Byers could have fixed NCAA but didn’t

In the course of working on a book about the NCAA these past few years, I’ve found myself grappling with the legacy of Walter Byers.

Byers, who died this week at the age of 93, was the first genuine full-time employee of the NCAA, a role he assumed in 1951 when he was hired to be its executive director.

Although the NCAA had existed since 1906, it had always been a toothless thing, a membership association that operated out of a small office in the Big Ten’s Chicago headquarters and was run by college officials who all had day jobs.

A reform effort led to the hiring of Byers, who was 29, a former journalist and publicrelations man with no management experience. Yet he soon persuaded the member schools to punish the University of Kentucky’s basketball team, which had been implicated in a point-shaving scandal, by boycotting it for a season. This was the beginning of the NCAA’s formidable enforcement powers.

He then prodded the universities to give the NCAA sole authority to negotiate a collegefootball television contract. This also became a major source of Byers’ power.

By the time Byers stepped down in 1987, the NCAA was both powerful and profitable, with more than 1,000 member schools, 143 employees and an annual budget of more than $100 million, as Bruce Weber noted in his obituary in The New York Times. By most normal measures, Byers had a highly successful career.

Then again, the NCAA’s culture to this day — overly bureaucratic and rules-obsessed and lacking in empathy or compassion for the 18-year-old athletes who come under its purview — is one Byers instilled.

Byers also failed at the thing that he claimed to care most about. He wrote in his memoir that his goal was always to preserve “the amateur collegiate spirit I so much loved as a youth and admired as a young sports reporter.”

The NCAA developed an absurdly thick rule book on his watch meant to “keep college athletics more a student activity than a profession,” as he put it, none of which slowed the growing commercialism of college sports. His basketball tournament, now known as March Madness, became a moneymaking juggernaut. And in the early 1980s, when the big football schools sued the NCAA to regain their television rights, he stubbornly refused to negotiate a compromise that might have prevented the situation we have today, in which football-driven television contracts are the holy grail of college athletics. Instead, in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA, giving schools and conferences the right to cut their own television deals. Which they did.

By the time Byers retired, he had turned against his own creation, claiming that commercialism had won and the NCAA should face reality. In 1995, he published his memoir, entitled Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes. Much of it consisted of his recounting Sisyphean battles to keep college sports “clean” and high-stakes negotiations with the television networks.

But at points along the way, he also decried the “cartel” — his word — that he helped create. He used other words, too, including hypocrisy, which is what so many modern critics see when they look at the NCAA. Byers laid out a full-blown reform agenda, including eliminating “oppressive NCAA laws,” treating athletes the same as every other student on campus and allowing them to make money from endorsements. And he noted — with no apparent irony — how resistant the NCAA was to change.

When I first realized that the man who built the modern NCAA had many of the same complaints that critics have today, my jaw dropped. But I also couldn’t help noticing that he never accepted any blame for the onerous rules, or the egregious restrictions on athletes, or the NCAA’s resistance to change. Instead, he blamed “the new generation of coaches and staff” who “didn’t know and didn’t care to learn about old ideals.”

I suppose it’s a good thing that Byers eventually saw the harm his NCAA was doing to college athletes. But that insight came awfully late in the game. Had his change of heart come a decade earlier, when he might have been able to change the course of the organization he had built and transform its culture, college sports would have been far better served.

Besides, actions speak louder than words.

Joe Nocera

Joe Nocera writes for The New York Times.