The Lived Academic Experiences of Ncaa Division I Fbs and Fcs

THE LIVED ACADEMIC EXPERIENCES OF NCAA DIVISION I FBS AND FCS

FOOTBALL STUDENT-ATHLETES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

CHRISTOPHER HARRIS YANDLE

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty

in the Higher Education Leadership Program

of Tift College of Education

at Mercer University

in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Atlanta, GA

2019

Christopher Harris Yandle

THE LIVED ACADEMIC EXPERIENCES OF NCAA DIVISION I FBS AND FCS

FOOTBALL STUDENT-ATHLETES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

CHRISTOPHER HARRIS YANDLE

Approved:

______Pamela A. Larde, Ph.D. Date Dissertation Committee Chair

______Jeffrey Hugdahl, Ph.D. Date Dissertation Committee Member

______Clemmie B. Whatley, Ph.D., SPHR Date Dissertation Committee Member

______Jane West, Ed.D. Date Director of Doctoral Studies, Tift College of Education

______Thomas R. Koballa, Jr., Ph.D. Date Dean, Tift College of Education

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Ashleigh. For years, I had talked about the idea of pursuing my Ph.D. If it weren’t for her surprising me with a stack of GRE books and registering me for the test, none of this would have happened. She has always believed in me – even when I didn’t believe in myself. Without her unwavering support and steadfast belief in me as a husband, father, and a man, this journey would never have been possible. Thank you and I love you more than you will ever know.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No path in our life is ever a straight line, and my path to this Ph.D. has been anything but a straight line. My return to school in May 2016 began with uncertainty as I had recently lost my job and my future was bleak. Our lives were abruptly turned upside down and my family trusted me as I moved them back home to Louisiana. For the next three years, I logged more than 25,000 miles round-trip between our home in Louisiana, my parents’ home in Dothan, Alabama, and campus in Atlanta. I am not sure if I was crazy, dedicated or a combination of the two. While I sacrificed my health and sanity for

2:30 a.m. wake-up calls on Saturday mornings in order to make it to Atlanta in time for class, the true sacrifices were made by my wife Ashleigh and my kids, Addison and

Jackson. They gave up their time with me so that I can pursue my dream in hopes I could provide a better future for them. Addison and Jackson will not understand the impact of that sacrifice now, but I hope to one day share that impact with them when they are older.

To Dr. Pamela Larde, thank you for your guidance as my dissertation chair. She guided me in the right direction and kept me on the path to my desired destination. Her enthusiasm and support were exactly what I needed to get through some of the toughest parts of this process. Thank you, Dr. Larde.

I would also like to thank the two other members of my dissertation committee,

Dr. Jeffrey Hugdahl and Dr. Clemmie Whatley. They both have a strong understanding of

v college athletics and they provided strong feedback and unique insight which were critical to this dissertation.

No support system is complete without friends and family. My parents, my sister, and my in-laws followed my career in college athletics and have followed my academic career with the same passion. They have supported my endeavors no matter what and for that, I am forever grateful.

Finally, I’d like to thank two of my fellow cohort members, Brittney Hardin and

Monica Brooks. I leaned on them through the tough times of this program and they were a great sounding board when I needed it. I couldn’t have survived this journey with either of you!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

DEDICATION ...... iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

LIST OF TABLES ...... x

ABSTRACT ...... xi

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY ...... 1

Four Defining Moments ...... 2 Statement of the Problem ...... 8 Purpose of the Study ...... 11 Research Questions ...... 12 Theoretical Framework ...... 12 Methodology ...... 13 Procedures ...... 14 Rationale for the Study ...... 15 Population ...... 16 Limitations and Delimitations ...... 17 Definition of Terms ...... 18 Significance of the Study ...... 20 Subjectivity Statement ...... 21 Organization of the Study ...... 22

2. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE ...... 23

College Football in American Higher Education ...... 24 Amateurism ...... 26 College Football and the Pursuit of Prestige ...... 28 A Competitive Marketplace ...... 29 Marriage of Athletics and Academics ...... 31 Supporters of Athletics within Higher Education ...... 32

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued)

Page

The Over-Commercialization of Major College Athletics ...... 33 Big Budget Spending ...... 34 Profiting from Football ...... 37 Everyone’s Broke? ...... 38 The Student-Athlete ...... 39 Students or Employees? ...... 39 Byers Reflects on the Student-Athlete Term ...... 40 Skepticism of Student-Athlete Term ...... 41 Athletic Scholarships ...... 42 Ensuring Academic Success of the Student-Athlete ...... 44 Beginning of Academic Reform ...... 45 Academic Propositions ...... 48 NCAA’s Current Academic Metrics ...... 50 Negatives of Eligibility Standards ...... 53 Student-Athlete Perceptions of Academic Success ...... 55 Student-Athlete Climate Study ...... 56 GOALS Study ...... 57 Academic Clustering Among Student-Athletes ...... 58 Academic Clustering Studies ...... 59 Academic Clustering in Major Sports ...... 61 Athletic Identity and Stereotype Threat ...... 63 Stereotype Threat and the “Dumb Jock” Stereotype ...... 64 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy ...... 67 Summary ...... 69

3. METHODOLOGY ...... 70

Methodology ...... 71 Research Design ...... 71 Rationale for the Study ...... 72 Research Questions ...... 73 Population ...... 73 Site Selection ...... 74 Selection of Participants ...... 74 Data Collection ...... 75 Transcription ...... 76 Trustworthiness ...... 77 Data Analysis ...... 77 Limitations and Delimitations ...... 78 Summary ...... 78

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued)

Page

4. RESULTS ...... 80

Methodological Framework ...... 80 Research Sites ...... 81 Research Participants ...... 82 Findings ...... 88 Summary ...... 117

5. DISCUSSION ...... 118

Discussion of Research Questions ...... 118 Discussion of Themes ...... 122 Implications ...... 127 Recommendations for Future Research ...... 131 Summary of Study ...... 132 Final Thoughts ...... 133

REFERENCES ...... 134

APPENDICES ...... 158

Appendix A: IRB Approval ...... 159

Appendix B: Informed Consent ...... 161

Appendix C: Pre-Interview Script ...... 164

Appendix D: Interview Protocol ...... 166

LIST OF TABLES Table Page

1 Highest Revenue-Generating Public FBS Athletic Departments (2017-2018) ...... 35

2 Lowest Revenue-Generating Public FCS Athletic Departments (2017-2018) ...... 36

3 College Athletic Scholarship Limits ...... 43

4 History of NCAA Academic Reform ...... 47

5 Academic Progress Rate Differential between 2011 and 2017 ...... 52

6 Comparison of GSR and Graduation Cohorts of 2002 and 2018 ...... 52

7 Description of Study Participants, Metro University ...... 87

8 Description of Study Participants, City College ...... 87

9 Description of Themes ...... 89

ABSTRACT

THE LIVED ACADEMIC EXPERIENCES OF NCAA DIVISION I FBS AND FCS FOOTBALL STUDENT-ATHLETES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH Under the direction of PAMELA LARDE, Ph.D.

The purpose of this phenomenology study was to explore the internal and external factors that have contributed to the lived academic experiences and perceptions of academic success for NCAA Division I football student-athletes. The goal was to explore and conceptualize the lived academic experiences of football student-athletes. Utilizing a qualitative approach, the researcher conducted narrative interviews to understand the lived academic experiences at two institutions in the southeastern United States. Both

FBS and FCS participants shared similar and differing academic experiences. Similarities included comparing their academic experiences to a ‘roller coaster,’ considering themselves a student over an athlete, enduring disappointment by being redshirted as a freshman, and wishing they would have taken different courses or majoring in a different area. Differences included considering themselves an athlete over a student and having a negative or lack of a relationship with their professors. Based on their lived academic experiences, current and incoming student-athletes as well as athletic department personnel may find it beneficial to further understand student-athletes’ academic perceptions in order to offer a positive and fulfilling college experience.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY

Three years before leading The Ohio State University football team to the 2015

Bowl Championship Series National Championship, third-string quarterback Cardale

Jones’s now-deleted tweet shined light on the battle between academics and big-time athletics: “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS” (Bonesteel, 2017). That tweet was based on his frustration for getting a B on a sociology exam (Bonesteel, 2017). It took several years for Jones to shed the “we ain’t come to play SCHOOL” image when he graduated from The Ohio State University in May 2017 with a degree in African

American and African studies (Bonesteel, 2017). However, Jones’s initial tweet raised the question that scholars and critics of college athletics have been asking for nearly a century: are athletes in college for academics, to play sports, or both?

Saturdays in the fall have become synonymous with college football, and these

Saturdays have become day-long celebrations for the gladiators on the field – student- athletes. Since the birth of college football in 1869, an on-going power struggle has existed between American higher education and athletics (Thelin, 2002). Nearly 150 years later, research suggests that power struggle still remains in part as academic achievement levels of NCAA Division I football, and basketball student-athletes are

1 2 lower than non-athletes at the same Division I institutions (Adelman, 1990; Gaston, 2003;

Pascarella, Truckenmiller, Nora, Terenzini, Edison, & Hagedorn, 1999; Simons & Van

Rheenen, 2000; Suggs, 2003b; Thelin, 2002).

Four Defining Moments

Although the NCAA was founded in 1906 “to protect young people from the dangerous and exploitive athletics practices of the time” (NCAA, 2014), the Association has been the focus of intense national scrutiny regarding college athletics’ role within higher education. Statistical data indicates that NCAA Division I Football Bowl

Subdivision (FBS) and Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) football student- athletes are among the worst academic performers according to the NCAA’s own

Academic Progress Rate and Graduation Success Rate (NCAA, 2018c; 2018d). However, a deeper study by Southall, Eckard, Nagel, and Randall (2015) suggests that the disparaging differences in graduation rates are related to race. Black football student- athletes and men’s basketball student-athletes, especially those playing for the most successful Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and Division I men’s basketball programs, tend to graduate at lower rates than full-time male students (Southall, Eckard, Nagel, &

Randall, 2015).

According to the latest NCAA Graduation Success Rates released in November

2018, FBS football student-athlete graduation rates increased by 16 percentage points from 63.1 percent in 2002 to 79.1 percent in 2018 while FCS football student-athletes’ graduation rates improved nearly 17 percentage points from 62.0 percent in 2002 to 78.9 percent in 2018 (NCAA, 2018e). During that same period, Black student-athletes made

3 the largest jump from 53 percent in 2002 to 79 percent in 2018 (NCAA, 2018e). When comparing football Graduation Success Rates figures to the other 16 NCAA male sports,

FBS and FCS football have historically had the two lowest graduation success rates but wrestling now has the worst Graduation Success Rate in 2018 (NCAA, 2018e).

Compounded with these graduation figures have been four events which served as exemplary moments in how this tug of war has existed in college athletics – the Carnegie

Report, the University of North Carolina academic fraud scandal, the ‘Operation Varsity

Blues’ college admissions bribery scandal, and more broadly, the athletic-academic disconnect.

Carnegie Report

Led by Savage and his colleagues (1929), the Carnegie Foundation for the

Advancement of Teaching issued a 350-page report that was the result of more than 100 campus visits over a three-year period in October 1929 (Clotfelter, 2009). The Carnegie

Report revealed that college sports were “a commercial enterprise ... and that providing athletes with a college education is not the most important line item” (Savage, Bentley,

McGovern, & Smiley, 1929, p. viii). Since the Carnegie Report’s initial findings, the biggest challenge that has faced intercollegiate athletics has been “trying to protect the notion of intercollegiate athletics as a place where student-athletes compete” (Fanning,

2011), according to National Collegiate Athletic Association president Mark Emmert in an interview with PBS’ Frontline prior to the 2011 NCAA Men’s Final Four.

4 Athletics and Academic Fraud

Three months after Emmert’s national interview, Dan Kane, a reporter for the

News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, uncovered the beginnings of what would become one of the biggest academic fraud scandals in American history (Kane, 2013).

Five years after the nation’s oldest public university, the University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill, acknowledged widespread academic fraud on its campus, longtime United

States Justice Department official Kenneth L. Wainstein conducted an eight-month independent investigation into the allegations of academic fraud at UNC (Wainstein,

Gregory, & Strambler, 2014). In the 136-page report of his findings, academic fraud was found to be the “direct result of pressure from the athletic department’s academic services” (Wainstein, Gregory, & Strambler, 2014, p. 16). The Wainstein-led investigation identified nearly 200 “no-show” classes, and hundreds of bogus independent study classes that dated back as far as 1993 (Wainstein, Gregory, &

Strambler, 2014, p. 17). University records obtained by Wainstein, Gregory, and

Strambler (2014) showed there were 3,933 student enrollments in these fake paper classes between 1999 and 2011 with 47.6 percent being student-athletes. Only four percent of all enrolled UNC students during this period were student-athletes, Wainstein,

Gregory, and Strambler (2014) concluded that Deborah Crowder, the administrator for the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, and the athletic department’s academic counselors “consciously worked together to put athletes in these classes that were either lazy or unable and unqualified to handle the rigorous academics at UNC” (p.

19).

5 After the University of North Carolina’s highly-publicized academic fraud scandal, former UNC basketball player Rashad McCants, a member of the Tar Heels’

2005 NCAA championship team, claimed “he made the dean’s list in the spring of 2005 despite not attending any of his four classes for which he received straight-A grades”

(Delsohn, 2014). McCants further solidified the belief that student-athletes are possibly being denied a true education, telling Delsohn (2014): “You're not there to get an education … You're there to make revenue for the college. You're there to put fans in the seats. You're there to bring prestige to the university by winning games.” In a follow-up interview a week later, McCants further explained his experience to Outside the Lines:

I didn’t write any papers. I didn’t write any papers, but I know that the tutors did help guys write papers – as far as help them through the grammar, the structure, paragraphs, so on and so forth. But, for some of the premier players, we didn’t write our papers. It was very simple. When it was time to turn in our papers for our ‘paper classes,’ we would get a call from our tutors, we would all pack up in one big car, or pack up in two cars, and ride over to the tutor’s house, pick up our papers and go about our business.

Despite both of McCants’ interviews with ESPN’s Outside the Lines, McCants failed to provide details about the alleged cheating, thus Wainstein, Gregory, and Strambler (2014) was unable to verify his allegations. Yet in her declaration to oppose the NCAA’s motion for summary judgement in O’Bannon v. NCAA (2015), UNC whistleblower Willingham appeared to verify McCants’ allegations (In re NCAA Student-Athlete Name & Likeness

Licensing Litigation, 2014). Willingham affirmed that the college football and basketball student-athletes under her supervision “sometimes earned a degree, but they did not get an education. ... They arrived unprepared and remained unprepared because of institutional priorities” (In re NCAA, 2014, p. 3). While the University of North

6 Carolina’s decades-long academic fraud scandal rocked American higher education, punishing the university for its student-athletes’ academic impropriety was not under the

NCAA’s purview (Kane, 2017).

Operation Varsity Blues

The NCAA’s stance on academic integrity would again be challenged in 2019 when the FBI uncovered the largest college admissions fraud scheme in United States history. The FBI’s Operation Varsity Blues investigation exposed the special admissions opportunities afforded to student-athletes at major college and universities (“College

Admissions Scandal,” 2019). Beginning in 2011, thirty-three parents of high school students were alleged to have conspired with other individuals to use bribery and other fraudulent means to illegally arrange to help their children get admitted to some of

America’s most prestigious colleges and universities (“College Admissions Scandal,”

2019). The FBI’s investigation, nicknamed ‘Operation Varsity Blues,’ focused on

William Rick Singer who helped wealthy parents bribe admissions testing officials, athletics staff, and coaches at major universities. While none of the students involved were actual recruitable student-athletes, coaches were bribed into designating these students as a recruit for their respective sport in order to gain admission (“College

Admissions Scandal,” 2019). However, none of the students flagged as student-athletes were actual student-athletes.

At least seven NCAA Division I schools were implicated in this academic admissions fraud scandal, including the University of Texas, Yale University, the

University of Southern California, UCLA, Wake Forest University, the University of San

7 Diego, and Georgetown University (“College Admissions Scandal,” 2019). Former

University of Texas men’s tennis coach Michael Carter accepted approximately $100,000 to designate an applicant as a recruitable student-athlete while Donna Heinel, the former senior associate athletic director at USC, pushed fake athletes through the university’s athletic admissions subcommittee in return for payments totaling more than $1.3 million

(“College Admissions Scandal,” 2019).

The Academic-Athletic Disconnect

In a study of the elite academic schools that do not provide scholarship aid to student-athletes (i.e. Ivy League institutions), results by Bowen and Levin (2003) revealed that recruited athletes do not do as well academically when compared to those students who are prepared academically (Lawry, 2005). Bowen and Levin (2003) concluded that the culture of athletics works against academic achievement (Lawry,

2005). Former NCAA president Myles Brand, who succumbed to cancer in 2009, believed there was an “underlying and growing disconnect with intercollegiate athletics within the campus-based academic community” (Brand, 2006, p. 13). Toma and Kramer

(2009) further explained the disconnect that can be attributed to the on-going power struggle between academics and athletics:

Academics and athletics persistently, though needlessly, function as adversaries, rarely working jointly on shared issues or even drawing on one another’s experience to improve practice. Such an illusory divide results from faculty members and academic administrators reducing college sports to stereotypes and favoring an us-versus-them orientation. … Meanwhile, athletic leaders are often too insulated from academe, too commonly failing to understand the norms, values, and beliefs that are so important in framing issues (p. 4).

8 Implications from the Literature

The publication of the Carnegie Report (Savage, Bentley, McGovern, & Smiley,

1929), the study by Bowen and Levin (2003), and the Wainstein, Jay, and Kukowski

(2014) academic fraud investigation are three of the numerous documented examples of what has plagued the ongoing tug of war between academia and college athletics. While college athletics and higher education have merged into an “unintentional union” (Hawes,

1999), national prestige for American colleges and universities are dependent on their athletics success, now considered an essential part of higher education’s success equation

(Smith, 1988). A review of the literature in Chapter Two will provide a summary of the educational problems facing college athletics and the NCAA’s efforts to reform academics within the “commercial enterprise” (Savage, Bentley, McGovern, & Smiley,

1929).

Statement of the Problem

The academics-athletics power struggle within intercollegiate athletics is increasingly visible in NCAA Division I athletics, and student-athletes are faced with the dilemma of which ‘A’ is more important, academics or athletics. “...academics is often competing for the time of athletes involved in revenue-producing athletics like football and basketball. Unfortunately, school often comes second because the stakes are high”

(Settles, Sellers, & Damas, 2002, p. 148). Led by the visibility of the football program,

NCAA Division I colleges and universities have regarded their athletic departments as the “front porch of the university” (Suggs, Lederman, & Selingo, 2003). However, the

9 primary focus on college sports has deviated away from education and is now focused more on glamour and athleticism (Harrison & Boyd, 2007; Willis, 2005).

A recent thirty-second public service announcement released by the NCAA featured two-time Division I-AA All-American and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jerry

Rice who stood in the middle of the screen in a deadpan manner: “There are 480,000 college athletes, and only two percent will go pro. That means over 470,000 will not get a shoe contract, no autographs, no private jets, no fan clubs, no hall of fame inductions.

Instead, they will walk away with something else much more valuable” (NCAA, 2018a).

That more valuable result, according to Rice and the NCAA (2018a), is a college education.

While the NCAA’s statistics prove that most student-athletes will not play professional sports (NCAA, 2018b), critics such as author Joe Nocera have continued to fight the NCAA’s public service announcement with a different set of statistics. In a live panel debate and discussion hosted by Intelligence Squared Debates (2017), Nocera opened by saying:

Sometimes close to half of all Division I football athletes receive Pell grants, which are reserved for the lowest income families in America. A college education is supposed to be life-changing, but listen to some statistics, some real statistics, not the phony NCAA graduation statistics, which by the way, don’t count any athlete who drops out. That’s the graduation statistic that doesn’t count athletes who drop out ... In the Big Ten, Black men’s basketball players have a graduation rate that is thirty-six percent lower than non-athletes. The Big 12, minus forty-two percent. The Mountain West, minus fifty-one percent. (At) Michigan State, thirty-three percent of Black male athletes graduate in six years compared to seventy-eight percent of non-athletes. And a lot of those who do graduate major in something eligibility, i.e., they just take any class that the academic advisor sends them to so that they – so they can stay on the field. This is exploitation. I don’t even know how else you can call it anything else. They’ve been recruited to the campus for one reason, one reason, to generate revenue for

10 the university. That’s why they’re there. You can’t say that about anybody else on campus ... So now they’re going to say now they’re non-employees because they’re ‘student-athletes,’ right? They work sixty hours a week. Their boss, their coach, controls almost every aspect of their lives. They are employees. They can’t take classes that get in the way of their sport.

Based on a report published through the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, Harper (2018) shared a sharp statistical contrast among Black men, noting that they accounted for 55 percent of Power Five football programs, but

Black men accounted for less than three percent of the total undergraduate population at the same institutions. While recent academic research has examined how Black men are socialized to value sports over academics (Beamon & Bell, 2006; Benson, 2000), college athletics might have the most harmful effect on Black male students in higher education

(Harper, 2006). In this socialization of valuing sports over academics, economic exploitation of student-athletes has driven the academic exploitation of student-athletes

(Gatmen, 2011). In the opening pages of Varsity Green, Yost (2010) shared a candid interview with Phil Hughes, the associate athletic director for student services at Kansas

State University, who referred to the student-athlete as “the entertainment product” (p.

13). According to Hughes, his job is “to protect The Entertainment Product. My job is to make sure that The Entertainment Product goes to class. My job is to make sure that The

Entertainment Product studies. My job is to make sure that The Entertainment Product makes adequate academic progress according to NCAA guidelines” (Yost, 2010, p. 13).

A benchmark study by Adler and Adler (1985) was the first to make a tangible connection in football and men’s basketball student-athletes’ relationships between athletic participation and academic performance. While these athletes are optimistic

11 about their academic careers when they enter college, their experiences – athletic, social, and classroom – ultimately “lead them to become progressively detached from academics” (Adler & Adler, 1985). Additional studies after Adler and Adler (1985) discovered student-athletes are “receiving negative messages” (Benson, 2000) before they enter a classroom setting and are “susceptible to prejudice and discrimination”

(Engstrom & Sedlacek, 1991). Their status as a student-athlete further complicates their self-efficacy as a segment of the population have shared their difficulties in being taken seriously as a student (Aries, McCarthy, Salovey, & Banaji, 2004).

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the internal and external factors that have contributed to the lived academic experiences and perceptions of academic success for football student-athletes at one NCAA Division I Football Bowl

Subdivision (FBS) institution and one NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution. This phenomenological study analyzed interview data “by developing patterns and relationships of meaning” in order to explore and conceptualize the lived academic experiences of football student-athletes (Creswell, 2003, p. 15).

12 Research Questions

The researcher used a phenomenological study design to examine college football student-athletes’ lived academic experiences. The researcher addressed three central research questions based on the theory of self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1948).

RQ1: How do NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes perceive their academic experience?

RQ2: How do NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes negotiate their academic lives within the constraints of their athletic demands?

RQ3: What are the differences in academic experiences among NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes?

