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Same Players, Different Game: An Examination of the Commercial College Athletics Industry
In this thought-provoking new book, John C. Barnes examines the contemporary state of commercial college athletics as a guide for current and potential administrators, coaches, regents, and others involved in collegiate athletic operations and decision-making. Each chapter provides an overview of an industry shaped by such current realities as Title IX requirements, commercial investments, student testing, and television contracts. Barnes provides an accessible outline of the historical background and potential future of the commercial college athletics industry from a nonjudgmental perspective. Same Players, Different Game not only serves as a text and guide for governance and leadership but also as a primer for the economic and political realities of modern college athletics that students and sports fans will find fascinating.
248 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2020
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May 26, 2021
The (don’t call it professional) world of US college sport occupies a distinctive place in both national and global sporting cultures. In its highest echelon it is all but professional, highly commercialised, high value and big money. As we’re also seeing in the approaches to play-during-a-pandemic (I write in a time-of-Covid), it seems also to be realm of extreme coercion and abuse where players matter less than the game, the institution and the money. This echelon is the form of college sport that has the highest profile, generates enormous income for a small number of universities and determines our perception of ‘college sport’. It is also an institution that at that level is dominated by (men’s) basketball and football.
As John Barnes shows in the management studies oriented exploration of that elite level, these highest levels of college sport are also fractious, contested and arena of profound struggles over policy and practice, and increasingly characterised by income and practice inequalities and dealing with the emergence of what he labels a winner-takes-all market. At the heart of his analysis, although it only becomes obvious on the second half of the book, is an issue that bedevils all of sport’s commercialised institutions – that it, the contradiction between the capitalist drive to market dominance and the essential role of outcome uncertainty and therefore performance equality (or comparability) between sports teams. This contradiction means that ‘market’ dominance by a team or club risks destroying sport’s fundamental appeal – uncertainty of outcome.
In focusing on the elite of college sport, Barnes directs his attention to parts of the NCAA’s Div-1-A (the most corporate tier of college sports’ most corporate institution – the National Collegiate Athletic Association), emphasising those teams/universities most likely to participate in the two major end of season football competitions. There is a logic to that in that football is by far the most expensive college sports (even though men’s basketball generates more income for the NCAA).
Although containing some solid historical contextualisation, the discussion focuses mainly on contemporary and current issues in elite, commercial college sport with a more sophisticated contextualisation lying in a sceptical exploration of current trends in commercialising higher education. This discussion, in part, explains why commercial sport has such a comfortable home in some parts of the US higher education system and equally why lower divisions in the NCAA’s structure are going down different paths. This discussion is supplemented and expended well by the subsequent chapter exploring the contradictions and background to ideas of the student athlete. Barnes is most secure in this aspect of the discussion and the subsequent section exploring trends towards inequality in the college sport sector. Elsewhere, and especially in the discussion of the sector’s growing financial power he is heavily reliant on legal judgements (as he is in other aspects of text) which he struggles to bring to life, in part it seems out of a caution regarding case content, but also because in some cases the case turns on administrative technicalities that are, by their nature, hard to make ‘exciting’ for wider audiences.
That criticism aside, this is an insightful discussion of contemporary issues, with all the dangers of currency that involves, and Barnes has done well, in most cases, to craft his discussion to minimise threats to currency – although in some aspects such as the player payments question that is nearly impossible given the extent and rapidity of change in those issues. The publishers could have ensured proofreading picked up some glaring issues (in a couple of places there is near repetition of paragraphs on the same or adjacent pages, and although typos are minimal some a glaring in their erroneousness – the second ‘r’ in Barack Obama’s first name for instance, which may well have been an autocorrect error).
The bigger limitation is that it is not entirely clear who Barnes is writing for; in places the text reads as a critical scholarly analysis, in others he appears to have upper level undergraduate and graduate students in mind while in places the tone becomes almost conversational. While helpful for those of us outside the USA or distant from US college sport cultures some of this is helpful, it has the effect of weakening the coherence of the text.
Even with this shortcoming, however, this remains a useful and insightful contribution exploring and analysing the current state of and background to key issues in highest level sport in US higher education and its wider contexts.
As John Barnes shows in the management studies oriented exploration of that elite level, these highest levels of college sport are also fractious, contested and arena of profound struggles over policy and practice, and increasingly characterised by income and practice inequalities and dealing with the emergence of what he labels a winner-takes-all market. At the heart of his analysis, although it only becomes obvious on the second half of the book, is an issue that bedevils all of sport’s commercialised institutions – that it, the contradiction between the capitalist drive to market dominance and the essential role of outcome uncertainty and therefore performance equality (or comparability) between sports teams. This contradiction means that ‘market’ dominance by a team or club risks destroying sport’s fundamental appeal – uncertainty of outcome.
In focusing on the elite of college sport, Barnes directs his attention to parts of the NCAA’s Div-1-A (the most corporate tier of college sports’ most corporate institution – the National Collegiate Athletic Association), emphasising those teams/universities most likely to participate in the two major end of season football competitions. There is a logic to that in that football is by far the most expensive college sports (even though men’s basketball generates more income for the NCAA).
Although containing some solid historical contextualisation, the discussion focuses mainly on contemporary and current issues in elite, commercial college sport with a more sophisticated contextualisation lying in a sceptical exploration of current trends in commercialising higher education. This discussion, in part, explains why commercial sport has such a comfortable home in some parts of the US higher education system and equally why lower divisions in the NCAA’s structure are going down different paths. This discussion is supplemented and expended well by the subsequent chapter exploring the contradictions and background to ideas of the student athlete. Barnes is most secure in this aspect of the discussion and the subsequent section exploring trends towards inequality in the college sport sector. Elsewhere, and especially in the discussion of the sector’s growing financial power he is heavily reliant on legal judgements (as he is in other aspects of text) which he struggles to bring to life, in part it seems out of a caution regarding case content, but also because in some cases the case turns on administrative technicalities that are, by their nature, hard to make ‘exciting’ for wider audiences.
That criticism aside, this is an insightful discussion of contemporary issues, with all the dangers of currency that involves, and Barnes has done well, in most cases, to craft his discussion to minimise threats to currency – although in some aspects such as the player payments question that is nearly impossible given the extent and rapidity of change in those issues. The publishers could have ensured proofreading picked up some glaring issues (in a couple of places there is near repetition of paragraphs on the same or adjacent pages, and although typos are minimal some a glaring in their erroneousness – the second ‘r’ in Barack Obama’s first name for instance, which may well have been an autocorrect error).
The bigger limitation is that it is not entirely clear who Barnes is writing for; in places the text reads as a critical scholarly analysis, in others he appears to have upper level undergraduate and graduate students in mind while in places the tone becomes almost conversational. While helpful for those of us outside the USA or distant from US college sport cultures some of this is helpful, it has the effect of weakening the coherence of the text.
Even with this shortcoming, however, this remains a useful and insightful contribution exploring and analysing the current state of and background to key issues in highest level sport in US higher education and its wider contexts.
Displaying 1 of 1 review