The One Year Athletic Scholarship

The one-year scholarships was established
and this this was the you know the real transformative of that
scholarships had only been around since nineteen fifty six on a formal basis throughout the
NCAA what did they do before fifty six
well I think this has to seem really weird to anybody today
there
there was an assumption
that to
provide
a free education in return for athletic performances would be professionalism
and therefore contrary to
the values of the institution
so
%uh %uh nobody could receive an athletic scholarship and
and %uh
the only way you could be funded to
to play football would be one if
some
friendly alumnus or booster would pay your way or two if you were provided
some kind of on campus work to pay for your education
well what this meant in reality
is you know you had
boosters buying players
and you had
you know jobs like %uh
you know sweeping the snow off the sidewalks outside the LA coliseum it became
you know notoriously scandalously fraudulent very hard indeed you gotta find
the snow first right
and these things were really controversial and actually the southern conferences adopted
scholarships
though they wouldn't
call them quite that in the thirties and forties and the big ten and %uh the
precursor of the PAC ten the old pacific coast conference resisted this
and they were accused of being hypocritical and they accused the southern conferences of
being professional
and so finally after all the in-fighting %uh the settled out that they had the scholarship in 1956
that that term itself is a very interesting terms it's a scholarship and it was a consciously
selected term
because the idea that
you could be
compensated paid
for athletic prowess was again contrary to academic standards so it was a scholarship
and and in fact
you could quit the team and keep your scholarship because your scholarship was not tied in any way
to athletic performance
or even participation
so this was
not surprisingly a matter of controversy and in the sixties there were several attempts %uh by usually
faculty
representatives from southern conferences
to institute a one-year scholarships instead of a four-year scholarship but it was recognized
at the conference that this would give an enormous amount of power to coaches
they could run off the players who they
you know didn't think measured up
despite their expectations in offering them scholarships
and
you know these controversies you know persisted through the sixties at several conventions
and then in nineteen seventy three
the one-year scholarships was simply instituted
and without
discussion recorded in the proceedings at the conventions it was kind of a back
room deal and agreement you know
coaches had always wanted this but also this was a time
when there was a lot of
of %uh political unrest in the country
and racial unrest in the country
and a lot of football programs were experiencing these themselves there were
you know the southeastern conference and other southern conferences we're integrating their football
programs for the first time
northern campuses were having these %uh
these conflicts between black football players and their coaches
%uh it it seems of course nobody would acknowledge this openly but it seems that the
one-year scholarship in addition to giving
coaches the power over their athletes
in terms of their performance whether it measured up it gave them control over
their
their attitudes and behaviors and so on I I think the unrest and particularly the
racial unrest of the late sixties early seventies was a factor here
but anyway what came out of of the ninety seven three
NCAA convention and then the following August at a special convention
%uh football was divided into three divisions one two and three
in order to acknowledge that some
schools were competing at a higher level than others
what you had was a more
focused %uh group of institutions committed to big-time football
who are now able to admit virtually anybody they want
from from the high school ranks
%uh and that includes now a fully integrated
collegiate athletic system and so
all these young African-American kids from woefully underfunded
formally segregated schools were suddenly eligible to play college sports you know
whether or not their schools had adequately
prepared them for for the college educational experience
and they had one-year scholarships only and their
continuing of their financial aid was dependent on how well they pleased their football coach