Theoretical Framework

Derived from a sociology theorem formulated by Thomas and Thomas (1928), the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy was first identified and defined by Merton

(1948) as “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true” (p. 195). Not only was the Thomas theorem a basis for Merton’s concept, but he also alluded to the self-fulfilling prophecy being observed by 18th-century philosopher Bernard Mandeville, Catholic French bishop Jacques-

Bénigne Bossuet, philosopher Karl Marx, and even famed neurologist Sigmund Freud

(Merton, 1948). Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) investigated Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy within an educational environment, elaborating:

The essence of this concept is that one person’s predictions of another person’s behavior somehow comes to be realized. The prediction, may of course, only come to be realized in the perception of the predictor. It is also possible, however, that the predictor’s expectation is communicated to the other person, perhaps in quite subtle and unintended ways, and so has an influence on actual behavior. (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968, p. 4)

13 According to Parks and Kennedy (2007), stereotypical thinking and prejudgments from faculty led to a self-fulfilling prophecy, affecting both the learners’ academic and social performances. When positive biases are present, students may benefit from their teacher’s expectations (Parks & Kennedy, 2007). However, negative biases may cause students to become “entangled in an ongoing spiral where less is expected of them and less is produced by them, thus confirming the original expectations of the perceiver in a self- fulfilling prophecy” (Parks & Kennedy, 2007, p. 938). Forty years after Merton (1948) discovered the phenomenon, Jussim (1986) labeled three stages of self-fulfilling prophecies within an academic setting: “a) teacher expectations, b) differential treatment, and c) student reactions” (p. 429). Prior research established that teachers develop initial opinions based on previously obtained information before they were observed a student’s performance (e.g., Cooper, Baron, & Lowe, 1975; Seligman, Tucker, & Lambert, 1972;

Rist, 1970). However, Jussim and Fleming (1996) indicated students can be subject to initial inaccurate academic expectations because of previously established biases and stereotypes.

Methodology

This study used phenomenological methods to explore the internal and external factors that have contributed to the lived academic experiences and perceptions of academic success for football student-athletes at one NCAA Division I Football Bowl

Subdivision (FBS) institution and one NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution. This study’s phenomenological design was one through an interpretivist lens as interpretivism is the belief that reality exists within a participant’s

14 reflection, self-description, and their interpretation of the data (Creswell, 2003).

Methodology is “the strategy, plan of action, process or design,” and method is “the techniques or procedures used to gather and analyze data” (Crotty, 2003, p. 3). In order to study the lived academic experiences of football student-athletes, phenomenology is the best method for this study. Phenomenology is the study of the human experience

Procedures

The researcher utilized a phenomenological study method, interviewing 10 total football student-athletes, five from one NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision

(FBS) institution and five from one NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution in the southeastern United States. For this study, the researcher utilized theoretical sampling and one key informant within the two schools’

15 athletic departments to identify student-athletes for the study. The researcher provided sampling requests for the study. In order to gain access to the site participants, the researcher asked his informant to select participants who are scholarship football student- athletes who are academically eligible to compete (2.0 GPA or higher). The ability to access participants was an important consideration in choosing these institutions, but the researcher was concerned with the potential of athletic department hostility with the research area. Coakley (2008) described the phenomenon of athletic department personnel’s hostility toward outsiders as “institutionalized suspicion” (p. 15).

Furthermore, the anxiety of outsiders conducting research with student-athletes could add additional stress because “team members are family and that survival and success depend on sticking together” (Coakley, 2008, p. 15).

Rationale of the Study

Qualitative research emphasizes participants’ diverse perspectives, the researcher’s reflexivity, the research itself, and the situational constraints that could influence inquiry (Flick, 2009). Structure, institution, convention, and tradition are unique qualities in human relationships that can make understanding them difficult

(Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014). The researcher’s relationship with administrators at the universities and his in-depth knowledge of the institutions was beneficial in his observing and documenting the participants’ behavior. Since most athletic department staff are wary of outsiders who are interested in student-athletes’ academic activities, this study required the permission of several administrators within the chosen athletic departments (Coakley, 2008). Approaches within qualitative research offer in-depth data-

16 rich analyses that are absent in a quantitative approach (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

Exploratory research methods benefit in qualitative study designs (Yin, 2003).

Population

The population examined in this study was scholarship football student-athletes who were academically eligible to compete (2.0 GPA or higher) and who had completed at least two semesters of academic coursework at their NCAA Division I institution.

There are more than 15,000 football student-athletes across 130 NCAA Division I FBS programs and roughly 13,000 football student-athletes across 125 NCAA Division I FCS programs. FBS programs (e.g. University of Georgia) can have a maximum of 85 players receiving athletically-based aid per year, with each player allowed to receive up to a full scholarship (NCAA, 2017a, p. 212). By comparison, Football Championship Subdivision programs (e.g. Mercer University) have the same 85-player limit but are only allowed to give the aid equivalent to 63 full scholarships (NCAA, 2017a, p. 212).

This study’s population was limited to NCAA Division I FBS and FCS student- athletes for three reasons. First, Division I is the only NCAA classification that is required to provide academic support services for student-athletes (Banbel & Chen,

2014). Second, Division I schools participate at the highest level of intercollegiate athletics where revenue generation and winning games are more important than Division

II or Division III (Clotfelter, 2011). The third reason is that Division I FBS student- athletes’ total time commitment to athletics adversely affects other aspects of their life

(Jenny & Hushman, 2014). According to the NCAA Division I 20/8-Hour Rule, student- athletes at the Division I level are subjected to limitations of four hours of countable

17 athletically-related activities and no more than 20 hours per week during the competition season, but these restrictions do not include an institution’s vacation period (NCAA,

2018e). Once the competition season is over, student-athletes are limited to eight hours of countable athletically-related activities per week (NCAA, 2018e).

Limitations and Delimitations

There were multiple limitations for this study. First, the sample size was 10 football student-athletes. As with any qualitative study, the sample size and the data collected are not generalizable and are not representative of the NCAA Division I football student-athlete population. Second, the qualitative research design limited the researcher to the number of football student-athletes to include in the study whereas a quantitative research design could have yielded a larger sample size. Although participants had similar experiences as Division I football student-athletes, they still have different lived academic experiences. Third, the researcher’s access to athletes as only the selected participants were available to be interviewed for this research study. Another limitation was the participants’ freedom (or lack of freedom) to be transparent about their athletic and academic experiences because of their obligations to their institutions or fear of potentially violating NCAA rules. Fourth, participants had different high school educational experiences which may have impacted their transition to college and their academic experience since enrolling. There were a number of delimitations for this study.

First, the researcher restricted the population and study sample to academically eligible scholarship football student-athletes who have been a full-time student for at least two semesters. Second, the researcher opted to focus solely on football rather than including

18 multiple sports in this phenomenological design as football is the revenue-generating force that funds most major college athletics departments. Third, the researcher chose the two research sites based on proximity to his location and personal relationships he had with key informants at each institution.

Definition of Terms

Several college athletics terms may be common knowledge to academics and university personnel, but the definitions below serve to normalize the terminology as they relate to this study:

Amateurism. The ideal of amateurism, a bedrock principle of college athletics and the NCAA, was adopted to ensure the students’ priority remains in obtaining a quality educational experience and that all student-athletes are competing equitably (Allison,

2001).

Academic Progress Rate (APR). The Academic Progress Rate holds NCAA

Division I institutions accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes through a team-based metric (Johnson, 2013).

Autonomy Conferences or “Power Five” Conferences. An area of autonomy is a legislative provision that provides NCAA legislative flexibility to the Atlantic Coast

Conference, Big Ten Conference, Big 12 Conference, Pac-12 Conference and

Southeastern Conference and their member institutions (NCAA, 2017a, p. ix). The term

“Power Five” is not mentioned in any NCAA legislation and the origin of the term is unknown.

19 Federal Graduation Rate (FGR). Compiled by the U.S. Department of Education, the Federal Graduation Rate measures the percentage of first-time, full-time freshman who graduate within six years of entering their original four-year institution (Southall,

2012).

Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision members play at the highest level of college football. Formerly known as Division I-A,

FBS teams must meet minimum attendance requirements which must be met once every two years. Additionally, this division plays in bowl games while the four-team College

Football Playoff determines its national champion.

Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). NCAA Division I Football

Championship Subdivision members play at the second-highest level of college football.

Formerly known as Division I-AA, FCS teams do not need to meet minimum attendance requirements. This division plays in a 24-team football playoff to determine its national champion.

Graduation Success Rate (GSR). The student-athlete graduation rate is the proportion of first-year, full-time student-athletes who entered a school on athletics aid and graduated from that institution within six years. The GSR differs from the FGR as the

GSR adjusts for transfers by inflating graduation rates through removing academically- eligible athletes who transfer from a school’s cohort (Southall, 2012; Gurney, Lopiano,

Snyder, Willingham, Meyer, Porto, Ridpath, Sack, & Zimbalist, 2017).

Redshirt, Redshirting, Redshirt Freshman. Redshirting is the process in which student-athletes can lengthen their eligibility by practicing with a team but not playing

20 during a particular season. The term ‘redshirt’ is believed to have originated with

University of Nebraska guard Warren Alfson who was asked by coaches to practice but not play with the team in 1937. As part of the agreement, Alfson was not issued a jersey number, wearing only a blank red uniform (Fisher, 2017; NCAA, 2019c).

True Freshman. A true freshman is a student-athlete who is not redshirted when they start college. They are immediately eligible to participate in games.

Student-athlete. A student-athlete is a participant in an NCAA sanctioned sport sponsored by the educational institution where he or she is enrolled (McCormick &

McCormick, 2006; Byers & Hammer, 1997).

Significance of the Study

There has been a recent study about the lived academic experiences of six Black football student-athletes at a Division I institution (Maxwell, 2011) as well as an ethnographic study of 20 Black former student-athletes at multiple Division I FBS programs (Beamon, 2012). However, there has been little research available comparing the lived academic experiences of enrolled NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes. Much of the available research has focused on the academic and athletic motivation of Division I college student-athletes (Nichols, 2017; Tudor, 2014; Carter,

2012; Rubin, 2012; Rasmussen, 2009); Black football student-athletes’ experiences with race in academia (Conroy, 2016); academic clustering among student-athletes (Case,

Greer, & Brown, 1987; Fountain & Finley, 2009; Fountain & Finley, 2010; Suggs,

2003a); amateurism (Flowers, 2009; Sack, 1991; Yost, 2010); and the impact of athletics

21 on educational success (Petr & McArdle, 2012; Gatmen, 2011; Howard-Hamilton &

Watt, 2001; Shulman & Bowen, 2001a).

Subjectivity Statement

The researcher spent more than 10 years in NCAA Division I collegiate athletics, including the final four years as a senior staff member at two “Power Five” institutions.

The researcher did not have any prior relationships with the student-athletes included in this study. Based on his previous college athletics experience, the researcher understood some of the challenges and issues that football student-athletes face. This knowledge allowed the researcher to ask appropriate follow-up questions and ask for clarification when needed. The student-athletes were not familiar with the researcher’s discipline or working knowledge of athletics prior to their interview. Since the researcher and the student-athletes had no previous relationship, the researcher attempted to avoid significant disadvantages as a peripheral member of the population under study (Dwyer

& Buckle, 2009). The researcher was aware of the perceived bias towards student- athletes by faculty. Ultimately, the researcher was able to set aside the negative aspects associated with him being a former college athletics administrator by utilizing verification procedures. According to Angrosino and Mays de Perez (2000), while there is always the potential for interviewer bias in qualitative studies, it is a “plain fact that each person who conducts observational research brings his or her distinctive talents and limitations to the enterprise” (p. 676).

22 Organization of the Study

This dissertation will be presented in five chapters. Chapter One will include the background of the study, statement of the problem, purpose of the study, population of the study, significance of the study, definition of terms, theoretical framework, research questions, limitations, delimitations, and the researcher’s subjectivity statement. Chapter

Two will be the review of the literature and the historical development of the relationship between athletics and academics that includes: student-athletes and academic clustering, the student-athlete as the entertainment product, amateurism and commercial exploitation, the impact of athletics on educational success, and stereotype threat. Chapter

Three will present the proposed methodology of the study that will include the design of the study, selection of participants, instrumentation, data collection, and data analysis.

Chapter Four will present the findings of the study, and Chapter Five will provide a summary of the entire study, discussion of the findings, implications for research and practice, and conclusions.

CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Subdivision (FBS) institution and one NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution. Intercollegiate athletics was born out of a unique historical moment when sport was utilized as an avenue for character development (Putney, 2009).

This chapter presents an overview of the literature in seven principal areas that provide the necessary background information to contextualize this study – College Football in

American Higher Education, the Over-Commercialization of Major College Athletics, the

Student-Athlete, Ensuring the Academic Success of the Student-Athlete, Student-Athlete

Perceptions of Academic Success, Academic Clustering Among Student-Athletes, and

Athletic Identity and Stereotype Threat.

The first section explains the “unintentional union” (Hawes, 1999) of college football and higher education and how college football led to the eventual creation of the

NCAA. The second section breaks down the disparaging differences in finances and revenues among NCAA Division I programs and how major college sports has been a billion-dollar industry. The third section discusses the creation of the term “student-

24 athlete” and how its creator Walter Byers regrets creating the word to help the NCAA protect its definition of amateurism. The fourth section reflects on academic reform within college athletics, how Proposition 48 and Proposition 16 were deemed as racist toward black athletes, and the latest round of academic reform by the NCAA. The fifth section shares student-athlete perceptions on their own academic success. The sixth section shares the popular tactic of clustering student-athletes in certain academic majors.

The final section defines athletic identity, stereotype threat, and how the “dumb jock” stereotype has a negative effect on student-athletes.

Prior to the 2007 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, the NCAA launched a new series of public service announcements (NCAA, 2007). The national branding campaign, which was targeted for broadcasts during NCAA championships, included three PSAs with the tagline, “There are over 380,000 student-athletes, and most of us go pro in something other than sports” (NCAA, 2007). A decade later, the NCAA

(2018) estimated that less than two percent of the approximately 16,236 draft-eligible college football student-athletes will play at varying levels of professional football.

Because 251 of the 256 picks in the 2018 NFL Draft were NCAA Division I student- athletes (232 from FBS and 19 from FCS), it was critical for this study and for the literature review to focus on NCAA Division I football student-athletes (NCAA, 2019e).

College Football in American Higher Education

In the preface of his book Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is

Crippling Undergraduate Education, Sperber (2000) shared the candid insight of an

25 NCAA Division I athletics administrator at a large public I institution with high-profile football and basketball teams:

We certainly can’t give our students a quality degree—not with class size growing geometrically and our 30-to-1 faculty/student ratio—but at least we can encourage students to have fun, and root for our teams while they’re here ... Football Saturdays are great here and so are winter basketball nights. In our Admissions Office literature, we’ve stopped saying that we provide a good education-our lawyers warned us that we could get sued for misrepresentation-but we sure promote our college sports teams. (Sperber, 2000, p. xii)

Kay Hawes, a former NCAA employee, opined that the Association’s “father was football and its mother was higher education” and the “almost unintentional union” resulted in the desire of students to play games (Hawes, 1999).

Long before millions of fans filled college football stadiums across America, intercollegiate athletics had humble beginnings. The first intercollegiate athletics event was an 1852 rowing meet between Harvard and Yale on Lake Winnipesaukee, New

Hampshire (Smith, 2011). What followed the first intercollegiate athletics event were the first intercollegiate baseball game in 1859 between Amherst and Williams and the first intercollegiate five-on-five basketball game between the University of Chicago and the

University of Iowa in 1896 (Smith, 2011). The first college athletics controversy occurred three years later when the second intercollegiate athletics event – a second rowing competition between Harvard and Yale – took place (Smith, 2011). Yale protested

Harvard’s use of a coxswain from its 1852 team, a graduate student who had already graduated from Harvard (Smith, 2011). Eligibility questions that began with Harvard’s use of a graduate student led to American intercollegiate athletics adoption of amateurism

(Smith, 2011).

26 Amateurism

This battle over the very ideal of amateur athletics in the United States has been on-going since the last 19th century. Walter Camp, who is considered the Father of

American Football, once claimed “A Gentleman never competes for money directly or indirectly” (Flowers, 2009, p. 11). During the same time period in 1905, Reverend

William H. Crawford, President of Allegheny College, boasted: “We go after men for the sake of baseball and football, offering all sorts of inducements. Scholarships are offered to promising players. Professionalism is winked at” (Flowers, 2009, p. 11). Ten years later in 1915, former President William Howard Taft wrote “the feeling of solidarity and loyalty in the student body that intercollegiate contests develop is a good thing; it outlasts every contest and it continues in the heart and soul of every graduate as long as he lives”

(Flowers, 2009, p. 9).

Amateurism is relatively new concept. It did not exist in ancient Greece as much as some college athletics purist may try to say otherwise. According to Olympic historian

Bill Mallon, amateurism “really started when people who were rowing boats on the

(River) Thames for a living started beating all of the rich British aristocrats. That wasn’t right. So they started a concept of amateurism that didn’t exist in ancient Greece, extending it more and more to the notion of being a gentleman, someone who didn’t work for a living and only did sport as a hobby” (Hruby, 2012, para. 14). What happened in

Britain with competitive rowers would eventually cross the Atlantic Ocean to the United

States, where college athletics would be labeled as entertainment (sport) and the

‘entertainment product’ (athletes) was to participate in their desired sport by choice as a

27 hobby. It is this idea that continues to exist in today’s multi-billion-dollar college athletics landscape as millionaire coaches and athletic directors fight to keep the

‘entertainment product’ from being compensated. While not a popular idea, this notion leads one to think: Is the idea of amateurism about keeping college athletics pure or is more about keeping the lower classes at the bottom of the ladder? With this historical perspective, amateurism represented an elitism contrived to exclude the lower classes from competing in sport with their social superiors (Sack, 1991).

College sports is a multi-billion-dollar industry thanks to licensing and multimedia and TV rights deals. It is apparent that college sports are a commercial enterprise and that providing these athletes with a college education is not the most important line item. If providing an education were that important, then the student- athlete wouldn’t be referred to as an “entertainment product” as they were in NCAA v.

Board of Regents (1984) as well as Yost’s (2009) Varsity Green:

My job is to protect The Entertainment Product,” said Phil Hughes, the associate athletic director for student services at Kansas State University. “My job is to make sure that The Entertainment Product goes to class. My job is to make sure that The Entertainment Product studies. My job is to make sure that The Entertainment Product makes adequate academic progress according to NCAA guidelines. (p. 13)

Having the voice of prominent athletic department official like Hughes is telling in the on-going saga between athletics and academics. Based on Hughes’ comments to Yost

(2009), there could be other academic and athletic personnel who feel caught in this power struggle to keep the “The Entertainment Product” eligible rather than making progress toward a degree.

28 College Football and the Pursuit of Prestige

One-hundred thirty years before Hawes, Rutgers College (now Rutgers

University) and the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University) met on

November 6, 1869, in what is considered the first American football game played

(Richmond, 2015). As football’s commercialization spread across America, the sport’s brutality led to reform and control by what would later become the NCAA (Siegel, 2004).

When the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now known as the University of

Massachusetts) beat Harvard College by 14 lengths in a crew race in 1871, other small colleges realized they too could obtain prestige by beating Harvard (Smith, 1988).

After hiring Princeton University’s Hector Cowan as its football coach in 1895,

University of Kansas president Frank Snow wrote that “[Cowan’s hire] … will tend to develop the green eyes rapidly of other Kansas institutions” (Reeve, 1908, p. 108).

Colorado College president William F. Slocum asserted his institution could “never gain the recognition it deserved until it has a winning football team” (Lewis, 1964, p. 177).

Colorado College’s football team began competition in 1882, and in 2008, was discontinued because of budgetary issues (Manning, 2009). Hofstra University in

Hempstead, New York, was the last NCAA Division I program to be discontinued for financial concerns. After a two-year internal study, Hofstra opted to reallocate $4.5 million invested annually from football to student scholarships and other academic areas

(Armstrong, 2009).

29 A Competitive Marketplace By the convergence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, America was becoming an industrialized nation, and market capitalism was infiltrating America’s social institutions (Flowers, 2009). Businessmen were increasingly filling roles on college boards (Sack & Staurowsky, 1998). Colleges became universities and universities expanded into the business sector (Smith, 1988, p. 98). College governing boards began to set policy and were quick to endorse the commercial and business aspects of college athletics (Flowers, 2009). Those commercial policies became part of a sophisticated marketing strategy for a fledgling University of Chicago, which was in desperate need of institutional support and to attract students (Flowers, 2009; Storr, 1966; Smith, 1988).

Pursuit of prestige. William Rainey Harper, the president at the University of

Chicago, was the first to integrate sports into a university’s public relations plan in 1892 when he hired Amos Alonzo Stagg “to develop a team which we can send around the country and knock out all the colleges” (Storr, 1966, p. 179). As part of this public relations and marketing plan, Stagg became the athletic director of the nation’s first athletics department (Crowley, Pickle, & Clarkson, 2006). He was also appointed as a faculty member, taught classes, and played two sports in addition to coaching three sports

(Crowley, Pickle, & Clarkson, 2006) – all were common practice for the time. Despite

Harper’s support, the University of Chicago expected its football players to compete both in the classroom and on the field (Crowley, Pickle, & Clarkson, 2006). A strict opponent of hiring athletes to play (Crowley, Pickle, & Clarkson, 2006), Harper said “it is not the function of the university to provide at great cost spectacular entertainment for enormous

30 crowds of people” (Storr, 1966, p. 181). Stagg coached the University of Chicago for 41 seasons, including a national championship in 1905. Chicago, however, discontinued its intercollegiate football program after the 1939 season (Lester, 1999a).

In 1903, Harvard University president Charles Eliot claimed the combination of football’s brutality and its profitability of cheating was more troubling than the casualties it caused (Branch, 2011). After 18 deaths and another 100-plus serious injuries during the

1905 football season, President Theodore Roosevelt hosted Ivy League officials from

Harvard, Yale, and Princeton at the White House to discuss eliminating the brutality of the game (Byers & Hammer, 1997). Two years after the White House meeting, President

Roosevelt defended the institution of amateurism in a 1907 speech to Harvard College students:

I trust I need not add that in defending athletics, I would not for one moment be understood as excusing that perversion of athletics which would make it the end of life instead of merely a means of life. It is first-class, healthful play, and is useful as such. But play is not business, and it is a very poor business indeed for a college man to learn nothing but sport. (Byers & Hammer, 1997, p. 39)

Carnegie Report. A 1929 publication by the Carnegie Foundation for the

Advancement of Teaching made national headlines when it exposed 81 NCAA schools for recruiting athletes and paying them in ways that were prohibited (Savage, Bentley,

McGovern, & Smiley, 1929). The Carnegie Foundation’s report launched the national debate on paying college athletes while asserting college sports was a “commercial enterprise” (Savage, Bentley, McGovern, & Smiley, 1929, p. viii). Ten years later, the

University of Pittsburgh’s football program was crippled by internal strife when first-year

31 athletes went on strike because their upperclassmen teammates were getting paid more than the first-year players (Smith, 2000).

Sanity Code. Embarrassed by its inability to eradicate such exploitation, conference officials across the country developed the “Sanity Code,” a code of ethics to restore sanity to college athletics (Sperber, 2000). In what would become the focus of

O’Bannon v. NCAA (2015), the “Sanity Code” decried that schools could not compensate athletes beyond free tuition and meals (Smith, 2000). “By authorizing the awarding of financial aid on the basis of athletic ability, the Sanity Code relinquished the NCAA’s commitment to amateurism” (Sack & Staurowsky, 1998, p. 38). After the Sanity Code reinstated the ban on athletic scholarships, the Code would eventually be scrapped in

1951 when athletic scholarships in the form of grant-in-aid were permitted (Sanderson &

Siegfried, 2018).

