More than 20 years of research and work. Six years of writing. The road to the publication of The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes: An Amateurism That Never Was was a long one for University of South Carolina Department of Sport and Entertainment Management professors Richard Southall and Mark Nagel and their co-authors. Their efforts were recently rewarded, as they received the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport’s prestigious Outstanding Book Award at the 2024 NASSS Conference in Chicago. 

Southall and Nagel collaborated with co-authors Professor Ellen Staurowsky of Ithaca College, Professor Richard Karcher of Eastern Michigan University and Professor Joel Maxcy of Drexel University on the book, a well-constructed and reasoned debunking of the mythology of amateurism in big-time college sport. This is the first book by professors from any of these universities (including the University of South Carolina) to earn the NASSS Outstanding Book Award, presented annually since 1993.

“Richard and I and others have been working on this for a long time in a lot of compartments. And so being able to kind of pull a lot of different things together and in one way that really tells a story about what's actually happening and also what's actually not happening in big time college sport is a tremendous amount of work coming together in one place,” Nagel says.

Though it reflects research from much farther back, the co-authors began writing the book in 2016, while of course also continuing their teaching duties and many other research projects.

“It was really just trying to get it done. And then we were fortunate in that a lot of changes began to happen. 2021 was when NIL magically came into existence and the use of collectives as a way to ‘pay’ athletes without really paying them In the sense of the compensation coming directly from the athletic departments. Then we just said, ‘Okay, we need to get this out because of what's happening in college sport. The model is changing right before our eyes,’ Southall says.

The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes: An Amateurism That Never Was, published in 2023 by The University of South Carolina Press, examines the history that led to the recent changes in college sport, as well as the groundwork for what may come next. It provides a comprehensive historical, sociological, legal, financial, and managerial argument for the reclassification of profit-athletes as employees. Such a reclassification would permit profit-athletes to gain not only fair financial compensation but also equal access to educational benefits that have been promised but systematically denied.

The authors trace how college sports, particularly in the “Power Four” conferences, have morphed into a hyper professionalized and commercialized sport-business enterprise. They provide evidence that at least since 1956 the NCAA's amateurism has been a collusive, exploitative, and racialized "pay for play" scheme that disproportionately affects Black profit-athletes. The authors cut through the institutional doublespeak of approved benefits, cost-of-attendance stipends, or name, image, likeness (NIL) collectives to lay bare the immorality of Power Five college sports.

The authors have not heard any rebuttal or other reaction from the NCAA, nor do they expect to.

“Really the last 10 years, the NCAA for the most part just completely ignored anything. I think they realized they were fighting enough battles in the court system to try to defend themselves against academics like us. That might have pointed out a number of different things,” Nagel says.

However, others have definitely taken notice. The book has raised awareness of issues in college sport, ones of which even some of those directly involved and affected were unaware.

“We've been contacted by various athletes, current and former, who have read the book, and it has opened their eyes to a lot of things that they hadn't thought about within the system. It's really hard to critique the system when you're in the system,” Southall says. “So I think part of what's happened with the book is it's allowed people to be reflective of the college system, the collegiate model that they used to determine that they moved away from, and it's given folks an opportunity to engage in self-examination. And so we're still hopeful that the book will help college athletes gain employment status and that the NCAA will still be held to the standard of not being able and allowed to violate the Sherman Act.” 

While written by academics, the authors believe the book might also interest those who are not academics, students, or even directly involved with the college sport industry.

"I think sometimes the things that you don't think on the surface are exciting, like antitrust law and marketing activities, turn out to be more so than you realize," Nagel says. "You don't necessarily have to be a diehard college sport fan or a diehard college sport critic to find things out of the book that will be very helpful across a lot of different professions or a lot of different areas of interest."

Southall agrees, adding “I think another thing people wouldn't expect to have so much in the book is how college sport has been a labor movement for about a hundred years. There's historical anecdotes and historical context for college athletes being paid for a number of years. It's just that the form of compensation has changed. I think people buy into ‘amateurism’ because they've heard the word amateurism so much over the years, but they don't understand that amateurism really has never existed in the college sport space. I think that's probably one of the biggest things that people will find when they read the book.”

The face of college athletics is changing fast, and the authors have already discussed a potential second edition of the book. Southall sums it up simply: “I think there's still more work to be done.”

The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes: An Amateurism That Never Was is available for purchase in paperback, hardback and as an ebook via  The University of South Carolina Press and on Amazon.