(11-05-2019 12:58 PM)arkstfan Wrote: Actually two things justified.
One. The public or at least the public and status considered professional sports to be coarse and vulgar. That's why the Olympics clung to amateurism as long as they did.
Athletics were supposed to be a pass time to develop oneself and stay healthy while learning the virtues that would make one a good soldier (read officer).
Second. The most respected academic institutions in the country rejected the idea of ability based aid, the rest halved the baby by limiting it to tuition, fees, books, room and board plus an allowance for laundry and other expenses that was taken away in the early 1970's. That figure when adopted in the 50's was pretty close in buying power to what the current stipends for cost of attendance pay, by 1971 not so much.
Those reasons are not what I'd call justifications.
That elitist attitude was not so prevalent pre-50s that people did not show up to games and pay good money to watch the players go at it. The fans back then knew that there were players who were being paid in one way and/or another. That's pro college ball, not amateur, and those fans yummed it up...
Since the demand for pro college ball was there (still is, always will be), there was, IMO, no justification for fixing pay. It served no pro-competitive purpose. All it did was cheat the players who would have been paid more -- the irrational, immoral beliefs of classist butt-heads in ivory towers notwithstanding.
The other schools ought to have owned up to the fact that college ball was business and that it had been for decades. They should have told the elitist pearl clutchers to go take a flying row off the edge of a waterfall. They should have properly compensated their own players.
Athletics as just a healthy, virtuous "avocation," as the Cartel calls it, was completely unjustified once it became business, and so too artificially low caps on pay. That's how I see it, anyway.
EDIT: I'm reminded of the following passage from a 90 year old article in the
Cornell Alumni News. For context, the Carnagie Foundation had just been reported that Cornell was one of only a few surveyed schools that did not pay varsity players in some way. Seems the writer here questioned the virtue of Cornell's own approach.