Marriage of Athletics and Academics

National prestige has become a priority for universities as “athletics eventually came to be an important part of the success equation” (Smith, 1988, p. viii). National reputation was available to the school with high-quality athletic programs (Chu, 1989, p.

55). Using athletics as a monetary and prestige pathway for American higher education, schools seek “to attract money, students and prestige from the general public, state and federal governments, alumni, ‘boosters’, private donors, faculty, educational foundations, and other groups in the environment” (Chu, 1989, p. 31). The marriage of athletics within higher education would become “one of the most significant experiments in the history of

American education” (Gerdy, 2006, pp. 12-13). This helped the United States to become

32 the first country to conduct this ‘experiment’ for developing elite athletes within the higher educational system (Gerdy, 2006, p. 13). American culture and society have become major influencers in sports stature within the United States (Bailey & Littleton,

1991, p. 15). Expressing concern about the critical divide between academia and college athletics, one university president said that “we just basically are saying that there's one thing in America important enough to set up separate rules for the only thing important enough to society to really exempt you from many of the requirements of the university, and that's athletics” (Bailey & Littleton, 1991, p. 32).

For many Americans, the university isn’t about academics, it’s about big-time college athletics (Sperber, 2000, p. 234), and “where there can be no doubt about is that nearly every important institution of higher education in America has at some point in its history emphasized big-time college athletics” (Smith, 1988, p. viii). Higher education and college athletics both boast common goals of raising the institution’s level of distinction and increasing their contributions to the community (Gerdy, 2006). James

Duderstadt (2000), former president of the University of Michigan, claimed that “one- dimensional views of the university through sports binoculars may pose a danger to the higher education community” (p. 10). Bailey & Littleton (1991) contend the over- commercialization and corruption of college athletics caused “extraordinary stress on the

... secular cathedral of higher education” (p. 15).

Supporters of Athletics within Higher Education

There are ardent supporters of the mission of college athletics within higher education. Benjamin (2004) argued “college athletics provides pre-professional training,

33 advertising and public relations for the university, and a form of vicarious living for students and community” (p. 10). Whereas Duderstadt (2000) acknowledged a sports- focused university may endanger the institution of higher education in America, Karen

Holbrook, the former president of Michigan’s biggest rival, The Ohio State University, defended college athletics as they “all provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate skills and learn discipline that help them succeed both in the classroom and in life”

(Holbrook, 2005, p. 4).

The Over-Commercialization of Major College Athletics

When the NCAA was formed in 1906 as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), the first set of bylaws restricted students from being paid for playing yet there were no restrictions placed on coaches or colleges profiting from sports (Sanderson & Siegfried, 2018). For a series of 13 years from 1922 to 1935, students participating in sports were banned from receiving scholarships by the NCAA, but the Association ultimately relented by allowing athletic-related scholarships for students participating in sports (Sanderson & Siegfried, 2018). Major college athletics departments have been spending millions of dollars on its programs for more than 40 years. The visible schism between athletic budgets and academic budgets began to grow exponentially by the start of the 21st century:

The autonomy of athletics programs makes overspending almost inevitable. Of all the parts of the university, only the athletic departments are so self- contained that when asked to justify expenses, frequently they answer solely to their own employees—their business managers. (Sperber, 1990, p. 92)

An example of this schism at the turn of the century came at the expense of the Penn

State Nittany Lions. In the spring of 2000, Penn State’s athletics budget was $42 million

34 and ten times larger than the budget for Penn State’s Honors College (Gaul, 2015). A football scholarship at Penn State costs roughly $50,000, while an Honors College scholarship costs $4,500 (Gaul, 2015).

Big Budget Spending

During a 10-year period between 2005-2015, NCAA Division I athletic departments increased their spending per student-athlete by 83 percent and football program spending per football student-athlete by 101 percent (Knight Commission,

2019). In a five-year period from 2012-2017, the median football spending at the 112 public NCAA Division I FBS institutions grew three times as fast as the median academic spending at those same institutions (Knight Commission, 2019; U.S.

Department of Education, 2019). According to a 2010 report published by the Knight

Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, NCAA Division I programs in the top 10 percent reported average athletics expenditures of $96.7 million and they were on pace to spend an average of $254 million by 2020 (Knight Commission, 2010).

The Haves. The University of Texas and The Ohio State University became the first two NCAA college athletic departments to make more than $200 million in revenues in an academic year in 2016-2017 (Knight Commission, 2019; U.S. Department of

Education, 2019). In the same year, Ohio State spent an NCAA-record $187.1 million in athletics department expenses, while Texas spent more than $184 million in expenditures.

Both Texas and Ohio State won only one team NCAA Championship in 2017; the

Longhorns won the 2017 NCAA Division I Men’s Swimming & Diving Championship and the Buckeyes on the 2017 NCAA Division I Men’s Volleyball Championship

35 (NCAA, 2019a). A year later, both the University of Texas and nearby rival Texas A&M

University eclipsed more than $200 million in total revenue during the 2017-2018 academic year (Knight Commission, 2019; U.S. Department of Education, 2019). The top

10 schools in athletic department revenue combined for a 94-39 record – a 70.7 winning percentage – among its football teams during the 2017 season with the Alabama Crimson

Tide winning the College Football Playoff Championship.

Table 1

Highest Revenue-Generating Public FBS Athletic Departments (2017-2018)

Rank School Conference Total Revenue

1. University of Texas Big 12 $219,402,579 2. Texas A&M University SEC $212,399,426 3. The Ohio State University Big Ten $195,769,104 4. University of Michigan Big Ten $195,769,104 5. University of Alabama SEC $177,481,937 6. University of Georgia SEC $176,699,893 7. University of Oklahoma Big 12 $175,325,500 8. Florida State University ACC $168,177,850 9. Pennsylvania State University Big Ten $165,373,214 10. University of Florida SEC $161,183,765

The Have Not’s. Each of the top 51 revenue-generating athletic departments in

2017-2018 came from one of the “Power Five” conferences. The University of

36 Connecticut, a member of the American Athletic Conference, ranked as the highest public school outside of the “Power Five” conferences in revenue generation with $79.3 million in 2017-2018. In contract, ten of the 20 schools which rank at the bottom in revenue generation sponsor NCAA Division I FCS football. The bottom 10 teams combined for a 49-64 record – a 43.3 winning percentage – with the lone bright spots being Nicholls State earning an FCS playoff spot and Grambling State winning the

Southwestern Athletic Conference championship.

Table 2

Lowest Revenue-Generating Public FCS Athletic Departments (2017-2018)

Rank School Conference Total Revenue

211. Eastern Illinois University OVC $10,983,445 215. Alabama A&M University SWAC $10,084,138 216. Nicholls State University Southland $9,617,268 217. Grambling State University SWAC $9,293,839 221. University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff SWAC $8,759,179 222. Jackson State University SWAC $8,120,167 225. Alcorn State University SWAC $5,740,720 227. South Carolina State University MEAC $5,381,310 228. Savannah State University MEAC $4,175,281 229. Mississippi Valley State University SWAC $3,561,797

37 Profiting from Football

In an 18-year period ending in 2016-2017, the Longhorns’ football program’s profit rose to $101,813,393 – an astonishing increase of 879.6 percent (Knight

Commission, 2019; U.S. Department of Education, 2019). In 2011-2012, the University of Texas was the first college athletics program to eclipse $100 million in revenue with

$103,813,684 (U.S. Department of Education, 2019). In less than 10 years, Texas more than doubled its revenue, raking in $210,370,940 in 2016-2017 (U.S. Department of

Education, 2019). The Longhorns were also the first college athletics program to make more than $200 million in an academic year (Knight Commission, 2019; U.S.

Department of Education, 2019).

Based on financial data from the 2016-2017 academic year, NCAA Division I

Football Bowl Subdivision public institutions spent more than $1.1 billion in athletics scholarships; however, the amount of money spent on scholarships was less than the amount of money spent on facilities and equipment ($1.75 billion), coaches’ compensation ($1.43 billion), and athletics support staff and administration compensation

(Knight Commission, 2019; U.S. Department of Education, 2019). Additionally, these same FBS public institutions carried more than $9 billion in total athletics debt in 2017

(Knight Commission, 2019; U.S. Department of Education, 2019). From its nearly $1.6 million in reported revenue in 2017-2018, the NCAA earned $844.3 million from its

Division I Men’s Basketball Championship television and marketing rights and an additional $133.4 million from NCAA Championship ticket sales (NCAA, 2019b). The total revenue is distributed as follows: $216.6 million to sport sponsorship and

38 scholarship funds, $164.7 million to the Division I Basketball Performance Fund, $103.4 million to Division I Championships, $84.5 million to the Student Assistance Fund, $74.4 million to Student-Athlete Services and Championship Support, $52 million to the

Division I Equal Conference Fund, $48 million to the Academic Enhancement Fund,

$41.8 million allocated to NCAA Division II, $41.4 million to Membership Support

Services, $32.3 million allocated to NCAA Division III, $9.7 million to Division I

Conference Grants, $3.4 million to educational programs, $88.3 million to other association-wide expenses, and $43.4 million for general and administrative expenses

(NCAA, 2019b).

Everyone’s Broke?

An exposé by Hobson and Rich (2015) examined thousands of pages of financial records from 48 public universities from “Power Five” conferences to gain a better understand as to why major college athletic departments struggle to make a profit. In a

10-year period from 2004-2014, the 48 athletic universities examined nearly doubled their combined income from $2.67 billion to $4.49 billion while media athletic department earnings jumped from $52.9 million to $93.1 million (Hobson & Rich, 2015).

Twenty-five of the 48 athletic departments still operated in a deficit in 2014 and 12 programs lost more money in 2014 than they did in 2014 (Hobson & Rich, 2015).

Auburn, one of the 12 programs to lose more money in 2014, saw its athletics payroll balloon from $9 million to almost $20 million (Hobson & Rich, 2015). Since

2004, the Auburn Athletics Department created more than 100 positions, including 15 jobs paying $100,000 or more (Hobson & Rich, 2015). The eye-raising numbers come at

39 a detriment to the region that supports Auburn University; the median income in the region is roughly $35,000 (Hobson & Rich, 2015). According to Jones (2013), athletics spending is shown to strongly correlate with on-field successes and winning among all sports at FBS schools, but the correlation does not exist at FCS schools. To further compound the financial inequalities among NCAA Division I schools, higher levels of spending by athletics departments are part of a strategic arms race against schools of similar sizes and conference affiliations (Hoffer, Humphreys, Lacombe, & Ruseski,

2015).

The Student-Athlete Walter Byers, appointed as the NCAA’s first Executive Director in 1951, was instrumental in establishing several precedents that would give the NCAA unforeseen power (Smith, 2000; Byers & Hammer, 1997). Two workers’ compensation court cases in the state of Colorado set the stage for the creation of the “student-athlete” term

(University of Denver v. Nemeth, 1953; Sperber, 2000).

Students or Employees?

After suffering an injury during spring practice in 1950, University of Denver football player Ernest Nemeth filed a worker’s compensation claim, alleging the school hired him to play football and this injury was a result of his employment (University of

Denver v. Nemeth, 1953; Sperber, 2000). A three-year court battle ensued, and the

Colorado Supreme Court upheld the ruling that referred to Nemeth as an employee under a Colorado’s worker’s compensation statute (University of Denver v. Nemeth, 1953). The

Colorado Supreme Court determined Nemeth’s compensation – an athletic scholarship,

40 housing, meals, and a campus job – was contingent upon his ability to play, and the

University was obligated to provide worker’s compensation for his football-related injury

(University of Denver v. Nemeth, 1953; Sperber, 2000). In an ironic twist, the University of Denver (2018) discontinued its football program for financial reasons in January 1961.

Two years after the Colorado Supreme Court upheld Nemeth’s claim, Fort Lewis

A&M football player and U.S. Army veteran Ray Dennison died from a head injury he suffered on the opening kickoff of a 1955 game against Trinidad Junior College (Sperber,

2000). Ray’s widow, Billie Dennison, filed for worker’s compensation death benefits on his behalf (Sperber, 2000). Following a Colorado district court affirming the Industrial

Commission of Colorado’s decision, the State Compensation Insurance Fund – along with Fort Lewis A&M – appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court (State Compensation

Insurance Fund v. Industrial Commission of Colorado, 1957). Billie Dennison’s claim was overturned as the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that she was not entitled to death benefits because football players were student-athletes, not employees (State

Compensation Insurance Fund v. Industrial Commission of Colorado, 1957). This was the earliest documentation of the term “student athlete” and it became the go-to terminology for the NCAA (Branch, 2011).

Byers Reflects on Student-Athlete Term

In his autobiography, Byers credited the creation of the student-athlete term as a calculated response to Nemeth and Dennison (Byers & Hammer, 1997). In his response to “the dreaded notion that athletes could be identified as employees by state industrial commissions and the courts,” Byers “created the term student-athlete, and soon it was

41 embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations as a mandated substitute for words such as players and athletes” (Byers & Hammer, 1997, p. 69). Placing the word “student” in front of “athlete” allowed the NCAA “to emphasize players’ statuses as students, prevented them from being identified as employees, resulting in the promotion of the amateur ideal of academics over athletics” (Graham, Moore, Bennett, & Hodge, 2015, p.

158).

Skepticism of Student-Athlete Term

Paul Bryant, the legendary University of Alabama head football coach, did not believe in the student-athlete myth: “I used to go along with the idea that football players on scholarship were ‘student-athletes,’ which is what the NCAA calls them. Meaning a student first, an athlete second. We were kidding ourselves, trying to make it more palatable to the academicians. We don’t have to say that, and we shouldn’t. At the level we play, the boy is really an athlete first and a student second” (Chu, 1989, p. 190).

Non-academics may be unaware that “student-athlete” is not in the dictionary

(Shulman & Bowen, 2001a). Many scholars have decided not to use the term in their writings or research (e.g., Shulman & Bowen, 2001a; Staurowsky, 2004). In their book

The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, Shulman and Bowen (2001a) provided a pointed and specific reason for not using the student-athlete terminology:

A brief word about language. We have chosen to resist some of the standard terminology associated with college sports. So, for example, whereas the NCAA is adamant about referring to students who play college sports as ‘student-athletes,’ we do not use this term since everyone who is enrolled at a college or university is a student. (p. xxxi)

42 Staurowsky and Sack (2005) further expound on the term, commenting that “placing the word student in front of the word athlete, however, does not eradicate the educational problems created when college athletes become quasi-professional entertainers.”

Staurowsky and Sack (2005) appealed to members of academia, asking they not use the term student-athlete as a concerted effort to promote accuracy and truth while improving the quality of research on the subject.

Athletic Scholarships

The NCAA has allowed athletic scholarships for students participating in sports since 1951 (NCAA, 2018g). According to the NCAA, Division I and II schools provide more than $3 billion in annual athletic scholarships to more than 150,000 student-athletes

(NCAA, 2018g). Fifty-nine percent of Division I student-athletes receive some level of athletics aid while 62 percent of Division II student-athletes receive athletics aid (NCAA,

2018g). However, NCAA Division III do not offer athletic scholarships. Instead, eighty percent of Division III student-athletes receive some form of academic grant or need- based scholarships (NCAA, 2018g).

At the NCAA Division I level, institutions can offer student-athletes full or partial athletic scholarships. FBS football is one of six head-count sports which means these

Division I sports are unable to divide their scholarships between athletes. For NCAA

Division I FBS teams, there are 85 scholarships to offer, compared to 63 scholarships at the Division I FCS level (Noll, 2018; Osborne, 2017; Sanderson & Siegfried, 2018). For all other sports that are not head-count sports, those programs can divide their scholarships among every athlete on their respective team (Osborne, 2017; Sanderson &

43 Siegfried, 2018). The practice of non-head-count sports distributing scholarships as they see fit is referred to as the equivalency scholarship model by the NCAA (Noll, 2018;

Osborne, 2017; Sanderson & Siegfried, 2018).

Once the NCAA reinstated its ban on athletic scholarships in 1951, there were no restrictions on grant-in-aid monies until 1973 when the NCAA set limitations on the number of scholarships allowed per sport (Sanderson & Siegfried, 2018). Football’s initial scholarship limit was 105 scholarships but was lowered to 95 in 1978 and to 85 in

1992 (Osborne, 2017; Sanderson & Siegfried, 2018).

Table 3

College Athletic Scholarship Limits

Sport NCAA NCAA NCAA Division I Division II Division III

Football (FBS)* 85 - - Football (FCS) 63 - - Football (Other Divisions) - 36 - Men’s Basketball* 13 10 - Women’s Basketball* 15 10 - Baseball 11.7 9 - Softball 12 7.2 - * Division I ‘head-count’ sport

44 Ensuring Academic Success of the Student-Athlete

Intercollegiate athletics is tethered to higher education in the United States. This idea of “edutainment” – the confluence of education and athletics entertainment – is the byproduct of the increasing involvement in the entertainment industry by American colleges and universities (Benford, 2007). This idea of “edutainment” was first analyzed in detail by Duderstadt (2000) who believed this was the responsibility of the university

(Benford, 2007):

To be sure, big-time college sports has entertained the American public, but it has all too frequently done so at the expense of our colleges and universities, their students, faculty, and staff, and the communities they were created to serve. They have infected our academic culture with the commercial values of the entertainment industry. They have distorted our priorities through the disproportioned resources and attention given to intercollegiate athletics. They have also distracted and in some cases destabilized the leadership of our academic institutions. They have exploited and, on occasion, even victimized players and coaches while creating a sense of cynicism on the part of the faculty and broader student body. Most significantly, big-time college sports have threatened the integrity and reputation of our universities, exposing us to hypocrisy, corruption, and scandal that all too frequently accompany activities driven primarily by commercial value and public visibility. (Duderstadt, 2000, p. 11)

Since Duderstadt’s commentary, the money race in college athletics has reached exorbitant heights. The NCAA surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the first time during the 2017 fiscal year (Berkowitz, 2018). More than 75 percent of that revenue came from television rights and marketing fees which totaled $821 million (Berkowitz, 2018). Based on the NCAA’s own financial data, it is apparent the college athletes have monetary value because of the millions of dollars they generate year-in and year-out.

The notion that college athletics is tethered to education has been an on-going claim by the NCAA since 1953 with University of Denver v. Nemeth (Hruby, 2017). It

45 was then that the NCAA and executive director Walter Byers made the assertion that students who played college sports were ‘student-athletes’ (Byers & Hammer, 1997), yet the NCAA didn’t pass its first academic reform items until 1965 (Petr & McArdle, 2012).

Beginning of Academic Reform

Since the birth of the NCAA more than 100 years ago, academic regulation and eligibility have been sources of ongoing consternation. The last 50-plus years of this continuing saga have been riddled with various eligibility policies set forth by the NCAA.

Before the NCAA began instituting academic mandates for student-athletes in 1965, schools operated as individual kingdoms, creating their singular admissions policies for college athletes (Shropshire, 1996; Rosen, 2000). This resulted in eligibility standards and requirements differing from school to school (Shropshire, 1996). In an attempt to shed light on the NCAA’s academic reform efforts, Todd Petr, the NCAA managing director of research, co-wrote a paper on the history of academic research within the

NCAA. Petr and McArdle (2012) divided the history of NCAA academic research into four eras, noting there was little-to-no research focusing on student-athletes’ academic performance until 1965. The NCAA’s 1.6 rule, which was adopted in 1965, outlined that student-athletes must have a minimum 1.6 GPA requirement to play (Petr & McArdle,

2012). While the 1.6 Rule was the first attempt to establish initial eligibility standards, it was replaced eight years later by the 2.0 Rule which established a simpler eligibility measure, requiring student-athletes to graduate high school with a 2.0 GPA to be eligible to play college sports (Petr & McArdle, 2012). Initially adopted to curb eligibility issues, these low eligibility standards enabled schools to “win at all costs” (Gatmen, 2011, p.

46 526) and to knowingly enroll academically “at-risk students who would not otherwise be eligible for admission” (Gatmen, 2011, p. 526). Since the publication of Petr and

McArdle (2012), a fifth era can be added to the history of NCAA academic research with the addition of the ‘2.3 or Take a Knee’ policy which was adopted in 2014 (Nwadike,

Baker, Brackebusch, & Hawkins, 2016).

Several case studies provided evidence that the NCAA’s first attempts at academic reform – the 1.6 Rule and the 2.0 Rule – were not yielding the graduation results or the academic performance the Association had hoped. During a 10-year span from 1973 to 1983 at Memphis State University, six White basketball players graduated while zero Black basketball players graduated (Oriard, 2012). While only 10 percent of

Memphis State’s basketball players graduated during this time, the graduation rate for the

Oklahoma State University football program in 1980 was a direr situation. Entering the fall 1980 semester, Oklahoma State had a graduation rate of 16 percent, the lowest of any member of the Big Eight Conference (Oriard, 2012).

47 Table 4

History of NCAA Academic Reform

Year Rule Purpose

1965 1.6 rule Minimum 1.6 GPA to be eligible 1973 2.0 rule Replaced 1.6 rule, minimum 2.0 GPA to be eligible 1983 Proposition 48 Student-athletes required to graduate high school with at least a 2.0 GPA and a minimum SAT score of 700 1989 Proposition 42 Denied financial add to partial qualifiers in their freshman year; Rescinded in 1990 1992 Proposition 16 Modified Proposition 48, creating sliding scale for SAT scores and GPA; did not go into effect until 1996-97 academic year 2002 Graduation Success Rate Developed for Division I as an alternative to federal rate; accounts for student-athlete transfers 2003 Academic Progress Rate Developed for Division I to reward teams whose student-athletes were making progress toward a degree 2003 Progress Toward Degree Division I enhanced standards for student- athletes’ progress toward graduation requirements 2014 2.3 or Take a Knee Set new minimum academic eligibility requirements for Division I student-athletes enrolling in college in August 2016 or later

48 The NCAA’s initial GPA eligibility rules were also a cause for concern at Tulane

University. Between 1973 and 1984, the mean SAT score for student-athletes in football or men’s basketball dropped more than 300 points from 1022 in 1973 to 691 in 1984

(Oriard, 2012; Eitzen, 1987). To paint a bleaker picture for Tulane, its study found that football and men’s basketball student-athletes had a mean GPA of 1.93 from 1980 to

1984 while Tulane undergraduate students’ mean GPA was 2.73 during the same time

(Oriard, 2012; Eitzen, 1987). What happened at Tulane and other schools across the country was the result of the NCAA’s 1.6 and 2.0 rules. In order to undo the damage caused by these rules, the NCAA implemented three separate propositions over the next decade – Proposition 48, Proposition 42, and Proposition 16.

