As professional sports grew ever more lucrative, the risk of losing out on a fortune became a threat to the credibility of the NCAA amateur ethos
It was founded in 1906 to improve player safety but resisting accountability for injuries has long been at the heart of the NCAA’s insistence that college athletes are amateurs.
US college sports’ major governing body began using the term “student athlete” as a legal strategy when the widow of a man named Ray Dennison unsuccessfully sought benefits after he died in 1955 as a result of a head injury suffered while playing football for a college team in Colorado. The institution, a court declared, was “not in the football business”.
