Book review: This story of the NCAA of old is still plenty relevant today

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

My summer vacation continues, and today we’ve got Jim Watkins, an assistant professor in sport studies at Mississippi State, pitching in with a freelance story, a review of a recent book that will definitely be of interest to many Extra Points readers.

by Jim Watkins

Walter Byers, the executive director of the NCAA from the 1950s into the late ’80s, is one of the most important people in the history of college athletics. As I would tell my students at Mississippi State in a sport history class, “He will be on the test.” In 1997, Byers wrote his own book, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” about his time with the NCAA. It takes the extremely critical stance you would expect based on the title. But despite Byers’s impact, that remained the only book written about him until last year, when well-known sports historian Ronald Smith published “Walter Byers and the NCAA.”. 

Readers should not go into this book expecting a biography. Instead, it focuses on Byers’s time running the NCAA. Smith — who played baseball and basketball at Penn State, later taught sport history there and has written several books about college athletics — argues Byers was a failure, although not a complete and utter one. More specifically, Smith portrays Byers as a successful, shrewd and fierce negotiator with major television networks, a successful revenue generator. But Byers could not defend the amateur ideals that he claimed to hold.

Byers’s career coincided with a transformational period within the NCAA. He started working for the organization when it was in its first decade of actually enforcing rules, rather than functioning as a glorified advising board. In addition, television went from a non-factor to being important enough to warrant a Supreme Court case. In the book, Smith connects how Byers tried to help the NCAA solidify itself as a strong enforcement body through the television dollars he helped procure. At one point, Smith notes that the leaders of the NCAA lauded Byers for his ability to enforce, not create, policies. For example, Smith discusses how academic reforms under Byers’s watch, such as the 1.6 GPA rule and Prop 48, were implemented only to later be weakened or totally dissolved.

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The book’s focus on the power wielded by Byers and the NCAA makes it a particularly relevant read today. Throughout, Smith identifies how outside influences such as professional leagues, the changing political landscape and the legal system dictated NCAA policy. The book also provides historical context in regard to how much power someone within the NCAA’s current leadership, such as president Charlie Baker, can truly maintain.

Instead of following a chronological timeline, the book is organized into chapters that each cover one major historical topic. The introduction focuses on Byers’s personal life, which Smith largely ignores afterward, and the incredibly strained relationship between Byers and his daughter. Smith points out that Byers’s personality, shown to an extreme in his family relationships, exemplified the type of leader he was with the NCAA. That being said, while the story is attention-grabbing and provides some insight into Byers’s personality, it could come across as going too far. Another story related to Byers’s career with the NCAA likely exists that would have demonstrated his personality just as effectively. 

The variety of historical moments Smith covers is by far my favorite thing about the book. Smith discusses attempts at academic reforms, the NCAA’s takeover of women’s college sports, the Jerry Tarkanian case and the growth of television rights in basketball and football — and of course there is a chapter about “Unsportsmanlike Conduct.” Readers will learn quite a bit about the history of college sports in the second half of the 20th century simply from Smith’s description of how Byers was involved.

Smith relies on a ton of sources. As the author of several college sport history books, he has visited a lot of university archives and still has access to that material. A minor issue is that most of the archives Smith mentions using are located in the Eastern half of the United States. There is enough criticism and praise of Byers in the primary sources Smith discusses, however, that a reader still likely will get a good understanding of how he was perceived across the nation. 

Smith could have improved his sourcing by using case briefs in his discussion of lawsuits the NCAA faced while Byers was in charge. Smith does cite some case briefs, but he does not do so for the Tarkanian lawsuit — where the controversial UNLV coach sued the NCAA over due process — or Georgia’s and Oklahoma’s historic case over the NCAA rules that limited how often college football games could be televised. As culturally important as college athletics is, lawsuits almost never reach the Supreme Court, but both of those did. As someone who teaches a sport law course, I might be biased, but the case briefs would have provided more information about the NCAA’s legal strategies Byers tried to use. In Smith’s defense, he does make the consequences and importance of these cases clear enough, and they help reinforce his view that Byers failed to protect the amateur ideals that he believed in. 

I would have liked more analysis of how Byers flipped from an ardent defender of amateurism, for decades, to referring to the NCAA as a corrupt cartel after he retired. As Smith rightly points out, this change in attitude makes it look like Byers took the NCAA’s money for years, then all of a sudden just happened to stop believing in all of the rules he had gotten paid to enforce. Before I even opened the book, I wondered what made Byers change his rhetoric. 

Smith implies, quite interestingly, that the formation of the College Football Association (CFA) and the NCAA’s loss in the historic lawsuit against Oklahoma and Georgia drove Byers over the edge. Considering how much money he’d helped the NCAA make through television, this makes a lot of sense. And to Smith’s credit, he concedes that there isn’t a ton of historical evidence that the CFA actually transformed how Byers thought about college sports. He admits it is more of an educated guess. While Smith is very transparent on this point, both he and I are left wondering if Byers gradually became disillusioned with the NCAA or if he had what Smith calls a “road to Damascus” experience. 

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Smith is up front about his personal views of and interactions with Byers, and that candor is a strength of the book. Smith is highly critical of amateurism, based on his experience as a college athlete and accomplished historian, so he’s naturally inclined to criticize how Byers defended it. Even so, he shares how highly he thought of Byers as a writer, and those details help Smith maintain credibility as someone who simply disagreed with Byers’s views, rather than someone who felt tons of animosity towards him. 

The book’s conclusion seems a little passive. In the final sentences, Smith suggests that he would rather not define Byers’s legacy and says he believes that is work that future historians could take up. While it is fair of Smith to not claim sole rights to defining Byers’s legacy, the numerous examples where he argues that Byers could not uphold amateurisms suggests Smith views that as his legacy. 

“Walter Byers and the NCAA” is certainly worthwhile reading for Extra Points subscribers. Anybody who works in college athletics should be especially knowledgeable about the growth and history of the NCAA Smith capably describes. Thanks to all of the different historical areas Smith covers, any reader should find a few topics they are exceptionally intrigued by.