Academic Propositions

Proposition 48. Once the NCAA realized Division I schools were using the low eligibility standards to recruit top-tier athletic talent (Gatmen, 2011), the NCAA implemented stricter eligibility rules with the passing of Proposition 48 in 1983 (Howard-

Hamilton & Watt, 2001). For student-athletes to be eligible for athletic aid, Proposition

48 required recruitable student-athletes to graduate high school with at least a 2.0 GPA and a minimum SAT score of 700 (Gatmen, 2011). However, some critics (e.g., Crowl,

1983; Ferrante, Etzel, & Lantz, 1996) viewed Proposition 48 as a racially motivated way to suppress Black males’ college athletics participation because minority students historically score lower on standardized tests. Leaders from Historically Black Colleges and Universities – or HBCUs – were openly critical of Proposition 48. Joseph Johnson, former president of Grambling State University, suggested that Proposition 48 was “a

49 racist rule that was instituted by racist people intent on denying Black kids an education”

(Farrell, 1987, p. 44). Jesse Stone, former dean of the Southern University Law School, referred to the new legislation as “patently racist” (Greene, 1984, p. 104). Former North

Carolina A & T chancellor Edward Forte claimed Proposition 48 had “unfortunately become a black-white issue” (Crowl, 1983, p. 20). A 1991 NCAA study suggested that if the Proposition 48 requirements had been imposed on the 1984-85 freshman class, “sixty- two percent of the Black athletes would have been ineligible due to standardized test scores as opposed to only eleven percent of white athletes” (Lederman, 1991).

Proposition 42 and Proposition 16. Three years after the implementation of

Proposition 48 at the 1989 NCAA Convention, the NCAA membership passed

Proposition 42 which would deny financial aid to partial academic qualifiers (Oriard,

2012). Outrage from Division I member institutions led to the NCAA rescinding

Proposition 42 in 1990 (Oriard, 2012). The NCAA adopted Proposition 16 at the 1992

NCAA Convention. In 1996, Proposition 48 was replaced by Proposition 16 (Gatmen,

2011) which modified the previous legislation to include a sliding scale between SAT scores and GPA (Howard-Hamilton & Watt, 2001; Oriard, 2012). It also created three distinct classifications of student-athletes: qualifiers, partial qualifiers, and non-qualifiers

(Howard-Hamilton & Watt, 2001). The biggest difference between Proposition 48 and

Proposition 16 was that Proposition 16 used an “initial-eligibility index that shifted some of the focus away from the SAT and ACT amidst concerns of their inherent racial biases”

(Rosen, 2000, p. 182). With Proposition 16’s initial-eligibility index in place, student- athletes were now able to establish their eligibility with a 2.0 GPA or higher in 13 core

50 courses as long as they also earned a qualifying score on either the SAT or ACT

(Howard-Hamilton & Watt, 2001; Oriard, 2012; Rosen, 2000). However, it resulted in shutting out many Black athletes from college. With Proposition 16 in place, there was a clear disproportionality in academically eligible Black athletes versus academically eligible while athletes. Less than half of Black high school seniors (46.4 percent) met the requirements set forth by Proposition 16 while two-thirds of white high school seniors

(67.0 percent) were eligible (Rosen, 2000; Howard-Hamilton & Watt, 2001; Gatmen,

2011).

NCAA’s Current Academic Metrics

The decade of the 1990s established the third of the NCAA’s four academic eras

(Petr & McArdle, 2012). An amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965, the

Student Right-To-Know Act was passed by Congress in 1990 (LaForge & Hodge, 2011).

The Student Right-To-Know Act required higher education institutions that receive federal funding to properly report the graduation rates for all students (LaForge & Hodge,

2011). More than a decade later, the NCAA created the Academic Progress Rate (APR) and Graduation Success Rate (GSR) in 2003 (LaForge & Hodge, 2011). The NCAA

(2018c) heralded the Academic Progress Rate as part of its ambitious plan to reform academics in Division I athletics. The APR was designed to hold institutions accountable for student-athletes’ academic progress “through a team-based metric that accounts for the eligibility and retention of each student-athlete for each academic term” (NCAA,

2018c).

51 As the second part of the NCAA’s academic reform effort, the methodology of the Graduation Success Rate was to create a graduation rate metric that “more accurately reflects student-athlete transfer patterns and other factors affecting graduation” (NCAA,

2018c). Although the Student Right-To-Know Act created the Federal Graduation Rate

(FGR) in 1990, the FGR and the NCAA GSR differ in two ways: “(1) the GSR holds colleges accountable for those student-athletes who transfer into their school; and (2) the

GSR does not penalize colleges who student-athletes transfer in good academic standing”

(NCAA, 2018d). However, as LaForge and Hodge (2011) note, the GSR typically results in a higher graduation rate because student-athletes who leave school early in good academic standing but do not graduate are removed entirely from their GSR cohort.

Since the introduction of the NCAA’s academic performance metrics, data indicate an improvement in both the Graduation Success Rate and the Academic Progress

Rate for FBS football student-athletes. When comparing the Academic Progress Rates of the 2010-2011 and 2016-2017 cohorts, football student-athletes at the FBS level have made marked improvement toward eligibility, retention, and degree completion (NCAA,

2017e). As of the 2017 APR release, football student-athletes still were well below average four-year APR for all sports. Football’s average four-year APR was 964 – nineteen points below the overall average four-year APR of 983, thirteen points below baseball’s average APR of 975, and three points below men’s basketball’s average of 967

(NCAA, 2017e).

52 Table 5

Academic Progress Rate Differential Between 2011 and 2017

Student-Athlete Group 2011 2017 Difference

Football Bowl Subdivision 955 968 +13 Eligibility 946 967 +21 Retention 952 963 +11 Football Championship Subdivision 939 962 +23 Eligibility 923 960 +37 Retention 945 957 +12

Table 6

Comparison of GSR and Graduation Cohorts of 2002 and 2018

Student-Athlete Group 2002 2018 Difference GSR GSR

Overall 74% 88% +14% White 81% 92% +11% Black 56% 79% +23% White Males 76% 88% +12% Black Males 51% 75% +24% Football Bowl Subdivision 63% 79% +16% White Football (FBS) 76% 91% +15% Black Football (FBS) 53% 75% +22%

53 Negatives of Eligibility Standards

One negative side effect of the NCAA’s current eligibility standards is the exclusion of access for non-sports minorities to the same flexible admissions standards as sports minorities (Petr & McArdle, 2012; Gatmen, 2011). Unlike their non-athlete counterparts, Black athletes are recruited by Power Five universities and, as a result, enjoy an admissions advantage (Shulman & Bowen, 2001a; Gatmen, 2011). Armed with statistical evidence that minority student-athletes’ chances of being admitted increase by

400 percent (Steiber, 1991; Overly, 2005; Gatmen, 2011), the NCAA and its member institutions continue to perpetuate the perception that success is achieved through athletics, not academic excellence (Overly, 2005).

Statistics show that Black student-athletes – on average – graduate at higher rates than their peers at non-HBCU institutions (Cooper & Hawkins, 2012). “Some universities take advantage of their student-athletes” (Duderstadt, 2000, p. 5). What’s the point when universities take advantage – or exploit – these student-athletes? Van Rheenen (2012) shared that according to Figler (1981) this exploitation occurs when a college student- athlete is “recruited into the college setting without possessing the necessary abilities or background to have a reasonable chance of succeeding academically” (as cited in

Leonard, 1986, p. 40). Duderstadt further claimed that universities exploited student- athletes’ “athletic talents for financial gain and public visibility and tolerating low graduation rates and meaningless degrees in majors like general studies or recreational life” (Duderstadt, 2000, p. 6).

54 Cureton v. NCAA. With the data supporting the NCAA’s initial eligibility standards exhibiting institutional racism, four Black high school athletes questioned whether Proposition 16 violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Cureton v.

NCAA, 1999). Tai Kwan Cureton, Leatrice Shaw, Andrea Gardner, and Alexander Wesby all exceeded the NCAA’s GPA requirement for eligibility, but they all failed to achieve the required standardized test scores (Cureton v. NCAA, 1999). The plaintiffs claimed the

NCAA’s use of the minimum standardized test score created “an unjustified, disparate impact on African-American student-athletes” (Cureton v. NCAA, 1999). Cureton, Shaw,

Gardner, and Wesby prevailed on summary judgement in the U.S. District Court for the

Eastern District of Pennsylvania. However, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision, ruling that “section 601 of Title VI did not preclude recipients of federal funds from [discriminatory practices against] programs not receiving the federal funding”

(Cureton v. NCAA, 1999).

Pryor v. NCAA. In 1999, Kelly Pryor and Warren Spivey signed an agreement called a National Letter of Intent to play soccer at San Jose State and football at the

University of Connecticut, respectively (Pryor v. NCAA, 2001). As was the case with the

National Letters of Intent signed by athletes who receive athletic aid, the agreement contained a clause that required the athletes to meet eligibility requirements established by Proposition 16 or the agreement is void if they do not meet them (Pryor v. NCAA,

2001). Neither Pryor nor Spivey met the Proposition 16 standards. In February 2000,

Pryor and Spivey sued the NCAA while Pryor alleged that Proposition 16 discriminated against her because of her learning disability which would be a violation of the

55 Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. As was the initial defense in

Cureton v. NCAA (1999), both Pryor and Spivey alleged the NCAA intentionally discriminated against them based on their race and violated Title VI of the Civil Rights

Act and 42 U.S.C. § 1981. The case was dismissed by the district court, but the holding was reversed by the Third Court which held the plaintiffs had a sufficient claim for purposeful discrimination under Title VI and section 1981 (Pryor v. NCAA, 2001).

Because Pryor v. NCAA “reopened possibilities for plaintiffs to sue the NCAA for discrimination” (Pryor v. NCAA, 2001), the NCAA was forced to amend its initial eligibility standards again.

Student-Athlete Perceptions of Academic Success

While the NCAA’s academic regulations have increased student-athletes’ academic and graduation successes, these regulations only establish a minimum standard for student-athletes (Fountain & Finley, 2009; Benson, 2000; Mathewson, 2000;

Mondello & Abernethy, 2000). This limited success tends to feed a negative academic culture within college athletics as it is based on the “de minimis concept, which provides universities with substantial incentives to maintain, and discourages them from investing in or exceeding, the minimum eligibility requirements” (Mathewson, 2000, p. 85).

Research has shown that teammates and coaches may play a large role in creating a team culture that either values or devalues academic achievement which may adversely affect a student-athlete’s own view of his or her academic expectations (Engstrom, Sedlacek, &

McEwen, 1995; Feltz, Schneider, Hwang, & Skogsberg, 2013). The literature suggested there is a positive connection between sports and academics for student-athletes

56 (Umbach, Palmer, Kuh, & Hannah, 2006; Harrison, Stone, Shapiro, Yee, Boyd, &

Rullan, 2009; Hildebrand, Sanders, Leslie-Toogood, & Benson, 2009; Martin, Harrison,

Stone, & Lawrence, 2010). Based on data from the National Survey of Student

Engagement, student-athletes reported making greater gains since starting college while perceiving their campus environment to be supportive of their needs (Umbach, Palmer,

Kuh, & Hannah, 2006).

Student-Athlete Climate Study

Since its inception in 1906, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has sought to ensure student-athlete well-being (Crowley, Pickle, & Clarkson, 2006). In June

2011, Pennsylvania State University’s Center for the Study of Higher Education released the initial findings of its Student-Athlete Climate Study (Rankin, Merson, Sorgen,

McHale, Loya, & Oseguera, 2011). The study explored the relationship between student- athletes’ experiences and climate perceptions based on three outcomes: academic success, athletic success, and athletic identity (Rankin, Merson, Sorgen, McHale, Loya,

& Oseguera, 2011). The results yielded 8,018 respondents across 164 NCAA member institutions which represented a 15 percent response rate (Rankin, Merson, Sorgen,

McHale, Loya, & Oseguera, 2011). Division I football student-athletes showed statistically lower levels of academic success compared to their Division III counterparts while Division I FCS and Division I non-football student-athletes reported the highest levels of academic success (Rankin, Merson, Sorgen, McHale, Loya, & Oseguera, 2011).

When it looked at the racial differences among student-athletes, student-athletes of Color

(i.e. Black) reported lower academic success scores while White student-athletes reported

57 lower athletic identity scores (Rankin, Merson, Sorgen, McHale, Loya, & Oseguera,

2011). According to the Student-Athlete Climate Study findings, faculty-student interaction had a significant influence on student-athlete’s athletic identity, athletic success, and academic & intellectual development (Rankin, Merson, Sorgen, McHale,

Loya, & Oseguera, 2011).

GOALS Study

Since 2006, the NCAA has been studying the experiences and well-being of current student-athletes through its Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of

Students in College (GOALS) study. Three previous versions of the study were released in 2006, 2010, and 2015 with a fourth version slated for release in January 2020 (NCAA,

2019d). Data were collected from 21,233 student-athletes including 1,092 FBS student- athletes and 734 FCS student-athletes (NCAA, 2016). While more than three quarters of

NCAA men and women reported a positive overall academic experience, more than one- third of student-athletes said that playing sports prevented them from taking desired classes (NCAA, 2016). Among Division I football student-athletes, sixty percent of FBS players felt they could keep up with their coursework during the playing season as compared to 55 percent of FCS players (NCAA, 2016).

Thirty-two percent of FBS football student-athletes and twenty-eight percent of

FCS football student-athletes said that playing football preventing them from taking certain classes but that they did not have regrets (NCAA, 2016). The FCS rate was 10 percentage points lower than the 2010 GOALS study (NCAA, 2016). FBS football student-athletes (18 percent) had the second-highest rate among student-athletes with

58 regrets about class choice (NCAA, 2016). More than thirty-five percent of FBS football student-athletes reported athletic participation prohibited them from choosing their desired academic major; however, only 11 percent regretted their choice in academic major (NCAA, 2016). Less than one-third of FCS football student-athletes (28 percent) said athletic participation prohibited them from choosing their desired academic major, but only seven percent said they regretted their choice (NCAA, 2016). While seventy- four percent of Division I respondents said they feel positive about their overall academic experience, only 54 percent of male student-athletes who chose an academic major they regret reported feeling positive about their academic experience (NCAA, 2016).

Academic Clustering Among Student-Athletes

Before the late 1980s, no thorough research had been conducted on academic clustering among student-athletes. Case, Greer, and Brown (1987) conducted one of the most thorough research studies on academic clustering. The study, which was the first to establish the term ‘academic clustering’, analyzed NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball teams (Case, Greer, & Brown, 1987). For their study, Case, Greer, and Brown

(1987) defined academic clustering as when “twenty-five percent or more of student- athletes on a single athletic term were enrolled in a particular major.” By comparison,

Upton and Novak (2008) offered an alternative definition of academic clustering. An academic cluster “existed if the number of student-athletes from a team in one major divided by the number of junior and students on the team was calculated to be greater than twenty-five percent” (Syvantek, Connelly, O’Neill, Boudreaux, Struempler, &

Teeter, 2017; Upton & Novak, 2008).

59 Academic Clustering Studies

Case, Greer, and Brown (1987) conducted a survey study of 130 NCAA Division

I men’s and women’s basketball teams during the 1985-1986 athletic season. Fifty-five of the 77 men’s teams (71 percent) showed signs of academic clustering, while 27 of the 53 women’s teams (51 percent) engaged in academic clustering (Case, Greer, & Brown,

1987). More than two decades later, Fountain and Finley (2009) examined race and academic clustering among upperclassmen football student-athletes at 11 Atlantic Coast

Conference institutions. The Fountain and Finley (2009) study found a larger number of upperclassmen were majoring in general studies programs. Further findings revealed a

“substantial difference between white and minority players in the percent of players clustered into a limited number of majors” (Fountain & Finley, 2009, p. 10). On one

ACC football roster, seventy-three percent of upperclassmen were studying business management, while six schools had one-third or more of their players clustered within a single major (Fountain & Finley, 2009). In a follow-up study that extended their methodology to other major FBS conferences, Fountain & Finley (2010) found that eight of the 57 football programs studied had 50 percent or more upperclassmen minority football players clustered in a single major. R.C. Slocum, who was the Texas A&M head football coach from 1989 to 2002, once complained that the institution’s lack of a general studies program put him at a recruiting disadvantage (Suggs, 2003a). Texas A&M now has a university studies major that is open to all students and is popular among student- athletes (Suggs, 2003a). As the Case, Greer, and Brown (1987) and Fountain and Finley

(2009) studies indicate, academic clustering isn’t limited to football.

60 Expanding on the work of Case and his colleagues, McCormick (2010) noted that academic clustering begins once student-athletes place their athletic futures above their non-athletic career goals and options (Case, Greer, & Brown, 1987; Case, Dey, Barry, &

Rudolph, 2017; McCormick, 2010). According to Case, Dey, Barry, and Rudolph (2017), this clustering process results in academic advisors planning student-athletes’ academic schedules around their athletic schedules and demands. Research by Goodson (2015) proved academic clustering was not only a “big time” athletics issue. Goodson (2015) found prolific academic clustering at HBCUs at both the NCAA Division I and Division

II levels.

No academic clustering study had focused solely on women’s basketball programs until the first decade of the 21st century. Paule (2010) discovered academic clustering was widespread among NCAA Division I women’s basketball programs.

Almost half (ninety-four) of the 211 schools studied exceeded the previously established cutoff value by Case, Greer, and Brown (1987) – 25 percent – for clustering players in a single major (Paule, 2010). The most notable discovery by Paule (2010) was that defending national champion, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team.

Nine of UConn’s 14 players (64 percent) listed their major as exploratory studies – a major selected by less than five percent of the University of Connecticut’s undergraduate population (Paule, 2010). Academic fraud is a potential problem when academic clustering is introduced (Steeg, Upton, Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008). Student-athletes’ decisions on their choices of academic major and course scheduling are prone to

61 inappropriate influence by their coaches and athletics academic advisors (Steeg, Upton,

Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008).

Academic Clustering in Major Sports

Before studies by Fountain and Finley (2009) and Paule (2010) were published,

Steeg, Upton, Bohn, and Berkowitz (2008), sportswriters for USA TODAY, studied the academic majors of juniors and seniors in five prominent sports at 142 NCAA Division I schools. According to their results, athletes were clustered into certain majors at rates disproportionate to all undergraduate students (Steeg, Upton, Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008).

Using fall 2007 student enrollment figures and 2007-2008 roster data for NCAA Division

I teams in football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, and softball, Steeg, Upton,

Bohn, and Berkowitz (2008) analyzed all 120 schools at the FBS level – now since grown to 130 schools – and nearly 9,300 student-athletes across 654 teams. More than one-third of the teams (222 of 654) had at least 25 percent of their upperclassmen clustered in the same academic major (Steeg, Upton, Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008). Stanford University had seven of its 19 upperclassmen baseball players clustered in sociology, and all seven of the

University of Texas at El Paso’s men’s basketball upperclassmen were multidisciplinary studies majors (Steeg, Upton, Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008). While research has indicated that academic clustering is prevalent among student-athletes (e.g., Paule, 2010; Fountain

& Finley, 2009; Steeg, Upton, Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008), Myles Brand, the former

NCAA president who passed away in 2009, claimed that “clustering by itself is replicated in many parts of the university; it’s not necessarily bad” (Steeg, Upton, Bohn, &

Berkowitz, 2008). However, Dr. C. Keith Harrison, an associate chair at the University of

62 Central Florida, disagreed and claimed that student-athletes are “majoring in eligibility, with a minor in beating the system” (Steeg, Upton, Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008).

Based on the size of a football team relative to a school’s undergraduate population, Schneider, Ross, and Fisher (2010) proposed that the academic majors of football teams cannot be expected to mirror the student body (Svyantek, Connelly,

O’Neill, Boudreaux, Struempler, & Teeter, 2017). Upton and Novak (2008) evaluated academic clustering among NCAA Division I football schools and noticed that six SEC football teams had at least one major cluster among upperclassmen. For instance, sixteen of the 25 juniors and seniors (64 percent) on the Vanderbilt University football team majored in human and organizational development (Upton & Novak, 2008). At Texas

A&M University, seventeen of the Aggies’ 33 upperclassmen were agricultural leadership and development majors (Upton & Novak, 2008). Auburn University

(criminology), the University of Arkansas (social science, kinesiology), Louisiana State

University (recreation management), and the University of Missouri (hotel and restaurant management) were the four SEC football programs with visible academic clustering

(Upton & Novak, 2008). Clustering among football student-athletes was also found within the Big 12 Conference (Schneider, Ross, & Fisher, 2010). Using Upton and Novak

(2008) as their foundation, the study by Schneider, Ross, and Fisher (2010) looked at academic clustering among Big 12 Conference teams in 1996, 2001, and 2006. The findings were similar to previous studies (e.g. Paule, 2010; Fountain & Finley, 2009;

Steeg, Upton, Bohn, & Berkowitz, 2008). Enrolling student-athletes in easier programs ensures coaches that they are satisfying necessary academic requirements while not

63 sacrificing their time and dedication to the sport (Foster & Huml, 2017; Knight

Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, 2006). Clustering student-athletes “into specified academic program not only limited the academic development of student- athletes, but the overall identity development of student-athletes is affected” (Foster &

Huml, 2017, p. 916).

Athletic Identity and Stereotype Threat

A person’s athletic identity is a combination of his or her self-image and their social identity or how they are viewed by others (Pearlin, 1983; Astle, 1986; Beamon,

2012). Brewer, Van Raatle, and Linder (1993) asserted that a person’s athletic identity is comprised of the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and social obligations that may be associated with identifying one’s self with an athletic role (Beamon, 2012). Black athletes in football and basketball are most susceptible to the idea of identity foreclosure

(Harrison, Sailes, Rotich, & Bimper, 2011; Scales, 1991) which occurs when one commits to an identity before exploring other options (Danish, Petitpas, & Hale, 1993;

Marcia, 1966). The high susceptibility of Black athletes is based on how their intense socialization into sports (Beamon & Bell, 2002; Beamon & Bell, 2006; Beamon, 2008;

Edwards, 2000; Eitle & Eitle, 2002; Harrison & Lawrence, 2003; Hoberman, 2000;

Pascarella, Truckenmiller, Nora, Terenzini, Edison, & Hagedorn, 1999; Scales, 1991;

Smith, 2007). Quantitative literature has confirmed that Black athletes are more likely to magnify the importance of sports in their lives and perceive that others view them only as athletes than their White athletes (Harrison, Sailes, Rotich, & Bimper, 2011; Murphy,

Petitpas, & Brewer, 1996; Scales, 1991). A study by Harrison, Sailes, Rotich, and Bimper

64 (2011) found that Black males see themselves as only athletes more often than White males while assuming that others viewed them only as others as well which proved a foreclosed identity had been formed. A qualitative ethnographic study by Beamon (2012) featured 20 Black male former NCAA Division I FBS student-athletes. Fifteen of the 20 respondents said they felt athletics comprised 60 percent of more of their self-identity while 12 believed sports made up 75 percent of more of their self-identity (Beamon,

2012). Furthermore, all 20 respondents faced some level of difficulty in transitioning from their role as athlete after they retired from sports (Beamon, 2012).

Stereotype Threat and the “Dumb Jock” Stereotype

Steele and Aronson (1995) were the first to perform experiments to understand the power stereotype threat has on undermining a person’s intellectual performance.

Stereotype threat refers to the perceived risk of “confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group” (Steele & Aronson, 1995, p. 797). Stereotype threat has also been defined as the “fear people have of being reduced to a stereotype”

(Inzlicht, McKay, & Aronson, 2006, p. 262). A possible side effect of stereotype threat is the anxiety created eventually undermines a person’s performance (Aronson, Fried, &

Good, 2002; Smith, 2004; Steele, 1998; Steele & Aronson, 1995).

Student-athletes are predisposed to stereotype threat through the negative ‘dumb jock’ stereotype (Edwards, 1983; Pressley & Whitley, 1996; Wininger & White, 2008;

Georgakis, Wilson & Ferguson, 2014; Wininger & White, 2015). According to Coakley

(2004), the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype is the belief that student-athletes are not capable of performing as well academically as their non-athlete classmates because they are athletes.

