge for complaints.

Pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally, lately of the Montreal Expos, played the 1975 season without signing new contracts. Their clubs renewed their old contracts for that one year. The union argued that after the renewal year, the players were free. It filed a grievance.

The case went to arbitrator Peter Seitz. On December 23, 1975, he ruled for the players. The renewal paragraph, he wrote, gave a club one more year, not every year forever. Owners fired Seitz at once. A federal court upheld his decision in 1976, and the owners’ appeal failed.

Now both sides had to bargain. The 1976 agreement created free agency for players with six years of major league service. After that, a player could sign with any club. Earlier, Catfish Hunter had become a free agent in 1974 when an arbitrator found his owner broke his contract. Hunter signed with the New York Yankees on December 31, 1974.

In 1970 Oscar Robertson, president of the National Basketball Players Association, sued the NBA. The suit challenged the league’s reserve system and a planned merger with the rival American Basketball Association. The case settled in 1976. The Robertson settlement opened a path to free agency, and the NBA and ABA merged that year.

English soccer had its own chains. Clubs paid a maximum wage of 20 pounds a week until players’ union leader Jimmy Hill won its end in 1961. In 1963 a court ruled for George Eastham that the retain-and-transfer system was an unreasonable restraint of trade. Clubs could still demand a transfer fee when a player moved.

Jean-Marc Bosman, a Belgian player, could not move to a French club in 1990 because his old club demanded a fee. On December 15, 1995, the European Court of Justice ruled for him. The Bosman ruling let players in the European Union move freely when their contracts ended, and it limited quotas on foreign players from EU countries.

After the 1985, 1986 and 1987 seasons, few free agents got offers from new clubs. The union filed grievances. Arbitrators found that owners had acted in collusion, meaning they had secretly agreed not to bid for each other’s players. The labor contract forbade clubs from acting together that way.

In 1990 owners agreed to pay 280 million dollars in damages to the players harmed. The case showed that free agency on paper still depended on owners actually competing. It echoed the 1879 reserve agreement in Buffalo, when owners also agreed not to compete for players.

In 1994 owners proposed a salary cap, a limit on what each club could spend on players. Players went on strike on August 12, 1994. The rest of the season and the World Series were cancelled, the first World Series not played since 1904. The strike ended in the spring of 1995, and baseball never adopted a salary cap.

In Flood v. Kuhn, the Supreme Court had said Congress should decide baseball’s exemption. After the 1994 strike, Congress acted. President Bill Clinton signed the Curt Flood Act on October 27, 1998. Curt Flood had died in January 1997, before the law passed.

The act says antitrust laws apply to major league baseball’s dealings with major league players, as they do in other pro sports. It left the rest of the exemption in place, such as rules on minor leagues, franchise moves and broadcasting. The act was narrow, but it carried Flood’s name into federal law.

By then every major American league used a mix of free agency, drafts and caps set by bargaining. The draft, in which clubs take turns choosing new players, still bound a young player to one club at first. The question Ward asked in 1887, whether a career belongs to the player or the club, stayed alive in each new agreement.