National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has rules that govern the conduct of athletic students. The laws’ framework affects the students’ conditions in participating in colleges, their recruitment, and their student-athletes’ overall behavior. Therefore, the complexity of the NCAA rules and their impact on athletics’ day-to-day operations determine the future of athletes’ talents. The scope and structure of NCAA rules seek to govern intercollegiate athletics, hence affecting the mechanism of talent development. Also, these laws commercialize intercollegiate education and determine the students’ admission into the institutions.
Literature Review
Scope and Structure of the NCAA Rules
The source, scope, and structure of NCAA laws determine the framework governing NNCAA sponsored intercollegiate athletes. Vanover and DeBowes (2013) underscore that NCAA has organized these regulations within thirty-three articles. The NCAA manual covers the principles for intercollegiate athletes’ conduct and practice, hence providing a framework of operating bylaws. On the same breadth, The NCAA model of governance informs an incentive-based sports education where student-athletes do not receive any compensation but rather scholarship attendance (Jessop, 2019). Therefore, NCCAA has a framework that limits how student-athlete engage and interact with sports agents. In essence, the policies and procedures of implementing legislative action impact the mechanism of enforcement, the conduct of NCAA championship, athletics certification programs, and the placement of athletes in teams.
The foundation of NCAA rules gears to providing a framework that defines the limits of the students-athletics. Current regulations address the principle of amateurism whereby athletes become an integral part of educational programs (Jessop, 2019). For this reason, the scope of NCAA rules helps to demarcate intercollegiate athletics from professional sports. Intercollegiate athletics’ commercialization stemmed from the need to redefine the education approach from academic-based to talent-based (NCAA, 2021). Most of the rules emerge with the recommendation from internal committees, which determines the relationship between the student-athletes, their sports agents, violations of the regulatory framework, and the penalty against these violations. In most cases, the existing framework gives sports agents more power to abuse student-athletes’ interests, impacting their growth and transition.
Impact on Student-Athletes
NCAA programs are both student-athlete and institutional-oriented. Most NCAA divisions, leagues, and sponsorships tend to focus on co-curricular experience impacting the participant’s academic performance. Scholars have noted that NCAA operates from a self-regulating model that standardizes student-athletes and agents’ rules of engagement. The objective of such model is to create a greater transparency in sports industry that results in safeguarding the interests of the students’ athletics (Jessop, 2019). The drawback of institutionalizing a standardized framework of law focuses only on the sports activities in the overall educational experiences. The framework of the law offers athletic scholarships leading to the presumption that student-athlete will have an inert discretion and place the highest priority on their academic endeavors (Schaeperkoetter, Bass, and Gordon, 2015). However, the philosophy that designs the NCAA laws fails in acknowledging the extent to which the overall quality of educational experiences depends on completing academic programs. Instead, NCAA establishes the environment of student athletics activity, which affects other academic and educational experiences.
NCAA has brought contention between academic success and college athletics. In higher education, intercollegiate athletics compliments academic missions. Research outlines that NCAA rules have created avenues for commercializing, exploiting, and distracting intercollegiate athletics (Jessop, 2019). The outcome of this impact is detrimental to the objective of ensuring proper emphasis on promoting competitive equity in educational goals. From this perspective, most student-athletics fail to realize that they are first students before they are athletics. On a different note, research suggests that institutions of higher learning enrich their academic missions by including college athletics in their educational programs (Vanover and DeBowes, 2013). NCAA’s standard view and its regulations around intercollegiate athletics influence institutions to emphasize sports and extracurricular activities. The opinion indicates how student-athletes tend to be absent from their institutional, thereby affecting the colleges’ academic integrity.
An increasing number of students are becoming renowned due to their prowess in utilizing their talents but do not receive compensation. The rules and regulations that define NCAA programs hold that student-athletes do not get salaries. The laws show a clear-cut distinction where student-athlete are amateurs and note professionals in athletics. McElveen and Ibele (2019) criticized the framework of NCAA law in commercializing intercollegiate sports. Although the criticism mainly impacts Division III athletic participation on academic success, the laws have made it possible for agents and institutions to transform intercollegiate athletics into a competitive and commercialized entity that distracts and obstructs student-athletes from successful academic performance. The faculty plays a leading role in implementing the laws of the NCAA. From this angle, academic integrity in higher education depends on the student’s culture and the relationship between students and agents of student-athletes. The perceived difference in student experience and engagement between athletes and none athletes creates an avenue that is challenging on s several levels (Vanover and DeBowes, 2013). The students’ engagement is plays a critical function or students’ retention and graduation rate. With the law requiring student-athlete to participate in their sporting events, they miss out on coursework, making them less likely to complete their degree programs.