65 A collection of studies has recorded the negative academic perceptions of athletes (e.g.,

Adler & Adler, 1987; Baucom & Lantz, 2001; Engstrom & Sedlacek, 1991; Sailes, 1993;

Coakley, 2004; Simons, Bosworth, Fujita, & Jensen, 2007; Wininger & White, 2008;

Wininger & White, 2015). “In an attempt to eliminate the stereotypical ‘dumb jock’ image, the NCAA has consistently raised the academic requirements for today's student- athletes competing at major universities” (Mondello & Abernethy, 2000, p. 127). The

“dumb jock stereotype can have an effect on white athletes, but it has a compounding effect on African American athletes” (Sailes, 1993, p. 91). Not only do student-athletes face the possibility of exposure to the inherently negative ‘dumb jock’ stereotype, but

Black student-athletes in particular face an additional race-based stereotype threat. Later research by Martin, Harrison, Stone, and Lawrence (2010) reported that Black student- athletes believe professors and other students apply the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype to them more than to white student-athletes (Stone, Harrison, & Mottley, 2012). Research (Stone,

Harrison, & Mottley, 2012; Edwards, 1983; Harrison, 2002; Sailes, 1996; Wininger &

White, 2008) shows that a majority of faculty, administrators, and non-athlete students view college student-athletes through the lens of the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype.

Black student-athletes have been plagued by the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype for more than three decades because they have also been burdened with inherently racist myths and the ‘dumb Negro’ stereotype (Edwards, 1983). In one study by Simons, Bosworth,

Fujita, and Jensen (2007), one-third of student-athletes said they were perceived negatively by their professors. Furthermore, Simons, Bosworth, Fujita, and Jensen (2007) found more than 60 percent of student-athletes reported negative remarks were made in

66 class about them by an instructor. In another study by Wininger and White (2008), classmates were reported to have lower expectations of them than of nonathletes. In a study of 151 student-athletes, Stone (2012) discovered the term ‘student-athlete’ can have a negative impact in the classroom setting. Stone (2012) further concluded student- athletes’ performance in the classroom can decreased based on the stereotype threat processes they experience.

Several researchers (Glasser, 2002; Murphy, Petitpas, & Brewer, 1996; Shulman

& Bowen, 2001b) have proposed that stereotype threat is one explanation for student- athletes’ academic underperformance. While numerous studies have examined stereotype threat’s effects on academic tasks (e.g., Aronson, Lustina, Good, Keough, Brown, &

Steele, 1999; Michel Desert, Croizet, & Darcis, 2000), gender (e.g., Koenig & Eagly,

2005; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999), and athletic ability (e.g., Beilock & McConnell,

2004; Stone, Lynch, Sjomeling, & Darley, 1999), a Yopyk and Prentice (2005) study found that a strong athlete identity may make a negative academic stereotype more predominant than a student identity. Later studies produced similar results (Bimper,

2014; Harrison, Stone, Shapiro, Yee, Boyd, & Rullan, 2009; Stone, Harrison, & Mottley,

2012). However, Yopyk & Pentice (2005) did not measure the roles of athletes’ self- perceived identity (Feltz, Schneider, Hwang, & Skogsberg, 2013). Research predominantly focusing on Division I Black male student-athletes in revenue-generating sports indicates that student-athletes’ athletic participation may negatively affect their academic performance (Benson, 2000; Edwards, 2000; Johnson, Hallinan, & Westerfield,

1999; Person & Lenoir, 1997).

67 A second study by Wininger and White (2015) focused on the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype and how it affects college student-athletes. According to Wininger and White

(2015), the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype lends itself to developing into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when an initially inaccurate social belief leads to its own fulfillment (Jussim & Fleming, 1996). In a classroom setting, a self- fulfilling prophecy occurs in a three-stage process: “(a) teachers develop expectations, (b) teachers treat students differently depending on their expectations, and (c) students react in expectancy-confirming way” (Jussim, 1986, p. 429). In a survey of 493 college students by Wininger and White (2015), students indicated they had lower academic expectations of student-athletes and they felt their professors held the same beliefs too.

This raises concerns as previous research by Aronson and Steele (2005) indicate that a negative stereotype can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy (Wininger & White, 2015).

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Sociologist Robert Merton is credited with coining the expression ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and in his initial paper, he defined it as the point when false expectations potentially lead to their own fulfillment (Merton, 1948; Stukas & Snyder, 2016).

Ultimately, Merton’s findings support the idea that self-fulfilling prophecies do exist; however, his analysis did not find that the prophecies’ effects are powerful (Klein &

Snyder, 2003; Madon, Guyll, Spoth, & Willard, 2004; Jussim, Eccles, & Madon, 1996;

Stukas & Snyder, 2016; Merton, 1948). While the singular effects of self-fulfilling prophecies may not be strong, the accumulation of a prophecy’s small effects can become powerful over time to those who perceive them as real (e.g., Klein & Snyder, 2003;

68 Madon, Guyll, Spoth, & Willard, 2004; Jussim, Eccles, & Madon, 1996; Merton, 1948).

However, Swann and Ely (1984) offered compelling reasons as to predict the dissipation of the effects of self-fulfilling prophecies.

While Merton (1948) first developed the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy,

Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) are credited in introduced self-fulfilling prophecies as an area of inquiry within the social sciences and education. In their seminal work, elementary school teachers were given the impression that a particular group of their students would show dramatic increases in their IQ during the school year (Rosenthal &

Jacobson, 1968). The random student selection did show greater increases in their IQ than their classmates (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

In order to examine the effects of self-fulfilling prophecy, researchers developed a standard paradigm of perceiver-target to better understand the phenomenon (Stukas &

Snyder, 2016). This perceiver-target standard paradigm was central to an early study conducted by Snyder, Tanke, and Berscheid (1977). For the study, a group of male perceivers were randomly assigned to receive a photograph of a female target; prior to the male perceivers receiving the photograph, it was rated as physically attractive or unattractive (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977). After having brief conversations with female participants, the behavior of the male perceivers was significantly different based on the female’s attractiveness or unattractiveness (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977).

Education literature indicates that stereotype threat and self-fulfilling prophecies are not restricted to student-athletes. Research has shown that the phenomenon of faculty expectations as self-fulfilling prophecy may unjustly affect Black students (e.g., Oates,

69 2003; Weinstein, Gregory, & Strambler, 2004; Tenenbaum & Ruck, 2007). Race is an underlying factor with stereotype threat and self-fulfilling prophecy as faculty members’ expectations was influenced by the student’s race (Parks & Kennedy, 2007).

Summary

In this section, five principal areas facing the academic success of NCAA

Division I student-athletes have been reviewed. College athletics and higher education were integrated into an “unintentional union” (Hawes, 1999). However, national prestige for a university became tethered to athletic success as “athletics eventually came to be an important part of the success equation” (Smith, 1988, p. viii). With the rise of

“edutainment” (Benford, 2007) and the role of the “student-athlete” (Byers & Hammer,

1997), universities have been unable to erase the educational problems created by the rise of student-athletes’ entertainment value (Staurowsky & Sack, 2005). In the last 50-plus years, the NCAA has introduced several academic reform measures (LaForge & Hodge,

2011; Gatmen, 2011; Petr & McArdle, 2012), but it has perhaps inadvertently caused schools to increasingly participate in the act of academic clustering their student-athletes for eligibility reasons, not necessarily for an education (Case, Greer, & Brown, 1987;

Syvantek, 2017; Upton & Novak, 2008; Fountain & Finley, 2009; Suggs, 2003a;

McCormick, 2010; Case, Dey, Barry, & Rudolph, 2017).

CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

A number of quantitative studies have examined the issues surrounding student- athletes’ academic performance (e.g., Andrassy, Bruening, Svensson, Huml, & Chung,

2014; Burns, Jasinski, Dunn, & Fletcher, 2013; Chen, Snyder, & Wagner, 2010;

Hazelbaker, 2015; Kulics, Kornspan, & Kretovics, 2015). Findings from these studies included: academic major selection for athletic eligibility purposes (Kulics, Kornspan, &

Kretovics, 2015), the need of a well-balanced academic and athletic life for student- athletes (Chen, Snyder, & Wagner, 2010), student-athletes’ satisfaction with their school’s academic support services (Burns, Jasinski, Dunn, & Fletcher, 2013), and areas of concern within NCAA Division I athletics (Hazelbaker, 2015). However, none of these studies provided insight into why student-athletes may suffer academically or how being a student-athlete affects their academic experiences.

Subdivision (FBS) institution and one NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution. The goal of this phenomenological study was to explore and conceptualize the lived academic experiences of football student-athletes.

70 71 Methodology

The phenomenological design was one through an interpretivist lens as interpretivism is the belief that reality exists within a participant’s reflection, self- description, and their interpretation of the data (Creswell, 2003; 2006). Methodology is

“the strategy, plan of action, process or design,” and method is “the techniques or procedures used to gather and analyze data” (Crotty, 2003, p. 3). In order to study the lived academic experiences of football student-athletes, a phenomenological approach was the best method for this study. Phenomenology is the study of the human experience

(Sokolowski, 2000) and it focuses on the descriptions of what people experience and how they experience what they experience (Patton, 2002). While there are three types of phenomenology, the phenomenological method chosen for this study was transcendental phenomenology which is a philosophical approach to qualitative research seeking to understand the human experience (Moustakas, 1994). As a form of qualitative inquiry, phenomenology seeks to explore phenomena and how they are perceived and experience by those individuals within the phenomenological event (Lester, 1999b). Transcendental phenomenology was created by German philosopher Edmund Husserl who viewed transcendental phenomenology as “a science of pure possibilities carried out with systematic concreteness and that it precedes, and makes possible, the empirical sciences, the sciences of actualities” (Moustakas, 1994, p. 28).

Research Design

The researcher utilized a phenomenological study method, interviewing 10 total school football student-athletes, five from an NCAA Division I Football Bowl

72 Subdivision (FBS) institution and five from an NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution in the southeastern United States. For this study, the researcher utilized theoretical sampling and one key informant within the two schools’ athletic departments to identify student-athletes for the study. The researcher did provide sampling requests for the study. In order to gain access to the site participants, the researcher asked his informant to select participants that were scholarship football student-athletes who are academically eligible to compete (2.0 GPA or higher). The ability to access participants was an important consideration in choosing these institutions, but the researcher was concerned with the potential of athletic department hostility with the research area. Coakley (2008) described the phenomenon of athletic department personnel’s hostility toward outsiders as “institutionalized suspicion” (p. 15).

Furthermore, the anxiety of outsiders conducting research with student-athletes puts additional stress because “team members are family and that survival and success depend on sticking together” (Coakley, 2008, p. 15).

Rationale for the Study

(Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014). The researcher’s relationship with administrators at the universities and his in-depth knowledge of the institutions were beneficial in his observing and documenting the participants’ behavior. Since most athletic department

73 staff are wary of outsiders who are interested in student-athletes’ academic activities, this study will require the permission of several administrators within the chosen athletic departments (Coakley, 2008). Approaches within qualitative research offer in-depth data- rich analyses that are absent in a quantitative approach (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

Exploratory research methods benefit in qualitative study designs (Yin, 2003).

Research Questions

RQ1: How do NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes perceive their academic experience?

RQ2: How do NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes negotiate their academic lives within the constraints of their athletic demands?

RQ3: What are the differences in academic experiences among NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes?

Population

The population examined for this study was scholarship football student-athletes who are academically eligible to compete (2.0 GPA or higher) and who have completed at least two semesters of academic coursework at their NCAA Division I institution. For this study, the population was limited to NCAA Division I FBS and FCS student-athletes for three reasons. First, Division I is the only NCAA classification that is required to provide academic support services for student-athletes (Banbel & Chen, 2014). Second,

Division I schools participate at the highest level of intercollegiate athletics where revenue generation and winning games are more important than Division II or Division

74 III (Clotfelter, 2011). The third reason is that Division I FBS student-athletes’ total time commitment to athletics adversely affects other aspects of their life (Jenny & Hushman,

2014). According to the NCAA Division I 20/8-Hour Rule, student-athletes at the

Division I level are subjected to limitations of four hours of countable athletically-related activities and no more than 20 hours per week during the competition season, but these restrictions do not include an institution’s vacation period (NCAA, 2018e). Once the competition season is over, student-athletes are limited to eight hours of countable athletically-related activities per week (NCAA, 2018e).

Site Selection

The researcher requested that his informant at each research site provide a comfortable interview location for the participants. At Metro University, the interviews were conducted in the defensive football meeting room which allowed the players to feel comfortable and relaxed in a familiar setting. At City College, players were interviewed in a conference room in the science building where most of them had classes. Their familiarity with the building and the location of the room allowed for them to be relaxed during the interview process.

Selection of Participants

Purposeful (or purposive) sampling was used in selecting the participants. As defined by Creswell (2006), purposeful sampling is qualitative sampling that selects key participants to learn about the problem or phenomenon. “Studying information-rich cases yields insights and in-depth understanding rather than empirical generalizations” (Patton,

2002, p. 230). Patton (1990, 2002) suggests 16 different strategies for purposeful

75 sampling in qualitative research. This research used an intensity sampling approach which involved selecting participants that “manifest sufficient intensity to illuminate the nature of success or failure, but not at the extreme” (Patton, 2002, p. 234).

Data Collection The researcher adhered to research protocol by submitting the appropriate forms and documents required for IRB review through Mercer University’s Office of Research

Compliance. Once the initial request was reviewed and approved, the researcher contacted his key informants at each research site to obtain participants for the study.

Moustakas (1994) suggests that collecting data through long interviews is the preferred method for phenomenological investigations which “involves an informal, interactive process and utilizes open-ended comments and questions” (p. 114). Adding to

Moustakas’ view, Patton (2002) further expounds that researchers “must undertake in- depth interviews with people who have directly experienced the phenomenon of interest

... a ‘lived experience’ as opposed to secondhand experience” (p. 104).

Because phenomenological interviews are an informal, interactive process, the researcher followed a semi-structured interview protocol. This semi-structured protocol

(Appendix D) was created to “facilitate the obtaining of rich, vital, substantive descriptions of the experience of the phenomenon” (Moustakas, 1994, p. 116). A semi- structured interview approach provided the research with the flexibility to ask follow-up questions while also having a standard interview structure.

76 Transcription

Interviews were transcribed and reviewed multiple times for errors. Once the transcriptions were completed, the researcher asked for the participants to read their transcript to validate their responses. Once the transcripts were validated by the participants, the researcher reviewed the data and coded the interviews to identify initial keywords or units. These units reference descriptive or inferential information based on words, phrases, or sentences compiled during the interviews (Miles, Huberman, &

Saldana, 2014). The researcher imported the data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and used axial and thematic coding to identify additional themes, patterns, and commonalities that appear in the participants’ interviews (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014; Yin,

2003). During the axial coding stage, the researcher connected categories to related subcategories in order “to form more precise and complete explanations” (Strauss &

Corbin, 1998, p. 24). After categories and subcategories were created through axial coding, the researcher organized the categories around a central theme or explanatory concept (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Data was analyzed using phenomenological analysis techniques (Moustakas, 1994).

Each interview was audio-recorded by the researcher to ensure accuracy and kept confidential. At the start of each interview, the researcher identified the participant with a pseudonym for their confidentiality (e.g., David, Caleb ... Walter, Aaron). Following the completion of the interviews, each interview audio file was digitally transcribed using computer software. The researcher then listened to the interviews again to ensure the transcript’s accuracy before sharing with the participants.

77 Trustworthiness

For research studies qualitative in nature, member-checking provides research participants with an opportunity to help ensure and improve the accuracy and credibility of the study. Both Lincoln and Guba (1985) and Colaizzi (1978) have advocated for the use of member-checking as a final step in validation of qualitative research studies.

However, a recent study by McConnell-Henry, Chapman, and Francis (2011) viewed that revisiting a participant for clarification (or member-checking) is a “potential threat to the rigour of interpretive studies” (p. 30). Furthermore, McConnell-Henry, Chapman, and

Francis (2011) noted that returning to the study participants is “antithetical to phenomenology’s requirement that a recounting is presented in native, or original, form and that is considers a snapshot in time, not a generalizable right answer” (p. 31). For this phenomenological study, participants were given the opportunity to review the transcribed data from the audio recorded interviews. All 10 participants reviewed the transcribed data and ensured their words were interpreted currently.

Data Analysis

While Merriam (2002) listed interviews, observations, and documents as the three major data sources for qualitative research studies, the researcher’s phenomenological study relied solely on individual one-on-one interviews with the participants. According to Creswell (2006), research data can be analyzed by reviewing interview transcripts, highlighting significant statements, sentences, or quotes that provide an understanding of how a participant experienced a particular phenomenon. This process of aggregating text or data into smaller categories of information is known as coding the data (Creswell,

78 2009). Each participant was interviewed utilizing an in-depth semi-structured interview protocol which included 15 questions (Appendix D). At the start of each interview, the researcher had the expectation that each interview would be unique and offer a different lived experience.

Limitations and Delimitations

There were two limitations for this study. First, the researcher’s access to athletes as only the selected participants were available to be interviewed for this research study.

The second limitation was the participants’ freedom (or lack of freedom) to be transparent about their athletic and academic experiences because of their obligations to their institutions or fear of potentially violating NCAA rules. There were a number of delimitations for this study. First, the researcher restricted the population and study sample to academically eligible scholarship football student-athletes who have been a full-time student for at least two semesters. Second, the researcher opted to focus solely on football rather than including multiple sports in this phenomenological design as football is the revenue-generating force that funds most major college athletics departments. Third, the researcher chose the two research sites based on proximity to his location and personal relationships he had with key informants at each institution.

Summary

This research design was phenomenological in nature and framed by the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The researcher interviewed a total of 10 football student-athletes – five at one NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) institution and five at one NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS)

79 institution in the southeastern United States. The data collection for this study included semi-structured in-depth interviews with the selected participants. Interviews were transcribed and reviewed multiple times for errors and participants were asked to read their transcript to validate their responses. Once the transcripts were validated by the subjects, the researcher reviewed the data and coded the interviews to identify initial keywords or units. Once the interviews were coded and analyzed, the researcher sought to conceptualize the scholarship football student-athletes’ lived academic experiences.

CHAPTER 4

RESULTS

Subdivision (FBS) institution and one NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution. The goal of this phenomenological study was to explore and conceptualize the lived academic experiences of football student-athletes. A multi- site qualitative study was conducted with data collected through interviews with 10

NCAA Division I football student-athletes. Pseudonyms for the research sites and participants were created to ensure that all participants’ identities remained confidential.

This section includes the methodology used to obtain participants for the study, descriptions of the selected institutions, descriptions of the study participants, the shared lived academic experiences of the study participants, the bias of the researcher, trustworthiness, and the limitations of the study.

Methodological Framework

This study’s phenomenological design was rooted within an interpretivism paradigm because interpretivism is the belief that reality exists within a participant’s reflection, self-description, and their interpretation of the data (Creswell, 2003). In order

80 81 for the researcher to understand the lived academic experiences of football student- athletes, a transcendental phenomenological approach was the best method for this study.

Transcendental phenomenology was created by German philosopher Edmund Husserl who viewed transcendental phenomenology as “a science of pure possibilities carried out with systematic concreteness and that it precedes, and makes possible, the empirical sciences, the sciences of actualities” (Moustakas, 1994, p. 28). The transcendental phenomenological methodology is centered around the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy which was first identified by Merton (1948). This concept was defined by

Merton (1948) “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true” (p. 195). The researcher examined the existence of this phenomenon in the participants’ experiences as it pertains to their lived academic experiences and their identity as student-athletes.

Research Sites

Two private universities in the southeastern United States were chosen for this qualitative study. The researcher wanted to compare similar institutions as comparing a public state university and a private institution could yield varying academic experiences.

Metro University is a private nonsectarian research university and is one of 130

NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) members. The institution’s fall 2018 enrollment was 14,062 students, including 8,610 undergraduate students. Less than twenty-five percent of the institution’s students are in-state residents. Metro University has one of the oldest, continuing active college football programs in the country. The

82 university is considered a large, four-year institution in a highly residential setting

(Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, n.d.).

City College is a private sectarian research university and is one of 125 NCAA

Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) members. The institution’s fall

2018 enrollment was 8,756 students, including 4,803 undergraduate students on its main campus. Eighty-seven percent of the institution’s students are in-state residents. The university is considered a mid-sized, four-year institution in a primarily residential setting

(Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, n.d.).

Research Participants

For this qualitative study, the researcher set the following parameters to select football student-athlete participants: they must be on scholarship, they must be academically eligible to compete (2.0 GPA or higher), and they must have completed at least two semesters of academic coursework.

Sampling Participants

After IRB approval was granted from the researcher’s institution, the researcher contacted each of his research site informants to help him to select and gain access to the study participants. The selected participants were contacted via their school-issued email account, detailing the study, requesting their participation in the study, and encouraging the participants to contact the researcher if they were interested in participating in the study. Once a participant agreed to participate, the researcher and his informant scheduled a date and time for each interview to be conducted at the selected interview location.

83 Participant Profiles

Five NCAA Division I FBS football student-athletes enrolled at a private nonsectarian university in the southeastern United States and five NCAA Division I FCS football student-athletes enrolled at a private religious university in the southeastern

United States participated in this research study. Sixty percent of this study’s participants majored in a business-related field, a number that is double the average number of business degrees by Division I student-athletes in 2016-2017 (NCAA, 2018f). According to the latest graduate data from the NCAA, twenty-four percent of Division I student- athletes earned a degree in business in 2016-2017, six percentage points higher than the student body average of 18 percent (NCAA, 2018f). The number of student-athlete business degrees jumped to 30 percent of male student-athletes, compared to 23 percent of males in the student body population (NCAA, 2018f). Football student-athletes factored for 23 percent of the business degrees earned in 2016-2017; in contrast, Division

I baseball student-athletes accounted for 35 percent of the business degrees earned in

2016-2017 (NCAA, 2018f).

David is a 21-year-old Black football player who is a redshirt junior nose tackle.

He is from a nearby large metropolitan area which allows his family to travel a short distance to watch him play. He attended a magnet high school where he thrived in engineering. He is a senior academically and majoring in applied computing systems with a minor in business. He shared that he was more interested in pursuing a career in the business side of computing systems and not the coding side. David described his

84 academic experience as a “roller coaster”, but he felt like his experience is setting him up for a successful career.

Caleb is a 23-year-old White football player who was granted a sixth year of eligibility by the NCAA. He is a graduate student offensive lineman. He graduated from an Ivy League institution with a degree in economics. He was a team captain at his previous school during his senior season. He cited his decision to play at Metro

University because he wanted to attend a school where he can get an MBA and also play at the FBS level. One of six players on the team from the northeastern United States,

Caleb expressed that he was more of a student at his undergraduate school so that he could focus more on being an athlete in graduate school at Metro University.

A soft-spoken and gentle giant, Josh is a 19-year-old Black football player and is a sophomore nose tackle. He is from a neighboring state which allows his mom to travel to his home games. Although he was recruited by a previous coaching staff, the current coaches upheld his scholarship offer and the prospects of playing as a true freshman. He is a health and wellness major. In his time on campus, Josh has developed powerful relationships and shared a unique story of how one of his professors wants to go fishing with him.

