How college athletics lost its way and what UW can do to reverse the madness

By all appearances, the major intercollegiate sports — football and basketball — are on their way to being completely professionalized. The Wyoming Cowboys will become Wyoming’s own Broncos and Nuggets. But is the professionalization of collegiate athletics what we really want? At issue is the original spirit underlying intercollegiate athletics: competitive amateurism, its relevance to the college experience, and more generally, to the exemplary notion of a sound mind in a sound body.  

In my dictionary, amateur is a good word, describing someone who engages in pursuits such as performances or sports for their own sake, as a pastime rather than as a profession. Best known as the quarterback who led the University of Michigan Wolverines to victory in the 1965 Rose Bowl, Bob Timberlake embodied amateurism, putting studies first. Memories become blurry over time, but as a graduate student, I do recall a conversation with Bob and another classmate over coffee at the Michigan Union, not about sports but about the 16th-century religious reformer John Calvin. Timberlake had a brief stint with the New York Giants, attended Princeton Theological Seminary, became an ordained Presbyterian minister and has devoted his career to helping people.  

When I moved to Wyoming 53 years ago, I realized that University of Wyoming football and basketball played a more significant role than simply providing opportunities for a few players, and entertainment for a lot of fans. In 1971, our stadium during Homecoming games was still touted as momentarily hosting the largest city in Wyoming. Homecoming continues as a wonderful opportunity for residents from every county to celebrate together as Wyomingites. Goodness knows, Wyoming needs more community celebrations!

Monetizing intercollegiate athletes has a long, often murky tradition in our nation. In the olden days, players in the major sports received perks, but they were limited to scholarships, preferential treatment on living arrangements, but no outright cash. Still, for recruits from low-income families, such perks provided an attractive opportunity for earning a first-in-the-family college education.

But now, any pretense that athletes in the major sports are scholar-athletes is no more. Under pressure from special interests, the NCAA has endorsed a slippery path for Division 1-A colleges to contract with athletes as paid professionals. 

As an intermediate step, the NCAA has outlined the means through which a college athlete can receive financial compensation for use of his or her “name, image, and likeness (NIL).” Two years ago, four highly-regarded trusted advisors — all UW alums — devised a way to promote local charities while hoping to ensure that UW could compete successfully for star athletes. Monies raised by 1Wyo, a Wyoming nonprofit, would compensate those athletes for allowing their names, images and likenesses to promote local charities. The plan depended upon donations to 1Wyo classified as tax deductible. The IRS denied nonprofit status to 1Wyo as it has done to most NIL collectives.

But now, subject to approval of a legal settlement, the NCAA will allow college athletes to be paid directly by the schools themselves. The NCAA will make available billions of dollars: first, toward compensating athletes who competed over the past 10 years; second, to a revenue-sharing model allowing schools to distribute monies directly to athletes going forward. Exactly how this settlement will work — who gets paid, and how much — is yet to be established.

Colleges and universities today are under fire for various reasons, mostly legitimate. The professionalization of intercollegiate athletics reveals a broader decades-long trend away from undergraduates learning lifelong skills and developing good character to vocational and technical training for specific high-demand jobs that pay well. It’s only later in life that we understand money alone does not guarantee happiness.  

Having lived in Wyoming by choice for all these years, my sense is that participating in the Big Sky Conference (NCAA Division 1-AA) would be far more in keeping with our Wyoming values and way of life. To be sure, mere discussion of such a suggestion generates immediate and overwhelming opposition. Nonetheless, I would like to think that our university board of trustees has the courage to turn down millions of non-education dollars to protect the collegiate integrity of the athletic program and the teaching mission of the institution.