The NCAA and its dwindling power: 10 key moments that led to its precarious

For most of its history, the NCAA held unchecked authority over the conduct of its member institutions, often imposing severe sanctions for significant rules violations.

In 1987, the SMU football program received the “death penalty” when its boosters repeatedly were caught making illicit payments to players. Michigan’s basketball program was forced to vacate its 1992 and 1993 Final Four appearances when a booster laundered gambling money to pay stars like Chris Webber. In 2010, USC’s football program received a two-year postseason ban and lost 30 scholarships because of gifts Reggie Bush and his family received from prospective agents.

But during the past decade, schools have lawyered up and fought back. In 2017, North Carolina successfully wiggled out of academic fraud allegations involving hundreds of athletes. In subsequent years, prominent basketball programs like Kansas caught up in an FBI bribery investigation received minimal punishments.

Meanwhile, the NCAA has been racking up larger legal defeats, like the 2021 Alston Supreme Court case, reducing its standing regarding its amateurism model.

Currently, Tennessee’s football program is being investigated for alleged recruiting inducements to five-star quarterback Nico Iamaleava, who in 2022 signed an $8 million NIL deal with a sports agency that operates the Vols’ NIL collective. Not only is the school publicly firing back at the NCAA, but its state’s attorney general is seeking an injunction that, if granted, would suspend all restrictions over the use of NIL in recruiting. It would be quite the existential blow to an organization that used to prohibit schools from providing cream cheese for their athletes’ bagels.

Between those and a handful of ongoing federal antitrust suits for other matters, the long-beleaguered NCAA is treading perilously close to the brink of destruction.

The ongoing erosion of the NCAA’s authority has been decades in the making, through a series of costly lawsuits, external pressures and self-inflicted wounds. The following is a timeline of 10 key moments that led to its current, precarious status:

1977: Tark the Shark takes a bite out of enforcement

In 1976, the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions mandated that UNLV suspend anti-establishment coach Jerry Tarkanian for two seasons upon finding him guilty of 10 violations. Tarkanian sued, claiming he had been deprived of his due process rights, and the Nevada Supreme Court ruled in his favor, vacating the suspension. Eleven years later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision, but the message was sent.

The NCAA clamped down on its investigators, making it harder for them to stamp out cheaters. In 2001, ESPN.com found that the annual average of major cases in football had dropped from 5.4 in the 1980s to 2.2 in the 1990s.