Corey is a 20-year-old Black football player who is a junior defensive end and is from one of the largest metro areas in the southeastern United States. Like Josh, he was recruited by a previous coaching staff and the current coaches upheld his scholarship offer. His major is finance although he cited that he wanted to major in engineering, but he did not know that Metro University did not offer an engineering degree until he

85 enrolled at the school. Corey said his transition from a high school athlete to a college athlete was a big adjustment, but he credited his parents being strict about his academics in high school for a smooth academic transition to college.

Kevin is a 21-year-old Black football player and is a redshirt junior quarterback.

He is from a neighboring state and has family in the metro area in which Metro

University is located. Personal and off-the-field issues at his previous institution led to him transferring to Metro University where he had to sit out the 2018 season to satisfy the

NCAA’s transfer rules. A finance major, he expressed that he finds himself to be more of a student in the offseason and more of an athlete during the football season.

Walter is a 22-year-old Black football player who is a redshirt senior linebacker.

He is an in-state athlete and City College is an hour drive away from his hometown. A marketing major, he is an intern for the athletics marketing department. Walter felt that his advanced placement courses in high school prepared him for the academic rigor of college, but he said he felt that his high school teachers did not put an emphasis on the differences between high school and college.

Aaron is a 23-year-old Black football player who is a redshirt senior offensive lineman and a first-year graduate student academically. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. He transferred to City College in his home state from an HBCU in the southeastern United States. During his freshman season at an HBCU, Aaron suffered a shoulder injury and a concussion during a game, but he was rushed back into the game.

That was the moment when he decided to leave the HBCU and transfer closer to home.

He was a mass communication major at his previous institution, and he was interested in

86 pursuing a degree in communications at City College; however, the school does not offer a communications degree. He settled for a marketing degree.

A gregarious character and a loquacious speaker, Chad is a 21-year-old White football player who is a redshirt junior offensive lineman. A marketing major with a philosophy minor, Chad is the son of a college and high school football coach. Because of his dad’s coaching career, his family was sometimes separated from his dad when he coached at an out-of-state school. He has suffered multiple knee injuries which will prohibit him from playing football after exhausting his college football eligibility.

Ryan is a 20-year-old White football player is a redshirt sophomore quarterback.

He was mature and composed in his responses, but he came across brash at times. The researcher felt Ryan’s brashness bordered on arrogance at the beginning of the interview

– almost like a side effect for self-preservation. He became City College’s starting quarterback as a redshirt freshman, but he suffered a season-ending injury in the fourth game of the season. Later in his interview, Ryan said that his broken collarbone humbled him as he returned to the football field for spring practice in 2019. Also a marketing major, Ryan is from a nearby neighboring state.

A quiet and reserved young man, Michael is a 21-year-old Black football player who is a redshirt junior defensive back. He is a criminal justice major and shared that he wants to become a federal agent after he finished playing football. He is from the metro area of the capital city of a southern state. Prior to the start of spring practice in 2019,

Michael switched positions from free safety to defensive back.

Table 7

Description of Study Participants, Metro University

Pseudonym (Race) Athletic Year Academic Year Major

David (B) Redshirt Junior Senior Applied Computing Systems Caleb (W) Sixth Year Graduate Student MBA Josh (B) Sophomore Sophomore Health & Wellness Corey (B) Junior Junior Finance Kevin (B) Redshirt Junior Senior Finance B = Black, W = White

Table 8

Description of Study Participants, City College

Pseudonym (Race) Athletic Year Academic Year Major

Walter (B) Redshirt Junior Senior Marketing Aaron (B) Redshirt Senior Graduate Student Organizational Management Chad (W) Redshirt Junior Senior Marketing Ryan (W) Redshirt Freshman Sophomore Marketing Michael (B) Redshirt Junior Senior Criminal Justice B = Black, W = White

88 Findings

Subdivision (FBS) institution and one NCAA Division I Football Championship

Subdivision (FCS) institution. The research participants discussed their perceptions and lived academic experiences based on three research questions addressed by the researcher. Each of the three central research questions were based on the theory of self- fulfilling prophecy, an ideology first discovered by Merton (1948). Within each research question was a series of four to six semi-structured interview questions (Appendix D).

Themes

Participants’ responses to each of the 15 interview questions yielded both similarities and differences in their perceptions of their lived academic experiences.

Similarities included comparing their academic experiences to a ‘roller coaster’ (David,

Chad, Michael), considering themselves a student over an athlete (David, Josh, Corey), enduring disappointment by being redshirted as a freshman (e.g., Kevin, Aaron, Ryan), having positive relationships with their professors (Caleb, Josh, Walter, Aaron, Chad), and wishing they would have taken different courses or majoring in a different area

(David, Caleb, Corey, Aaron, Chad). Differences included considering themselves an athlete over a student (Corey, Aaron), having a negative or lack of a relationship with their professors (David, Kevin, Ryan, Michael), not feeling like he learned anything in his classes (Aaron), or having overly positive outlook on his academic experience (Ryan).

89 The participant responses were divided into five thematic categories: identity, academic experience, athletic experience, cultural and social experience, and intrapersonal growth.

Each of the five themes were further divided into sub-themes that emerged through multiple coding processes.

Table 9

Description of Themes

Theme Participants’ Lived Experiences (sub-themes)

Identity Student-athlete vs. Athlete-student, Life after football, Balancing student and athlete equally, Impact of athletic success on academic success Academic Experience Academic ‘rollercoaster’, Balancing athletic and academic demands, Relationships with faculty, Course and degree selection, Stress and college coursework Athletic Experience Redshirt season, Injuries and setbacks Cultural and Social Experience Support System, Relationships with Teammates Intrapersonal Growth Maturity, Growth mindset, Confidence

Theme 1: Identity

Identity and self-efficacy are two themes that were discovered during the interview process with the study participants. Research participants were asked: “Do you consider yourself a student or an athlete? Why?” Four of the 10 participants identified

90 themselves as both a student and an athlete while other participants identified as one or the other. However, two participants at the FBS institution said their identity “varies.”

Student-athlete vs. Athlete-student. Participants David and Corey noted a “fine line” between distinguishing themselves as a student or an athlete. While initially answering that his identity varies, David mentioned that his thinking oscillates between playing football and life after football:

It varies. Sometimes I think about my life after football a lot and sometimes I feel like when I think about graduating and figuring out what I'm going to do after football, I'm giving up on my football dreams. And then I go back, ‘Nah, I ain’t gonna (sic) focus on that, I'm gonna (sic) go get an extra workout in,’ and then the next day I'd be like, ‘well, shoot, I need to focus on what I got after football, man,” cause (sic) I'm watching the NFL Draft right now. Like, man, these guys are good, I'm good, but this might not be in God's plan for me. So I got to focus, I got to make sure I have a backup. I try to do focus on both of them equally. I feel I try to be the best I can be on the field and the best I can be in the classroom. But sometimes when, in your mind, you give more effort towards one than the other sometimes. And that's just how it is.

David further detailed how football practicing in the morning structures his day for the better, but there are still roadblocks to additional academic success:

When you think about a regular student in that class in the morning and they have all day to focus on studying and social life and worrying about this assignment they gotta (sic) get through and then we have just the afternoon to focus on school. You know what I'm saying? Sometimes it's tough. Then, sometimes the class you really want to get in, they don't offer it in the afternoon, they only offer it in the morning. But I feel like for us here, it’s the best option for us to get the workouts in the morning, go and focus on school after working out. If I'm at school all day, all I’ll be thinking about is practice later on it in the evening. Once I get done with practice, ‘Oh boy, I've watched my film cause (sic) I made sure I have a class where I got time to see what I did and move on from it.’ But if I got class before, I'm going to sit there and be in class, I go, ‘okay, what the offense bringin’ today’ (sic). Well, what's our conditioning for the day? I haven't had the chance to do that, but that's how I think I see myself doing it.

91 Kevin noted that student-athletes “have to be able to juggle” both academics and athletics

“very well.” He further explained:

You have to learn to balance both because if you don't, then you might get overwhelmed with football cause (sic), it's everybody's goal (as a football player). Or you might get overwhelmed with school. In the off-season, you find yourself being more of a student than the athlete. And then during the season, you find yourself way more being an athlete than a student.

His defensive teammate, Josh, was candid about his identification:

I have to say truthfully, I'm an athlete. I know school is important, but like if I have the choice, if I'm sitting in my room, I'm going to go to bed in like an hour and I've got a choice to either get ahead on a paper or watch film, I'm going to watch film. I feel you should title yourself to what you're more driven to do, more like what's most important to you. If a barber is an author on the side, but he's really being an author then he's going to say, 'I'm an author, not a barber.' So, same way with me being a student-athlete, I'm an athlete.

Life after Football. As a graduate student granted a sixth year of eligibility by the

NCAA, David compared his student-athlete identity to a “4-to-40-year decision” which means that what student-athletes do during their four-plus years of college will play a vital role in the next 40 years of their life after college. David acknowledged that part of the reason he and other student-athletes attended his Ivy League undergraduate alma mater was for the “student part of it.” According to David, his time as an undergraduate at an Ivy League school was his time to be a student and he views his time as a graduate student-athlete at the FBS institution as his time to be an athlete:

Whichever helps you in the longer term. I've always been a guy that looks at the long-term itself too. So I think part of there was, I wanted to be the best football player I can be, but I know at the end of the day that football is probably going to end sooner rather than later, especially going into a smaller school like that. The (Ivy League school) leaned a little bit more towards the student side even though it was still about football quite a bit, but I think here I've kind of edged more towards the athlete side of it. I think being a little bit less aggressive in the classroom has let me kind of sink in deeper here. And I

92 also knew that coming here, I had one year left, I came back because I wanted to play more. I felt that I was robbed of a few years and I think playing at a higher level itself made me want to be more of an athlete. So I think I kind of leaned a little bit more of the other side down here.

Caleb, a sophomore who played in all 13 games with 12 starts as a true freshman in 2018, identifies as a student because he knows that “football’s not forever” and he doesn’t want to be known only for football.

Balancing Student and Athlete Equally. Four of the five participants at City

College identified with being both a student and an athlete but not necessarily being both parts equally. The one exception, Aaron, succinctly stated: “I have missed a lot of academics for sports, but I have never missed sports because of academics.” Walter dove into greater detail about how football coaches at his school keep all team activities to the morning which allows for football student-athletes to divide their focus each day:

I can say I consider myself both because like here, we do everything in the morning. We do meetings, practice, any kind of thing with football. We do it in the morning before classes start. I feel like I start off my morning by being an athlete, football ready, so from probably 5:30 to 9:30, I am an athlete. Strictly football is on my mind. That's it. But as soon as I leave the field house, I'm in student mode. I feel like with me and a lot of college athletes, I feel you have to be a student because if you don't have the right GPA or the right grades, your athletics will suffer from that. You can't be on the field without a certain GPA. It always feels good to make a good grade. I love it when I make a good grade on a test. It's feels like I won a football game then. I feel like I'm a balance of a student and an athlete because I feel like you can't be one without the other because if you try to be an athlete, your academics will suffer. If you just try to be strictly just study, study, study, study, and don't try to work on your craft because you came to college to play football. If you're a student-athlete, you came to play your sport. So you want to be successful in both. I try to balance everything. When I'm at the field house in the morning, I'm strictly football, but as soon as I step out of the field house and on my way to my first class, I'm all about the books. I consider myself to be a balance of both.

93 Chad, Ryan, and Michael shared similar perceptions of their identity and how being an athlete can happen only if you are sound academically. Michael considered himself both a student and athlete because “without grades, I can’t play. Without school, there is no football (for me).” Ryan considered himself both a student and athlete because of the amount of time he must devote to each one. “Of course, I’m an athlete, but I don’t even know how many hours a week we spend watching film, lifting, or practicing, but then I’m also a student because I’m studying taking 15 hours each semester.” Chad, a redshirt senior, identified as a student-athlete; however, he broke it down as being a student when he was an underclassman on the football team and being an athlete as an upperclassman.

Here at (City College), being a student is a heavy thing to do. As a young dude, it was always academics, academics, academics. But as you get older and you get more comfortable, you say, ‘I'm an athlete now I can really expand upon myself and really make myself into an athlete that I want to be.’

The researcher asked Chad a follow-up question about the moment when he switched his identity from a student to an athlete. He equated more playing time to his identity as an athlete, and “officially an employee of the football team.” Chad continued:

You have to make sure your P's and Q's are right. And if you're worried about your academics, it's a thing where your academic life can be hidden ... Being in class, you're not being put on trial like you are ever Saturday. And not only are you doing that live, you then have film archives of what you did on Saturdays. If you want to be a good football player, you're going to have to find a time where you're going to get that assignment done and then have to go work. And it was you had to really invest in your athletic side to excel because a lot of times you don't have to really invest in academics. Some students can invest their whole entire day and do it. That's what they have to do to get by. But if you're gifted enough, like a lot of our star football players, you just get that bad boy done. Get a B and move on, you know, because everybody's moving up in athletics. When you really start playing and you're really starting to have to go at it is when you say, I'm an athlete now and then I can do my student work and my academic work when I find that hour or so.

94 Impact of Athletic Success on Academic Success. Study participants reflected that their academic success did not affect their athletic success; however, participants believed that there was a connection between athletic success and academic success. While not speaking from personal experience, Chad thought that athletic success could be both a positive and a detriment:

When you are successful on the field, you have a confidence about you. When you're successful in the weight room, you have a little bit more swagger when you walk into a classroom. And not a cockiness, but more of like, ‘you're going to give me a four-page paper? Well I've done worse than that’. When you're not successful, that's tough. When you have to wake up every morning and watch your film, and you're not performing like you want to, what makes you want to go to a classroom and say, ‘oh no, I have to listen to a teacher who's then gonna (sic) tell me what I'm doing wrong again.’ Sometimes you meet your breaking point and that's why a lot of guys don't go to class. They find themselves worthless in class, or they are not going to be successful there or something like that. There's a direct correlation, success on the field. There's another variable in your life that's pulling you down or lifting you up.

When asked if his athletic success had any impact on his academic success, Michael said

“no, they still grade you the same.” However, when Michael was asked if his academic success had any impact on his athletic success, his response changed slightly: “It depends cause (sic) if you're not really handling your business in the classroom, it's hard to say you're focused. So at times sometimes that can transfer over, but sometimes some people just aren't good in the classroom, you know?”

While critics might find it difficult to separate academics and athletics for the student-athlete, participants felt not only is there a separation between academics and athletics, but it’s also dependent on the mentality of the student-athlete himself as to how academics and athletics affect each other. David agreed that it depends upon the

95 mentality of the student-athlete himself as to how academics and athletics co-exist in his life.

I think it just comes down to the mentality. If you have the idea that ‘hey, football is my meal ticket here, it got me here now I want to get the best education I can, I want to get the best internships I can,’ they can kind of detract from it. I think it also works the other way that ‘hey, football's my meal ticket to the league. Like I don't need to go to school.’ So I think it's all about the mentality that you bring towards it, that really pushes you to how far you succeed in either one.

Theme 2: Academic Experience Only one of the 10 participants mentioned a positive academic experience as their most memorable moment of their time in college. Walter shared that he achieved a 4.0

GPA with 16 hours during the fall 2018 semester. “I got a 4.0 and that was my first 4.0 since the summer of my sophomore year. I was proud of it and that was during the football season too so that’s probably my proudest accomplishment while in college.”

An Academic ‘Rollercoaster’. While the premise of the research study was to learn about football student-athletes’ lived academic experiences, thematic underpinnings of time management, prioritizing tasks, and an inherent battle between academics and athletics emerged among the participants’ responses. Some participants described their college experiences as a ‘rollercoaster’ like David:

My experience has been a rollercoaster, and at certain points, I felt like I was doing great academically, doing great athletically at the same time. Sometimes I felt like I was struggling academically but doing great in football. It’s just been an up and down rollercoaster throughout my time here and I feel like that's just because of college. I guess that's just my experience that it's been a rollercoaster - sometimes tough, sometimes not. It just depends.

When asked if he found it more difficult academically during the playing season itself or it was dependent upon the coursework, David further explained:

96 I felt like it was the courses I was taking because during the season it's tough with juggling school and football, but that's when you make your schedule to the point I feel like certain classes that I took that I felt it would be easier or you know, easier to maintain and end up not being that then you missed the deadline and like drive or something. So you got to go in and just push through it, you know? And that makes it, it makes it tough to, once you, once you figured out like, okay, there's a course I have to take, but it's harder than I expected, you know?

Graduate students David and Aaron offered similar viewpoints of what they did or didn’t learn during the beginning of their academic careers. David said:

I think it was challenging at points. I think especially at the (Ivy League) school where it's a very rigorous academic environment. I think it's tough because you'll get kids where they care about school, but it's not entirely 100% that way. I feel like the average intensity to which kids bring to the classroom, that was a lot higher. So I mean to even keep in the upper half, it was difficult. So I mean I think that was one thing that it can wear on your for after a while.

David further expounding on the similarities academically between his former Ivy

League school and Metro University, focusing more on his status as a graduate student:

I think being a graduate student has its own intrinsic differences than being an undergraduate student. I think that graduate school, you're choosing your own path. It's things you're more passionate about, making it easier to sit in the classroom. You want to read more. It's actually things you enjoyed doing, where a lot of undergraduate stuff is things you're forced to do. You're forced to take those basic level courses, even if it's stuff they're not interested in. I think that makes it a little easier to go to class each day down here. I'd say I definitely enjoy it academically a bit more down here. And I think also it's been a little bit easier of a load in itself. I think a lot of the MBA's have already done their undergraduate degree, so they understand they already worked a bit in the real world. So then I understand it's not really exactly just getting 100% on everything and being in the highest grade in the class. It's a little bit more fundamental and understanding things and you don't have to have the answer all the time as long as you kind of understand that and do well you can get through.

While the learning experience appeared to be enjoyable for David, the college experience for Aaron who began his undergraduate career at an HBCU institution has

97 been much more of a challenge as he felt that he’s been let down from a learning perspective:

I think it's an interesting experience. I don't necessarily feel like I learned that much in the classroom, to be honest with you. And a lot of that is on me. Some of the information I just didn't see as very relevant to anything I was going to get into. I really wanted to do mass communications, but they didn't have that here. I came here because this was the first school in (my home state) to offer me a scholarship as I was transferring and I was getting pretty impatient, so I went ahead and went with (City College). I knew they were a good academic school and I didn't even look at the majors. I wanted to go into communications, but communications here is more of the psychology behind communicating and it was just more of a psych class. I didn't necessarily want to do psychology. So I went with media studies. We really just broke down films and things like that and it was basically I just got through it because I knew I needed a degree. I feel like I got more, I feel like I got more out of the social experience because in high school I hung around other football players that were just like me. I feel like I became a smarter, well-rounded individual when I started hanging out with people that never even wanted to play football. People that never wanted to play sports, people that were in the arts, people that were into moviemaking, people that wanted to get into politics. Just different people that came from completely different backgrounds than me. I felt like that was probably the most useful part of college, in my opinion.

With graduation on the horizon, David feels like his academic experience has finally set him up for a successful career.

It has been a roller coaster. It's up and down. It's like now I have a direct line on what I need academically to get what I want out of life. Because even though I'm in school and all that, nobody wants me to be in school forever. Everybody's in school to get a good job and make money and now I feel like academically, my experience is setting me up for that life.

Michael has experienced both academic success and disappointment. He’s focused on trying to finish strong in the classroom:

It's been a rollercoaster for me. I had a 3.3 (GPA) at the end of my freshman year, but then I had a not-so-good summer. Then in my sophomore year, I picked it up again and finished with a 3.2 (GPA). This shit has been up and down. I've just tried to keep my head above water really and finish strong.

98 Balancing Athletic and Academic Demands. Participants referenced both time management and organizational skills when they were asked how they balanced their athletic and academic commitments. David explained that balancing athletic, academic, and social demands are like a student-athlete’s Venn diagram:

I'd say there's definitely a huge learning curve for freshman year about what you are able to do and what you're not able to do. I think you learn that there's those three pillars in life. You have the football and athletic side of it – your meetings, your training room, eating right, weight room, all those things – and then there's the school side of it, which again is studying a lot of your time, going to class, not skipping class. There's also that third aspect which is like your social life and I think you learn pretty quickly that it's like a three-way Venn diagram and you have to pick two (of the three pillars). That's the way it is. It's really hard to live in that one middle part that has all three overlapping, but I think you got to pick two and if you want to be a student-athlete, those are the two you got to pick.

While David said student-athletes generally have to pick the student and athlete portion of their lives, Walter said time management “is the first thing you have to do. You have to realize that there’s a time for everything. There's time for fun. There's time for academics and there's time for athletics.”

Both football programs practice in the mornings and the study participants shared how having football events in the morning helped them better prioritize their day, and

Ryan went as far as saying that without this type of structure in his college life, he would dread practice throughout the day:

We are a morning practice team, so everything Monday, Wednesday, Friday we do football stuff up until like 10:30 because we're allowed to have classes beginning at 11:00 a.m., and then Tuesdays, Thursdays we do football stuff up until 8:30 and then we can have 9:30 classes soon after. I would say in the morning, I'm definitely like just an athlete. And then in the afternoon I feel like I am a regular student, to be honest. That’s when I do all my life stuff. I'll go to classes, but then I do all my studying at night, like I don't study in the morning at all. That can be difficult sometimes because you want to refresh,

99 but if you have a 9:30 class, you're coming straight from practice. You don't really have time to look over notes or something like that. So you have to be ready, confident in your ability to go pass the test the night before. I love having that structure in my college life. Without it, I would dread practice throughout the whole day, but it's nice just to get it over with and then be like a normal student.

Time management and procrastination became recurring sub-themes within the student- athletes balancing theme. “I am actually a procrastinator,” said Aaron.

I do procrastinate a little bit simply because I don't want to do the work most of the time. So it's a lot harder for me to do it when the deadline is very far away. But when the deadline is tomorrow, I don't know why, but that's when I get all my motivation. That's when my best thoughts come to me.

Aaron’s teammate Chad possessed a similar procrastinator mindset:

I'm procrastinating just as much as the next athlete and that's one of those things that I get into to it where I become friends with someone else in the class or I talked to another person that holds me accountable, helps me out. So that's definitely how I get through academics, and I really push it on my days off. Morning is athletics, afternoon is class time or just trying to rest and get my mind right between like an hour between class or something. And then at night is when I really start having to lock stuff down. It's all academic – take the laptop out and really start knocking out papers or go to the library. That's also helpful with (City College) is that all of our stuff is in the morning and we got academics and the rest of the day. So it's just sectioning out your days, getting into that rhythm of, ‘oh it's about 6:30, I need to start looking at some academic stuff.’ And it doesn't always work out like that. You're dog tired and you've got to take a nap and then you wake up and it's freakin' (sic) 8 o'clock. Well, you did that to yourself, so let's get it over with. So it's kind of one of those things where you have to section off your days.

Relationships with Faculty. Participants at both research sites noted that their coaches and academic support staff encouraged student-athletes to sit near the front of the classroom and to introduce themselves to their professors. Perceptions on their own relationships with faculty varied, including Caleb who made plans to go fishing with one

100 of his professors. David noted that one of his professors came to support him at their spring game, but that’s the extent of his relationships with current or past professors:

I don't have a relationship with my teachers. Well, I got a relationship with like one of them since I've been here, maybe two. And I feel like it's just because when I'm in the class, I'm just in the class to figure out what I need to do and get it done. Sometimes I feel like they want us to come up to them, but I don't really have the time to come stand, it's a line of people waiting to talk to the professor after class. I don't have time to wait in that line to talk to them and get to know him and let him know my name is because I have another class to go to or I got studying I need to do because I'm not trying to be up all night, you know what I'm saying? So I don't have any relationship with too many of my professors, I've had relationship with a professor I'm taking now. She even came to the spring game. Other than that, no it's not, it's not really a relationship. They know my name. I know some of my professors, I can't even tell you their name. I'm taking their course and that's just being honest, I'm taking the course, I know what class it is, but not the professor's name. Cause (sic) I'm just here to take the class, pass the class, move on.

