On college campuses across the country the academic year is winding down — making it an opportune time to review the changing landscape of college athletics, says Warren Zola, assistant dean for Graduate Programs, Carroll School of Management at Boston College, for the Huffington Post. The nature, business, and management of college sports has been debated and criticized these past 12 months more so than any other period in recent history, and the NCAA is facing scrutiny on whether it has deviated too far from its stated mission: to ensure that college athletics is “an integral part of higher education with a focus on the development of our student-athletes.”
For the first time, critique of college athletics has migrated from sports pages to mainstream media. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch published his essay “The Shame of College Sports” in The Atlantic Monthly last fall, illuminating the business of college athletics in ways never seen before. Frank Deford, an Emmy award winner and six-time U.S. Sportswriter of the Year called the piece “the most important article ever written about college sports.” The onslaught of media coverage and vilification of the NCAA has led us to question the fundamental role of college athletics within higher education…