Walter Byers, American sports executive (born March 13, 1922, Kansas City, Mo.—died May 26, 2015, near Emmett, Kan.), as executive director of the NCAA (1951–87), transformed it from a loose and largely powerless association into a large profitable organization with strong authority over every aspect of collegiate sports; he later declared the system he created to be corrupt and unfair. Byers, who attended the University of Iowa but did not graduate, was assistant sports information director of the Big Ten Conference when he was chosen as the NCAA’s first leader. He established an office in his hometown of Kansas City. In 1952 he made an agreement with NBC for televising a weekly football game, with much of the revenue to be paid directly to the NCAA. The association’s control of TV rights became increasingly lucrative over the succeeding decades, even for a time outstripping revenue earned by the NFL. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (1984) that football universities were entitled to sell television rights to their own games without going through the NCAA, Byers focused on selling TV rights to college basketball games and more than made up the loss of revenue from football games. Byers, who was credited with having coined the term student-athlete, strongly supported the NCAA’s actions to enforce the amateur status of the university students who played sports. Toward the end of his tenure, however, he began to see the system as outdated and unworkable, because athletes were prevented from earning any type of compensation, including endorsements or gifts. He maintained that a large percentage of the college athletic programs were cheating and thought that a new system needed to be devised. Byers’s memoir, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, was published in 1995.
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National Collegiate Athletic Association
National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), organization in the United States that administers intercollegiate athletics. It was formed in 1906 as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association to draw up competition and eligibility rules for gridiron football and other intercollegiate sports. The NCAA adopted its current name in 1910. In 1921 it conducted…