Aaron was struggling in a statistics class, but he was able to pass because he had forged a relationship with his professor.

Statistics was destroying me, but I had a very good relationship with my professor, so he gave me like extra help, even after class sometimes. I'd go see him during his office hours. And I felt like he was more open to helping me because we had a good relationship. I still talk to him if I see him now around campus.

Josh still talks to one of his freshman-year professors who attended their games during the season, but he’s also experienced professors who “didn’t really care (about me)”. He credited his desire to know people as a positive result from growing up in athletics:

I like to try to get to know people. So when I reach out to a professor and tried to talk to him or her after class, they've brushed me off and everything when I was just trying to talk to him. So I've had everything from one extreme to the other. Yeah, definitely. I feel like that's how it's been from growing up in athletics. I want to have a good relationship with my coaches so we can be honest (with each other) and tell him what I need to work on. So same thing in

101 the classroom. I want to have an honest relationship and say, 'hey, you need to pick it up and this and that.’

David shared that being a student-athlete “can work in your favor,” but you need to be careful as to avoid a “dumb jock” stereotype threat:

I've always enjoyed school. I think it's something like football where I'll take a competitive attitude in it, where I don't want to just get by. I want to do well in it. So I think that as long as you put the best foot forward always when you're walking a class, introduce yourself the first day, sit up in front, ask questions, pay attention. I think that they'll always respect you, especially knowing that you're an athlete and they know that you have more than the average student workload. So I think that being a student-athlete can work in your favor, but if you're kind of one of those kids that sits in the back, have your hoodie up, they can tell you're not really listening, that they're going to be like, ‘oh, it's just another dumb jock. He doesn't want to learn. I'm not gonna (sic) really care about him too much.’ I think you get out of it what you put into it and if you really do care that they'll have even more respect for you.

Course and degree selection. Five participants mentioned course scheduling or degree selection as the one thing they would change about their academic experience. All five shared that they should have put more of an effort into specific classes in order to get the desired final grade. David wanted to change “some of the courses that I took that I ended up getting a D in or retake them” because he felt “I could have put more effort into it and got a better grade.” On a similar note, David wished he “always did a little bit more.” He explained that he avoided difficult classes and wished he tried to take “that little bit of a more challenging road” in order to get more out of his academic experience.

Before enrolling at Metro University, Corey was not aware of the full breadth of academic majors and degree offerings at the school. “I just wish I took more time on the front end to see what majors (Metro University) offered so I had an idea of what I wanted to do when I first got here,” said Corey. He went on to further explain:

102 When I first got here, I wanted to do engineering, but they didn't have it. And knowing that's really hard to balance with football. So I feel like if I would've come (sic) in with a plan knowing exactly what I wanted to do, I could've jumped in and that would have made my academic experience a little smoother.

Corey did not declare an academic major until the spring semester of his sophomore year.

“That’s four semesters into college that could have been spent knocking out my core classes.” Chad who is simultaneously finishing the final semester of his undergraduate degree and beginning the first semester of his master’s degree was originally a biology major before switching to marketing.

I realized what I'm good at and I accepted for what I'm good at. I was originally a biology guy, and then I was like, ‘you know what? A lot of people are doing this better than me and not working like I'm working.’ So I realized I gotta (sic) find my fit. I moved over to the business school and just found it very easily that I could go through academics without having to spend copious amounts of time on work that is just out of the ordinary.

Because he started as a biology major, Chad thought he “might have wasted a year early on getting into a rigorous, rigorous major, but knowing that’s a part of life, you make a decision and you get through it.” There were points in his academic career where he said he wished had more guidance into what classes to take:

I'm fortunate enough to be able to graduate early, but I would have to say (I wish) maybe (I had) a little bit more guidance as in I want to go talk to people and I want to say like, ‘if I dropped this class, where will it put me,’ and that is what happened this semester. I was having a knee surgery and I said (to our academic counselor) ‘I need to drop something to get my mind right and get myself enough time to get better.’ They said ‘no, you're fine, you're fine.’ Then I drop it and then it's like they never knew I wanted to graduate early and now I'm taking 17 hours during the season and they're like, ‘oh, it's two P.E. classes.’ Well, you still got (sic) to write papers in P.E. classes and then I'm still taking 15 hours in the middle of the season. And so maybe (I wish I had) a little more attention to detail. Maybe a little more for thinking and writing it down rather than trusting someone else's opinion completely.

103 Walter cited dropping courses as one of his least favorite things he’s experienced during his academic career. “It’s not just one, it's how many I had to drop, since my time here,” he said. “That's a disappointing time for me because it's like I've quit or I’ve given up on it, but that's the best option because I'm not going to pass it.” Other than his negative experience of dropping classes because he was fearful that he would not pass them, Walter said the only things he’s going to remember about his academic experience are “passing (classes) and graduating.” When asked why he felt those were the only things he’d remember about his academic experience, Walter said he could not devote the appropriate amount of time to his academic demands.

I don't feel like I have the time because some classes are asking for a lot and they don't understand that I don't have the same amount of (free time). Everybody has the same 24 hours, but most of my 24 hours are already taken up by something else so I don't have the extra time to sit down and do all these homework assignments that you have us do cause (sic) I won't get any sleep trying to do it. Sometimes it's that. Sometimes I feel like when I get in a course, it's not exactly what I thought it was and I don't like it. So I leave and drop it. And other times it's just like, man, I can find an easier class to take and then take this one.

Stress and College Coursework. Corey shared a personal anecdote about the shock he experienced in his transition from high school to college.

In high school, I didn’t have to write a paper over, like, three pages. Then, my first semester here, I was in an English writing class. Everything was going smooth. I had one four-page paper and then she sent us a final 10-page paper. I just could not wrap my mind about what I was going to sit and write about for 10 pages. So that was hard for me to get through.

Tasked with writing a 10-page paper on the history of the word ‘savage,’ Corey said: “I had to wrap my mind around that, but I found a way to get it done.”

104 Theme 3: Athletic Experience

David, a graduate student, said his most memorable moment was during his redshirt freshman year when he made his first career start. “I’d say probably the first game I started. It was our fourth game of the season against another Ivy League school and it was at home. We ended up winning that game and we were underdogs for it.”

For Ryan, who had completed his redshirt freshman season as the starting quarterback before suffering a season-ending injury, said he had two favorite moments from his brief time in college. The favorite moment of his college experience was when

City College played at a nationally-ranked SEC school during his true freshman season.

“I didn’t play (because I was redshirted), but I was on the sideline. Our defense forced five turnovers on them, and we went into the fourth quarter to beat an SEC team; that’s definitely very memorable.” Ryan went on to mention a personal moment of his. “And then, personally against (a public FCS school) which was my first conference start and we beat them when they were ranked ninth in the country. That will definitely go down as one of my top memories.”

Like his teammate, Michael also listed his first start as his most memorable moment. “One of my first games, I had gotten my first start. I had put a hard hit on someone. (At the time), I’m like 185 (pounds), and he’s 6-foot, 240, so I had to come out immediately after that (hit) though. But it was cool.” As Michael recounted his favorite moment, his eyes lit up with excitement as he recalled the feeling. “I’d say another memorable moment would be my freshman year. I had gotten in against (an FCS

105 opponent) and I recovered a fumble and almost scored. I think that was a big moment for me.”

Redshirt Season. Eight of the 10 participants experienced a redshirt season during their athletic career. However, the participants who experienced a redshirt season shared that being redshirted was beneficial to their growth both as a student and as an athlete.

Like their academic experience, several participants described their athletic experience as a ‘rollercoaster.’ Ryan, a redshirt freshman, thought his athletic experience “had been stellar” despite injury and expecting “to get redshirted my freshman year to develop physically and mentally because the game moves a lot faster from high school to college.” On the other hand, Walter thought he would play immediately as a true freshman: “My athletics experience has been a ride. Coming in, I got redshirted, thinking

I could play and everything. I used that time to get bigger, stronger, faster.” Walter listed being redshirted as his least favorite moment from college:

Coming out of high school, you are the best guy on your team. You think you’re hot stuff coming into college. You think you're going to walk in and play right away. Obviously, there was a bigger plan and, looking back on it, it was a blessing in disguise. With the redshirt year, I got better with my academics and I was able to focus more on the academic side of things. I was able to get bigger, faster, stronger. I had more time for a social life to really experience college, like not just having games, games, games and just worrying about football. I could actually have a little fun and just enjoy college for a little while. On the other hand, when I was redshirted, I was thinking I wasn't good enough to play college ball. That was my low point.

For David, he was recruited by a previous coaching staff and was told he would start here as a true freshman. However, the coaches that recruited him weren’t the ones who signed him to play. “What I was hearing from other guys and the coaches recruiting me, 'yeah man, you can come here and start,’ and all this stuff like that.” When David arrived on

106 campus, he was faced with the reality that was not going to start but that he would be redshirted instead. “I got down on myself because I found out I was getting redshirted; it was something that I didn't know the significance of how good it could help me at the end of my career.” David admitted that he didn’t understand the significance of being redshirted when the coaches delivered the news to him as a freshman:

Going back and looking at the film, I'm a better player to date. I had points while I was down and out. I didn't want to play anymore because I wasn't playing. But I worked my butt off and I just continued to work hard and kept working hard, kept working hard. And that's how I became the player I am today by just working hard. And that's what I'll continue doing until I'm done with football. It brought more work ethic. I had it in high school. I lost sight of it because I felt like, ‘I'm the man, I'm getting recruited by all of these schools, I get to pick where I want to go.’ I get here and it's like I'm starting all over again. So it just brought the work ethic, the dog back out of me and I appreciate it.

Injuries and Setbacks. Three study participants discussed injuries they experienced during their college career. For Chad, he described his athletic career as

“rocky” because he was redshirted as a freshman and then endured multiple knee injuries.

It didn't start out exactly how I wanted it to. To start as a redshirt freshman, it's a good enough thing to say like, ‘well that's not bad, playing as a young dude.’ I was on track and I felt good and then I had an injury in the middle of a game. It was an injury technically you could play through; it's going to hurt, and it could get worse, but you could get through with a knee brace. So I did it and now I'm two surgeries down and I had some fractures on my knee that never healed up. I'm to a point where the doctor has given me an arthritis brace just to get through two more years (of playing football). ... I was on the incline where my knee was getting better and then I hurt it again. So it's been up and down. I haven't experienced a season where I was 100 percent since my redshirt freshman year where I was going against the guys that I thought would kick my tail, but I was holding my own and I was playing well against them and then my injuries happened. It's one of those things.

107 In addition to a pair of fluke injuries he’s endured in college, David shared his battle with

Crohn’s Disease and how he had to overcome the setback in high school and the beginning of his collegiate career.

I actually have Crohn's Disease. I was diagnosed in high school and that was tough. It was right around December of my senior year. I was pretty sick. I lost about 20 pounds before the doctors finally diagnosed it. And I mean, at that point I’m thinking ‘I'm going to go into college, weaker than I've been,’ and at that point I was sick for about three months too. So I was like, ‘man, am I ever going to get better? I'm not going to be sick in college. I'm either going be able to play football or I’m not.’ That was tough, but I did get better, thankfully. I had great doctors back home. I tore my PCL (posterior cruciate ligament) my freshman year, the day before our spring game at a walk- through practice. That was miserable. And then this past year, my redshirt senior year, I had a Jones fracture in my right foot, which is the fifth metatarsal, which is what gave me the sixth year of eligibility. It was in the first quarter of our first game. Someone rolled up on the back side of my foot and it broke. Just unfortunate. Both injuries were really fluke injuries.

Walter and Ryan have experienced both a redshirt season and a season-ending injury. After earning freshman all-conference honors as a redshirt freshman, Walter thought ‘Okay, I'm big and bad, and now I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to be a star now.’ However, those thoughts quickly changed as he tore a ligament in his ankle during the first game of his redshirt sophomore season.

After tearing my ligament, I played the next game, but I had to sit out (against a nationally-ranked SEC team). That was one of our biggest games we played (up to that point). I remember sitting there just thinking ‘it wasn't supposed to go like this,’ and feeling down on myself, thinking the season is not going to be what I thought it was cause (sic) I'm hurt. I'm not the same player that I was when I was healthy.

For Ryan, he earned the starting quarterback position as a redshirt freshman before suffering a broken collarbone:

Unfortunately, I broke my collarbone in the fourth game (of my redshirt freshman year), so I wasn’t able to play the rest of the season, but that still

108 give me other things to able to be humbled immediately after having four good games and then you’re injured for the rest of the season. But I’ve definitely enjoyed every minute of it.

Theme 4: Cultural and Social Experience

Support System. The majority of the study participants noted that their family, more specifically their parents or guardians, as their main support system. David and

Corey both said their family was their “backbone.” While his mom and dad were his go- to phone calls when he had a bad day, David felt it was also important to have a local support system too so that it balances his family support system:

I think I've always had great friends and especially people who you live with because they know kind of what classes you're taking or things you may be facing. You can bitch and moan and say as much as you want to them and they'll always be there to listen to you and always make a joke and it's a little bit more of a lighthearted support system. So I think there's a good balance. You need to have a good balance between the two of them. I think if we're just calling home all the time, I think you can get homesick about like, ‘man, I really wish my parents, I wish I had something better here.’ But to have close friends that were going through it with you every day at practice or in the classroom with you, I think that's something that can help you in the short term.

Corey included close friends with his family as part of the “backbone” of his support system. “They've been with me through the ups and downs, the highs and lows, high school and college,” said Corey. “The beginning of my college career was tough cause

(sic) I started my freshman year and went through a lot of difficulties there ... a lot of ups and downs, high moments and low moments.” Despite the ups and downs, Corey said his family stood by his side “every single step of the way” and that now they’re on a journey together to succeed.

109 Both of Walter’s parents worked in the school system back in his hometown and said his support system “comes from home first.” After his parents, Walter viewed his coaches as the second piece of his support system. “Every week we have a weekly academic meeting where we map out our assignments and grades from past assignments from the past week,” said Walter. For Walter, his academic advisors were his third area of support because they “go through your grades and everything you have planned for the week, everything coming up.”

Aaron said his mom was always his biggest supporter as his mom and dad

“played two very different roles” in his support. “My mom...was around sports and all that and she's a firm believer in that if you have some boys, they need to be in sports because if they're not in sports, what are they going to do?” said Aaron. “They might get in trouble; you need something to take up their time. And that's the most convenient thing to put your sons in.” Aaron said his dad did not play sports and instead was an avid photographer. “My dad, I think he started taking pictures at like 11, 12 years old and he knew he wanted to be a photographer from then on out,” said Aaron, “and he would always give me the perspective of outside of sports. I appreciate both of them because I feel like they keep me grounded.”

Josh included his coaches – in addition to his family as part of his support system.

“My (head coach) wants everybody to be up to par because (he) actually truly cares about people graduating.” Josh added that his family also plays a significant role in his academic career.

As far as my family and the staff as a whole, they're very big on academics too. I talk to my mom and dad every day and all that. They ask me how's

110 school going, what are your grades looking like, you got any tests coming up. They keep me balanced on the books too.

Of the 10 study participants, only one – David – mentioned either his academic advisor in athletics or on campus. However, his athletic academic advisor is part of his support system, not his on-campus advisor:

I feel like my family is my Number 1 support system. When I'm hitting rough patches, I find somebody I can lean on and talk to in my family. My coaches are always here when I need them, but I feel like for me, it never gets to that point where I need to go see my coaches and sit down like, ‘man, I'm worried about this or worried about that.’ I feel like my family and the coaching staff and all the advisors, everybody's part of that support system. I'm talking about in this (athletics) building, I'm not talking about on campus because I really feel like those are separate. I probably visit with my on-campus advisor probably like twice since I've been here. And I'm going on my fourth year and I don't need to go (on campus). I don't need to go over there if I've already talked to the advisors (in athletics). So I feel like this is all the support system right here. This is what is it.

Caleb viewed his teammates as his day-to-day support system, but he likened his teammates to his competition and offered an interesting anecdote about competing against his teammates:

Obviously, your day-to-day (support) are your teammates, but that's a little different with competition and you're competing against your colleagues. I don't think anybody has ever said in an office setting when they're trying to get a promotion, they walk up to Joe in a cubicle over and say, ‘hey man, I'm gonna (sic) work my tail off for this thing.’ They might say they might have that banter, but is there any true genuine conversation? No, because Joe is trying to get the competition as well as you are. So on the football field when you really are going after each other and someone does something big, you're like ‘Hell yes! Dang right man, you're getting after it.’ And I love that. But in the back of your mind you're like, ‘I got to step it up. I got to really get after it.’ My teammates are there for, you know, the rah-rah, the energy, the flow, and sometimes they'll bring you down too.

Relationships with Teammates. In addition to forming relationships with their professors, participants shared stories about the importance of forming other

111 relationships. For Chad, college has been an opportunity to define important relationships in his life. “I’ve grown with my relationships, knowing what an important relationship is and what isn’t an important relationship,” said Chad. “Putting things in perspective.”

Ryan said he has made more meaningful relationships while he’s been in college. “The relationships that you make are definitely more meaningful with your teammates and other friends (outside of the team).” Michael said he has been able to make good friends and “make great relationships that I will have for a lifetime.”

Chad went into further detail about relationships and his camaraderie with his teammates. “Looking back at those years, and I looking back at last year when things weren't going well, we had a couple losses, the locker room was kinda (sic) falling apart,” said Chad.

People were talking bad about coaches and everything...I remember being one of the people talking my freshman year and now I'm the one that's mediating and trying to make sure everything is okay because in football, you have a hundred different guys. That's a hundred different personalities and when you have all that testosterone, it breeds conflict. I see these four years of football, going into my fifth year, I realized how important is to try to understand everyone having a relationship with everyone, everyone on the team, because you can't critique someone or try to tell someone they're doing something wrong if you don't have a relationship with them. I realized that. Over these last four years, I realized that relationships are key. So I feel like I've gotten way wiser just having college experiences coming from where I come from and it was just different. I really feel like these last four years that I've grown a lot to the point where I could actually call myself a leader on the football team now.

112 Theme 5: Intrapersonal Growth

Study participants shared how they viewed their intrapersonal growth through maturity, a growth mindset, and confidence. Three of the five FBS student-athletes pointed to their maturity level as to where they’ve grown the most since enrolling in college.

Maturity. David began college with the thought that he’d be a guaranteed NFL player. However, he said his mindset has changed for the better since he was a college freshman.

I feel like my mindset has changed for the better. When I got here, I was all football, football, football. I came here to play football. I was always a great student in high school, but when I got here, I was like, ‘man, I'm going to the next level.’ I told mom, if I go to a Division I school, I'm going to the NFL. But as you get older, you really get to see what the game brings and what you have to bring to the table to get (to the NFL). Then you start to think about what it's going to take to get your life where you want it to be regardless of whether you make it (to the NFL) or not.

Both Josh and Corey also thought they grew the most as a person. For Josh, it was the chance of finding out who he was away from football. “I’ve probably grown the most as a person, actually finding out who I was because I classify myself as an athlete, I know there's more to life than football and being away from everybody I grew up with back home.” In addition to finding his non-football identity, he has been able to find out where his real friendships lay.

You get to reflect and see who are really your friends. You get to grow as a person and you just find out a lot about yourself being on your own, seeing who supports you when you're up, when you're down. It's just a good learning experience.

113 Kevin shared his struggles at the start of his college career and attributed his personal growth to his faith and his decision to transfer schools.

I've seen myself grow from being an 18-year-old boy now to a 21-year-old redshirt junior. Just seeing how with time, how everything transpired and things I can grow at and things I have grown at. Switching schools and the hand I was dealt with, just looking at everything in a positive way and keeping God first through all my trials and tribulations.

Conversely, Walter viewed his area of greatest growth was not his maturity but in his growth from a selfish mentality.

It was all about me. I was all about me being successful and me doing good in classroom, just everything, basically as a real selfish mentality. Everyone has to be selfish to a certain extent, but I was taking it too far. I feel like when I first arrived (at City College), I wanted everything to be about me. I wanted to be in the spotlight. I wanted to be the one that's on the billboards and everything like that, but I came to realize that on most teams that are successful, you just have to know your role, not only on the field, but you have to know your role in the classroom, social life, everything. Know who you are. I had to find myself. My first couple years of college and me coming from a small town, I really didn't see a lot of diversity. There were many different cultures. I had to soak all of that in and just basically take a look at myself in the mirror and say: ‘To be successful you have to be willing to put your head or neck on the line for someone, for someone else.’

Walter shared that he realized his success and failures in life were not only a reflection of himself but his family as well.

I wanted to be the person that got all the glory and everything, but I realized that everything has greater purpose in everything. It's not just me going to class, it's just not affecting me. It's my family, my friends, my whole support system. If I'm doing something wrong in the classroom, on the field, or off the field, that's going to reflect bad (sic) on my family. It reflects bad (sic) on the football team. I realized that my decisions don't affect just me. I realized my decisions affect most of the people in my life.

With maturity comes better decision-making. Michael credits maturity in college for helping him make better decisions.

114 I've made some not-so-smart decisions in the past that, and I would say my temper. I never had a bad attitude, but I definitely had a bit of a temper when I was in high school towards some people. But definitely I've gotten calmer which has come with me getting more mature.

Personal growth wasn’t limited to simply maturity and growing older. David pointed to his learning how to better manage his time as his greatest area of growth:

If there's one thing I learned in college that it's going to put me a step ahead in life, it’s time. And to maximize every single second of it is what you gotta (sic) do if you want to be in that top 1% of anything. You want to be the best person in your company? You're going to have to work more than 40 hours a week. You want to be the smartest kid in the class? Then you're going to have to do more than just go to class and do the homework. You want to be the best kid on the football team? You're not gonna (sic) be able to just do the team lifts and then go out and party on the weekends. You're going to be in the weight room, you're going to be watching film more. So once you learn that time's the most valuable thing you have, you really appreciate it.

Growth Mindset. Aaron referenced his ‘universe of understanding’ as his biggest area of growth. “I call it your universe of understanding, your overall understanding, because I started talking to different types of people that came from different backgrounds, things that I've never had to encounter.” Aaron further shared that this maturity and tolerance had both increased as well as his growth mindset. Because of this areas of growth, Aaron said he was able to open his mind to different people and better understand people from different backgrounds.

I was more close-minded to certain aspects of life because I had never had to deal with them. That was my problem. So I was like, you know, well, I don't deal with this and it doesn't seem like that big a (sic) deal. I don't understand why everybody's so mad about it. And then I met someone that came from that background, and I understood why it would be tough because I actually had to talk to them. So I think my understanding grew the most out of everything.

115 Walter wished he would have a different mindset when he transitioned from high school to college. “I would change my mindset coming into college, trying to change that high school mindset where I can do it if I just look over these notes a couple of times, I'll get the material.” The realization that college was much different than high school came later than Walter expected.

