ABSTRACT
College football thrived in the television era. In the 1960s alone, attendance doubled from 10 million a year to 20 million. Once colleges overcame their reluctance to televise their games, strategic innovations and effective promotion brought new excitement to the sport, and created an enormous television audience, which translated into a sharp rise in the price that institutions received for television contracts. The enormous growth in revenue turned big-time college sports–primarily football and men’s basketball–into a powerful economic engine that delighted a broadening range of fans. It also magnified the power of the NCAA and intensified debates over the relationship between sports programs and colleges’ broader educational missions. In 1951, a college basketball point-shaving scandal made it clear that students and alumni were far from the only people with stakes in college games. The high stakes of national exposure put tremendous pressure on coaches and alumni groups to cheat on NCAA rules, and many did. Colleges and universities would continue to wrestle with these challenges for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