NCAA affects the finances in intercollegiate athletics. Expenditure outpaces revenues in the multibillion-dollar industry. Bongiovanni (2020) explains the extent to which NCAA examines sits revenues and spending among the Division 1 athletics programs. Institutional spending on athletics has shown the inclination of colleges to finance athletic programs over the academic purpose. As a result, the educations have compromised amoral authority because their financing priorities emphasize NCAA programs at the expense of their primary educational missions. Although many athletic programs justify their increased budget on the objective that athletic programs enhance the institutions’ profile. It costs the educational institutions more than $42 million to pay for players, many of whom do not become professional players (Bookers, 2020). Mguye (2014) underscores that many institutions impose mandatory fees to cater to the annual subsidy. For this reason, the institutions hope to receive state support to supplementing athletic programs. The outcomes led to an increase in expenses than the revenue generated by the athletics.
NCAA has traditionally restricted any college student from receiving any amount of payment through outside employment. Research shows that NCAA has allowed student-athletics to get involved in part-time jobs during the school year (Bongiovanni, 2020). Cases of student-athletes receiving any pay or outside employment indicate the NCAA laws’ weaknesses in creating an environment where the student athletic nurture their talents as they excel in their programs. Most of these students have gone professional and have been unable to return to college (Bookers, 2020). Such an impact will lead to the interference of the education of a significant number of professional players. It would not be appropriate to have a field full of players who are not learned. Besides, there have been concerns that paying student-athletes could further decline graduation rates among those players. The players are already under scholarship, which is, in fact, even easier to get as compared to an academic scholarship. If the student-athletes want to consider money as an incentive, then money should also be an incentive for those future scientists or teachers. The colleges incur various expenses to facilitate players in carrying out their services as they represented the institution. It would also not be fair to pay the student-athletes because other extra-curricular activities are participating in the school drama or the marching band that the institutions forego their payments. The colleges need to consider the number of students under scholarship. NCAA has made this an essential principle in enhancing the talent development of the students.
Conclusion
From the preceding discussion, various scholars indicate different impacts that the NCAA laws and regulations have on the student-athletes, the institutions, and the overall future of the sporting career. While education has taken different trajectories in the recent past, focusing on talent-based education is critical for a sustainable society. The inclusion of student athletics formulates the structure of the NCAA in advancing the pedagogy of talent-based education. However, the colleges’ revenue, to a large extent, benefits the same student-athletes either directly or indirectly. NCAA should consider the student-athletes as any other participants in amateurism. The sports that make the most revenue for many schools are football and basketball. Part of that money helps to develop additional programs that do not make money for the schools or even make the institutions lose money.
References
Bongiovanni, M. (2020). Compensation for the Players: An Analysis of the Compensation of an N.C.A.A. Athlete. https://research.library.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=fulr-online-blog.
Booker, B. (2020). College Athletes Are Now Closer to Getting Paid After NCAA Board OKs Plan. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/29/847781624/college-players-are-now-closer-to-getting-paid-after-ncaa-board-oks-plan.
Jessop, A. (2019). Students First: The Need for Adoption of Education and Incentive-Based Sport Agent Policies by NCAA Division I FBS Member Institutions. Journal of Legal Aspects of Sports, 197–222.
Mguye. (2014). What is the Role of College Athletics, and Should Student-Athletes be Paid? Valparaiso University. Retrieved from https://www.valpo.edu/president/editorials/what-is-the-role-of-college-athletics-and-should-student-athletes-be-paid/.
McElveen, M., & Ibele, K. (2019). Retention and Academic Success of First-Year Student-Athletes and Intramural Sports Participants. Recreational Sports Journal, 5–9.
Schaeperkoetter, C. C., Bass, J. R., & Gordon, B. S. (2015). Student-Athlete School Selection. Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, 8(2), 266-286.
Vanover, E. T., & DeBowes, M. M. (2013). The impact of intercollegiate athletics in higher education. Academic Perspectives in Higher Education, 1(1), 1.
NCAA. (2021). Student-Athletes. NCAA.org – The Official Site of the NCAA. https://www.ncaa.org/student-athletes#:~:text=Nearly%20half%20a%20million%20NCAA,and%20access%20to%20academic%20advisors.