My mindset then was ‘I know I'm smart, this is going to come easy. It's just my freshman year, classes can't be too hard.’ I feel like if I had a different mindset coming in, I knew what was ahead of me and my teachers gave me a little bit more advice, I think things would have been different.

Entering his sixth year in college, Caleb said his mindset has grown the most as it pertained to being more responsible and accountable for his actions. “I think I've grown with responsibility and being accountable cause (sic) in high school, you're young and it's easier than college. I feel like I've grown to do things how you're supposed to do them and being more responsible.” Caleb paused for a moment and added that “you got coaches and staff members telling you to do stuff, but you make your own decisions; you decide what you’re going to see or feel.”

Despite not being in college as long as Caleb, Ryan had a similar belief in how he’s grown in responsibility. “I would say I've grown the most in managing my time and having more responsibilities.” While Ryan is only a sophomore academically, he felt that he has adjusted well to the responsibilities of college. “Not being able to just like get by, like asking favors of my parents and stuff like that cause (sic) I'm more responsible and definitely having manage your time with football and the classroom.”

Confidence. Success in the classroom can carry over onto the football field, but a sense of confidence on the football field could be detrimental to some student-athletes in

116 the classroom. David said it depended on the individuals on the team as to how this idea of a false sense of success would play out.

If everybody's doing what they're supposed to be doing, then everybody should be doing the best they can do in school, not getting a big head like, ‘man, we (sic) superstars.’ But I can see it going both ways in real life. I could see guys, like, ‘okay, we (sic) winning now, I ain't gotta (sic) go to class’ and I can see guys who we win it, ‘let's keep the motivation going over to class. You're doing this.’ You know what I'm saying? We want to win in every aspect of life. I can see it going both ways, but I feel like it depends on the team.

Caleb echoed much of David’s viewpoints about how success can affect a player’s view of academics. However, Caleb believed success was primarily affected by the player’s mentality.

I can see two ways really. I see the 'I'm winning. I don't need to do that as much mentality' where, hey man, we just won the national championship, like let's just kind of hang out for the rest of this semester. I can see that. But then I could also see the idea of that can probably happen more frequently. Definitely can happen more frequently. But then again, I think it's all about the mentality you bring to it. And if it's one of those kids that says, ‘hey, I worked really hard for this. I mean, we worked hard to win our conference. We worked hard for this. I think we can bring that same idea. I want to do the best I can academically.’ Do I think that there has ever been a kid had said, man, we just won the league now I want to be a great student? I don't think that's really ever happened. But if there's always been someone that's pushed themselves hard, I think that getting that little bit of a positive reward of having a great season can push them to do a little bit better too in the offseason.

Corey had a more positive approach to the effects of athletic success on the lived academic experiences of student-athletes, but he did say losing on the football field could adversely affect a student-athlete’s academic focus.

For me, I think it just kind of raises your morale and your drive to do things. When everything’s going good (sic), it's easy to jump up and say, ‘hey, I'm going to do this’ or ‘hey, let me knock out this paper. Let me do it cause (sic) you know, that's going good (sic).’ I think it's probably the same for

117 everybody because then you have to think when you're losing, you're dedicating a lot to trying to get back on track. You might kind of slack off in school then because you're trying to like, 'okay I'm a student-athlete and the athlete part's not really going well right now.’

Chad reflected on confidence as an area of personal growth since enrolling in college.

“Confidence and taking on a lot of rigor – academic and athletic – I've grown that way. I don't get intimidated by big projects anymore. It's more of like, ‘well, let's work through this, let's attack it rather than ‘woe is me.’”

Summary

This chapter provided rich, detailed summaries of the five NCAA Division I

Football Bowl Subdivision student-athletes and five NCAA Division I Football

Championship Subdivision student-athletes and their distinct lived academic experiences as football student-athletes. This chapter also revealed the thematic findings that were the result of the data collection and data analysis process outlined in Chapter Three. The narrative responses from the 10 study participants yielded five themes: identity, academic experience, athletic experience, cultural and social experience, and intrapersonal growth.

CHAPTER 5

DISCUSSION

This chapter presents a discussion of the phenomenological study, implications for practice, directions for future research, and conclusions drawn from the research findings presented in Chapter Four. This study’s phenomenological design was rooted within an interpretivism paradigm because interpretivism is the belief that reality exists within a participant’s reflection, self-description, and their interpretation of the data

(Creswell, 2003).

Ten NCAA Division I football student-athletes shared their stories and lived academic experiences through a semi-structured interview protocol. This semi-structured protocol was created to “facilitate the obtaining of rich, vital, substantive descriptions of the experience of the phenomenon” (Moustakas, 1994, p. 116). A semi-structured interview approach provided the research with the flexibility to ask follow-up questions while also having a standard interview structure.

Discussion of Research Questions

118

119 Research Question 1: How do NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes perceive their academic experience?

Participant responses to how they perceived their academic experience ranged from a ‘rollercoaster’ and a ‘mountain climb’ to being successful. David acknowledged he “bit off a little bit more” than he could handle when he arrived at Metro University because he went to a magnet and engineering high school and he thought he could handle the rigor of both academics and athletics. Caleb, a graduate student, said his academic experience was “successful”. Graduating from an Ivy League school with a 3.56 GPA, he learned the most from the classes where he struggled the most. For Josh, the time between his high school graduation to the start of his college career were a number of days. He chose to attend Metro University because “if you succeed academically, it’ll rub off on you in the future.” Corey said he was growing as a student because college is like the real word in which there’s “not going to be someone telling you, ‘hey, you gotta do this, gotta do this.’” Kevin was grateful for what he’s learned in college by putting it into his everyday life.

After a bad first semester, Walter, a high school valedictorian, learned how to be more organized because “you really don’t realize the workload until it actually happens or until you have that first bad grade on a test. You don’t realize how important it is to study, be organized, and make sure you get everything done.” Aaron felt like many of his classes were unnecessary and simply a formality “for the sake of the prestige of the institution.” To further his view on his classes, Aaron thought that most of the credit hours required for his degree weren’t crucial for his success in the job field.

120 I know I have a pretty decent personality. I'm happy and I feel like I'm a charismatic person. But as far as knowledge that came straight from college, I felt like if I came to college, a blank individual and all I did was go to classes. Of course you need a social aspect. But I think if I just retained all that information from these classes, I was still being kind of wandering around like, ‘okay, what do I do now? How do I apply this to a workspace?’

Chad called his academic experience a ‘mountain climb’ because he started as a biology major before realizing “a lot of people are doing this better than me and not working like I’m working.” He eventually switched to a marketing major and found that he could “go through academics without having to spend copious amounts of time on work than just out of the ordinary.” After completing his second year in college, Ryan said his academic experience was “exactly what I wanted to get out of it so far. I have a good GPA. I spend time studying, but not too much.” Michael called his academic experience a ‘rollercoaster’ after starting with a 3.3 GPA at the end of his freshman year and dipping after an unsuccessful summer academically. He picked up his GPA as a sophomore, but he mentioned that in addition to being a rollercoaster, “this shit has been up and down.”

Research Question 2: How do NCAA Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes negotiate their academic lives within the constraints of their athletic demands?

Each of the 10 participants shared that time management and organization were critical in how they negotiated their academic lives within the constraints of their athletic demands. Additionally, they said they are able to balance both because their football responsibilities (i.e. workouts, weights, meetings, practice) are always scheduled for the mornings while the remainder of their days are reserved for their academic responsibilities. David said he made “both (academics and athletics) a priority” and

121 Walter said student-athletes have to realize that “there’s a time for everything” and that time management “is the first thing you have to do.” Caleb said student-athletes learn quickly that there are three pillars – athletics, academics, and social life – but you can only pick two like a “three-way Venn diagram.” Adjusting to college from high school takes some time getting used to, according to Josh, but “once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty simple.”

Speaking specifically to time management, Corey said he continues to fight an on-going battle of finding time for football, academics and personal time.

I'm trying to find a system that works for me to take care of things because football, we practice in the morning and everything. So that's already cut out itself. But then balancing my classes, sleeping, eating, having leisure time and doing schoolwork and everything else, I'm still fighting that to this day, honestly.

Kevin has attended two NCAA Division I FBS institutions. His first one had football practice during the hottest part of the day in the afternoon which he said was “very tiresome.” He said having football practice in the morning like at Metro University “sets the tone” for his day and that “if you do good at football practice in the morning, it carries over to your day.”

Each of the five participants at City College credited morning football demands as helping them better organize their academic demands and manage their time. Ryan said:

“I love having that structure in my college life. Without it, I would dread practice throughout the whole day, but it's nice just to get it over with and then be like a normal student.”

122 Research Question 3: What are the differences in academic experiences among NCAA

Division I FBS and FCS football student-athletes?

Half of the study’s participants said they would change either some of the courses they took in college or wished they were better informed about choices in academic majors. Despite the difference in school size and academic offerings, there were few differences in the academic experiences of the study participants. A notable similarity among the participants was the adjustment from high school to college. Several participants mentioned that they had to “grow up quick” as they learned that college professors would not make sure they were on top of things like their high school teachers.

Discussion of Themes

Narrative responses from the 10 study participants yielded five thematic data areas: identity, academic experience, athletic experience, cultural and social experience, and intrapersonal growth. Each of the five themes were validated through previous literature and offered a glimpse into the lived academic experiences of NCAA Division I football student-athletes.

Theme 1: Identity

Black student-athletes have been plagued by the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype for decades (Stone, Harrison, & Mottley, 2012; Edwards, 1983; Harrison, 2002; Sailes, 1996;

Wininger & White, 2008). However, none of the participants have experienced ill effects of a ‘dumb jock’ stereotype during their time in college. Additionally, no participant said they have been the recipient of negative comments from a professor which would contradict a previous study that found more than 60 percent of student-athletes reported

123 negative remarks were made in class about them by an instructor (Simons, Bosworth,

Fujita, & Jensen, 2007).

Originally, the researcher wanted to shy away from the use of the ‘student-athlete’ term like Shulman and Bowen (2001a) and Staurowsky and Sack (2005), but he felt that would lead the study participants in a different direction since the terminology is ubiquitous within college athletic departments (Byers & Hammer, 1997). Although Stone

(2012) discovered the term ‘student-athlete’ can have a negative impact in the classroom, there were no signs of that stigma or stereotype in the data. In fact, multiple participants said that because the football team practices in the mornings, they are able to compartmentalize their days between being a student and being an athlete (David, Walter,

Chad). Despite being a two-time conference all-academic selection, Caleb considered himself an athlete because he would choose watching film over finishing a paper if given the choice. Results were mixed among the participants when they were asked if academic success had any impact on their athletic success which would not prove that a strong athlete identity could make a negative academic stereotype more predominant (Yopyk &

Prentice, 2005).

With the theoretical framework of this study centering around the self-fulfilling prophecy, the seven Black participants exhibited no signs of being adversely affected by unjust faculty expectations as suggested in previous research (e.g., Oates, 2003;

Weinstein, Gregory, & Strambler, 2004; Tenenbaum & Ruck, 2007). Furthermore, the participants’ self-perceived identity appears to have had no effect on either their academic or athletic experiences.

124 Theme 2: Academic Experience

While the NCAA’s GOALS studies have provided quantitative data in relation to student-athletes’ academic experiences, they were unable to offer why the student- athletes felt the way they felt about those experiences. The latest GOALS Study in 2016 did indicate that nearly one-third of NCAA Division I football student-athletes were unable to take certain classes they wanted because of their athletic participation (NCAA,

2016). However, none of the participants said their football participation precluded them from pursing an academic major they desired. In fact, David, Corey, and Aaron said their school did not have the academic major they initially wanted so they settled for something similar. Additionally, Chad chose biology when he started college, but he switched to marketing because it was easier to navigate.

Past studies (Case, Greer, & Brown, 1987; Syvantek, 2017; Upton & Novak,

2008; Fountain & Finley, 2009) have shown academic clustering to be a prevalent issue in Division I athletics. According to the 2019 roster on Metro University’s athletics web site, forty-seven percent (43 of 92) of its football players with declared majors are majoring in a program within its School of Business. Based on the definition of academic clustering set forth by Syvantek (2017) and Upton and Novak (2008), the business- related major academic cluster at Metro University far exceeds the 25 percent threshold.

City College does not publicly share its football student-athletes’ academic majors which precluded the researcher from determining whether or not academic clusters exist on the football team.

125 One of the negative side effects of the NCAA’s current eligibility standards was how it excluded non-sports minorities from accessing the same flexible admissions standards as sports minorities (Petr & McArdle, 2012; Gatmen, 2011). The seven Black participants did not receive special admission status into their respective institutions as they met the academic standards for admission. According to Duderstadt (2000), “some universities take advantage of their student-athletes” (p. 5) while recruiting them into college “without possessing the necessary abilities or background to have a reasonable chance of succeeding academically” (Figler, 1981; Leonard, 1986; Van Rheenen, 2012).

One Black participant (Aaron) has already graduated from City College with a bachelor’s degree and the other six Black participants are on schedule to graduate from their institutions within their five-year eligibility window.

Theme 3: Athletic Experience

Many studies have explored the long-term effects of college football student- athletes experiencing injury (e.g., Tietze, Borchers, Roewer, & Hewett, 2015; Krill,

Borchers, Hoffman, Tatarski, & Hewett, 2017; Dick, Ferrara, Agel, Courson, Marshall,

Hanley, & Reifsteck, 2007; Steiner, Berkstresser, Richardson, Elia, & Wang, 2016;

Williams, Singichetti, Li, Xiang, Klingele, & Yang, 2017), but there is a significant gap in the literature specifically focusing on how college student-athletes overcome injuries and physical setbacks. While there is no available research about the effects of a redshirt season on college student-athletes, all 10 participants exhibited some form of resilience during their college career – from a redshirt season to overcoming injury to overcoming personal struggles. Resilience occurs when one has a positive response to an adverse

126 experience (Fergus & Zimmerman, 2005). As it varies across setting, situation, and time, resilience, in this study, is a characteristic of the study participants as they were able to access the necessary resources (e.g., academic support, athletic training, support system) they needed in order to return to the football field (Topitzes, Mersky, Dezen, & Reynolds,

2013; Fergus & Zimmerman, 2005).

Theme 4: Cultural and Social Experience

Each of the participants shared that their sphere of influence and the support system extended beyond the locker room. Not all participants had a strong system of friends outside of the football program, but those that did included both student-athletes on other teams and non-athletes as well. Research on the social lives and activities of college student-athletes has been mixed. Adler and Adler (1985, 1987, 1991) found that the social development of student-athletes was not disrupted by their sports participation while other studies support the idea that student-athletes are often more engaged in campus activities than their non-athlete peers (Wolniak, Pierson, & Pascarella, 2001;

Umbach, Palmer, Kuh, & Hannah, 2006; Williams, Sarraf, & Umbach, 2006). Other research (Meyer, 1990; Parham, 1993; Brewer, Van Raalte, & Linder, 1993; Eccles &

Barber, 1999; Miller & Kerr, 2003) suggests that social development can negatively affect the student-athletes. None of the participants shared that they are active in campus organizations beyond the scope of athletics. Some participants said their social experience can be restrictive because of their athletics participation which is supported within the literature (Blinde, 1989; Leonard, 1986; Lewis, 1993; Parham, 1993;

Chickering, 1969; Mather & Winston, 1998; Chickering & Reisser, 1993).

127 Theme 5: Intrapersonal Growth

Involvement in intercollegiate athletics is beneficial for student-athletes as they learn life and work skills as well as other intrapersonal skills which can then be transferred to their careers after they are finished with athletics (Weis, 2007; Shiina,

Brewer, Petitpas, & Cornelius, 2003; Spreitzer, 1994). Much of the literature concerning student-athlete maturation and intrapersonal growth has predominantly focused on career decision-making (Murphy, Petitpas, & Brewer, 1996; Brown, Glastetter-Fender, &

Shelton, 2000; Burns, Jasinski, Dunn, & Fletcher, 2013), identity foreclosure (Murphy,

Petitpas, & Brewer, 1996; Brown, Glastetter-Fender, & Shelton, 2000; Lally & Kerr,

2005), career maturity in student-athletes (Linnemeyer & Brown, 2010; Tyrance, Harris,

& Post, 2013; Gayles, 2009).

Implications

There are multiple implications for future and current student-athletes, colleges and universities, and parents and families of student-athletes. These implications are based on the thematic data derived from the lived academic experiences of the 10 participants for this study. Additionally, this study’s findings also include recommended future research to potentially fill the gap in research about redshirt freshman student- athletes and the effects of redshirt seasons.

For Student-Athletes

Based on the data, there are four implications for student-athletes. Being an

NCAA Division I student-athlete is a time-consuming endeavor that some (e.g., Chad) have called a “job.” When student-athletes are recruited by NCAA Division I programs,

128 some may not do their full research on what academic programs the school offers.

Instead, they focus only on the institution as a vehicle to play college football and continue to chase their professional football dreams.

First, student-athletes should do their due diligence in understanding the institution’s full academic offerings and what required classes they need to take in the first two years in college. NCAA Division I is the only division that requires member institutions to have academic support services within its athletic department. With potentially better resources at their disposal, football student-athletes should use these resources to their benefit. Not utilizing their tutors and academic advisors within athletics is a disservice to the student-athletes’ progress toward degree completion.

Second, it is important for student-athletes to have a healthy support system while they are in college. For many, college is the first time they are away from home. As several participants shared (e.g., Chad), student-athletes should not only have a family support system but a support system within the team or college friends outside of athletics. Having a healthy support system is crucial to student-athletes’ mental health and well-being during difficult times in college.

Third, organizing and prioritizing your tasks each day are paramount to a student- athlete’s ability to have a healthy balance between academic and athletic responsibilities.

While both research sites have morning football practices and activities which allows student-athletes to focus on academics the remainder of the day, not all schools adhere to this type of scheduling.

129 Fourth, student-athletes need a better understanding of the realities of college football as an incoming college freshman. Many incoming freshmen have the understanding or misunderstanding that they will play immediately as a true freshman.

However, many coaches recruit student-athletes with the intention of redshirting a portion of them because of roster limitations or the need for further physical and academic development. A redshirt season can be greatly beneficial for student-athletes to focus on academics while also getting in better physical condition without injury setbacks from a game.

For Colleges and Universities

During the recruiting process, coaches should be transparent about the academic programs their schools offer. While they are recruiting student-athletes to play a sport, these student-athletes must be academically eligible in order to play. Less than two percent of college student-athletes play professional sports. With the odds of playing professionally against the vast majority of college student-athletes, working toward a degree is paramount for student-athletes. Because the NCAA stresses that student- athletes graduating and progress toward a degree, colleges and universities must also provide student-athletes with the necessary academic tools to succeed and ultimately graduate.

Based on the stories of the participants, having morning football activities has helped them better compartmentalize their day between being a student and an athlete.

Athletic departments should consider the benefits of practicing in the mornings as it could help strengthen student-athletes’ academic focus. While it may not be feasible for

130 many colleges and universities based on class offerings, departments should at least study the possibilities of this change.

For Parents and Families

Like their student-athlete, parents and families need to understand an institution’s full academic offerings and what classes their student-athlete must take during their first two years of college. Some students may commit to a school without knowing what academic programs are available to them. If they enroll at a school which does not have the academic area in which they desire, it could lead to problems in the future (i.e. transferring to another school or selecting an academic major they do not want).

College is a transformative time in a student’s life. As this might be the first time a student-athlete is away from home, it is important that they have a healthy support system. Having that healthy support system is crucial to a student-athlete’s mental health and well-being so parents and families must play an integral part in their student-athlete’s support system.

Finally, many incoming college freshmen will not play their first year in college as coaches will redshirt them so that they can focus on further physical and academic development. However, a new rule in place as of the 2018 football season allows players to play in up to four games and still quality for a redshirt season and maintain four years of eligibility (NCAA, 2019f). Like their student-athlete, parents and families need to understand that being redshirted as a freshman should be viewed as a positive more than as a negative. Conversely, this redshirt year could negatively affect a student-athlete’s

131 mental health, so it is paramount that their parents and families support them through this transitive period.

Recommendations for Future Research

The participants’ lived experiences shared during this phenomenological study offer a wealth of information for future studies. As a phenomenological study, this research utilized a small sample size. Because the chosen research sites were private institutions, it would benefit researchers if a future study compared public institutions at the FBS and FCS levels. In addition, this study only focused on academically eligible football student-athletes at the NCAA Division I level. To get a better understanding of the lived academic experiences of Division I football student-athletes, a study of academically at-risk student-athletes could be of benefit to researchers and college athletic departments.

Because of the gap in research on redshirt freshmen or student-athletes who have endured a redshirt season, future research is needed in this area. Additionally, there is still much research to be done in order to understand the lived academic experiences of not only NCAA Division I football student-athletes but other sport student-athletes as well at the Division I level. Outside of the college football ecosystem, future research with men’s and women’s basketball student-athletes which participate in the other high-profile revenue sports in NCAA Division I. There could also be room for additional studies comparing the lived academic experiences of student-athletes from revenue sports and non-revenue sports.

132 Summary of the Study

This phenomenological study included 10 NCAA Division I football student- athletes who were on scholarship and academically eligible at their institutions. Five football student-athletes were selected from one private NCAA Division I Football Bowl

Subdivision (FBS) institution and five football student-athletes were selected from one private NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) institution. From their lived academic experiences, five major themes were drawn from the interview data of the 10 football student-athletes – identity, academic experience, athletic experience, cultural and social experience, and intrapersonal growth.

Within each theme, participants’ responses yielded both similarities and differences in their perceptions of their lived academic experiences. Similarities ranged from comparing their academic experiences to a ‘roller coaster’ to considering themselves a student over an athlete to enduring the disappointment of being redshirted as a freshman. While some of the participants did view themselves as an athlete over a student, several athletes expressed that they wished they would have taken different courses or majored in a different academic area. One athlete expressed that he felt as though he didn’t learn anything in his classes. In the end, the 10 football student-athletes shared valuable insight into their lived academic experiences that could be beneficial to college athletics staff to aid student-athletes in their quest for academic success.

133 Final Thoughts

When I began my initial dissertation topic search, I knew I wanted it to center around collegiate athletics, particularly college football. Originally, that idea was to tackle the commercialism and amateurism in college athletics. However, as more stories about academic issues among college football programs became more publicized, I wanted to hear first-hand accounts from the college athletes that are the most visible of any college student on a college campus – college football players.

There were stories shared by participants that validated the stories told by the student-athletes I had worked with during my career. Conversely, there were stories shared by participants that challenged intrinsic biases I had accumulated during my career. At the end of each interview, I was reminded that most college football fans do not see these athletes as people but as entertainment products like Kansas State

University associate athletic director Phil Hughes told Yost (2010).

Finally, I have one more point to mention that is pertinent to this dissertation. I did not want to use the term ‘student-athlete’ at any point in this document; however, there is no academic literature that I cited that did not use the terminology. Shulman and

Bowen (2001a) did not use the ‘student-athlete’ term in their book, and it was, in fact, a word created by Walter Byers himself (Byers & Hammer, 1997). After reflecting upon my decade-long career in college athletics and studying hundreds of academic articles on academics and athletics, I now believe the term ‘student-athlete’ could be viewed as a derogatory term because it is not an accurate depiction of life in college athletics.

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APPENDICES

158

APPENDIX A

IRB APPROVAL

159 160

APPENDIX B

INFORMED CONSENT

161 162

163

APPENDIX C

PRE-INTERVIEW SCRIPT

164 165

APPENDIX D

INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

166 167