Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/20-512_gfbh.pdf
Page Number: 7.0

Cite as:  594 U. S. ____ (2021) 

3 

Opinion of the Court 

college sports to take off.  “By the late 1880s the traditional 
rivalry between Princeton and Yale was attracting 40,000 
spectators and generating in excess of $25,000 . . . in gate
revenues.”  Zimbalist  7.    Schools  regularly  had  “graduate 
students and paid ringers” on their teams.  Ibid. 

Colleges offered all manner of compensation to talented 
athletes.  Yale reportedly lured a tackle named James Ho-
gan with free meals and tuition, a trip to Cuba, the exclu-
sive right to sell scorecards from his games—and a job as a
cigarette agent for the American Tobacco Company.  Ibid.; 
see  also  Needham,  The  College  Athlete,  McClure’s  Maga-
zine, June 1905, p. 124.  The absence of academic residency 
requirements gave rise to “ ‘tramp athletes’ ” who “roamed 
the country making cameo athletic appearances, moving on
whenever and wherever the money was better.”  F. Dealy, 
Win at Any Cost 71 (1990).  One famous example was a law 
student  at  West  Virginia  University—Fielding  H.  Yost—
“who, in 1896, transferred to Lafayette as a freshman just 
in  time  to  lead  his  new  teammates  to  victory  against  its 
arch-rival,  Penn.”  Ibid.    The  next  week,  he  “was  back  at 
West  Virginia’s  law  school.”  Ibid.  College  sports  became 
such a big business that Woodrow Wilson, then President 
of  Princeton  University,  quipped  to  alumni  in  1890  that 
“ ‘Princeton is noted in this wide world for three things: foot-
ball, baseball, and collegiate instruction.’ ”  Zimbalist 7. 

By 1905, though, a crisis emerged.  While college football
was hugely popular, it was extremely violent.  Plays like the 
flying wedge and the players’ light protective gear led to 7
football fatalities in 1893, 12 deaths the next year, and 18 
in 1905.  Id., at 8.  President Theodore Roosevelt responded 
by convening a meeting between Harvard, Princeton, and
Yale to review the rules of the game, a gathering that ulti-
mately  led  to  the  creation  of  what  we  now  know  as  the 
NCAA.    Ibid.  Organized  primarily  as  a  standard-setting
body, the association also expressed a view at its founding 
about  compensating  college  athletes—admonishing  that