Tag: National Collegiate Athletic Assn

March Madness Spotlights a Sport Relegated to Pittsburgh’s Shadows: Basketball

Sports run through Pittsburgh the way its rivers do, dappling the city’s culture with hints of black and gold. The baseball icon Roberto Clemente’s name graces a downtown bridge. Over a half century after Franco Harris’s heaven-sent touchdown, the “Immaculate Reception” is as likely to be invoked at Sunday mass as the Immaculate Conception. And […]

Read More

How Is a College Football Team Different From Its Marching Band?

Robert McRae III has seen a lot. His grandmother, a civil rights activist in Los Angeles, often brought him along to rallies she organized and picket lines she walked — even to a gay pride parade with giant anatomical balloons that, he recalls with a smile, might not have been age appropriate. As a Dartmouth […]

Read More

Dartmouth Basketball’s Union Took Shape in the Campus Dining Hall

Members of the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team congregated at the stately Hanover Inn near campus on a dreary, drizzly Tuesday and walked over to a small office building where they smiled for a group photo. Then they went up to a second-floor conference room and took a vote that had been six months — […]

Read More

Trump Gets a Trial Date, and Fani Willis Fights Back

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists […]

Read More

Dartmouth Players Are Employees Who Can Unionize, U.S. Official Says

A federal official said Monday that members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team were university employees, clearing a path for the team to take a vote that could make it the first unionized college sports program in the country. In a statement, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional director in Boston, Laura Sacks, said that […]

Read More

Suit Seeks to Block N.C.A.A. Limits on Athletic Donors

The attorneys general of Tennessee and Virginia filed suit on Wednesday against the N.C.A.A., saying the body that regulates college athletics has no right to block the increasingly common practice of wealthy boosters paying to attract top recruits. The suit was filed a day after the disclosure that the N.C.A.A. was investigating the University of […]

Read More

N.C.A.A. Investigates Booster Club Funding for College Sports

The N.C.A.A. is investigating the University of Tennessee’s football program for a potential recruiting violation involving a booster group in a significant escalation of efforts to rein in the rapidly expanding role of outside money in college sports, according to people familiar with the case. The investigation is focused in part on the use of […]

Read More

The Best Teams That Money Could Buy

In late 2021, the once-mighty Texas Longhorns had just finished a 5-7 football season, losing six straight games for the first time since 1956. “We need bigger humans,” said Steve Sarkisian, the team’s coach. That off-season, Texas found a new — or at least, newly legal — way to recruit them: cash. A new tax-exempt […]

Read More

The Best Sentences of 2023

Over recent days, I took on a daunting task — but a delightful one. I reviewed all the passages of prose featured in the For the Love of Sentences section of my Times Opinion newsletter in 2023 and tried to determine the best of the best. And there’s no doing that, at least not objectively, […]

Read More

At What Point Should College Athletes Be Considered Employees?

Brandon Outlaw sat on a witness stand for two days this week and described what it was like to play football at the University of Southern California. His fingerprints were scanned when he arrived for meals at the athletes’ dining hall to make sure he was there. He received text messages from anonymous class checkers, […]

Read More

N.C.A.A. Proposes Uncapping Compensation for Athletes

A plan by the N.C.A.A. for a series of reforms that includes uncapped compensation for athletes could help address the growing inequities of a system in which sports like football and men’s basketball generate billions in television and other revenue yet share a minuscule amount directly with the athletes. In a sharp break from his […]

Read More

Walter Davis, Basketball Star With a Velvet Touch, Dies at 69

Walter Davis, whose smooth shooting propelled him to basketball stardom with the University of North Carolina and the Phoenix Suns, but who late in his career struggled with drug addiction, died on Thursday while visiting family in Charlotte, N.C. He was 69. The university announced his death but did not specify a cause. Davis, a […]

Read More

How Rich Donors and Loose Rules Are Transforming College Sports

The key to recruiting top college football players these days is not just a lavish training facility or a storied coach. It is ensuring the chance for them to hook up with a new type of operation that can pay them eye-popping sums, collected from wealthy boosters who can often write off the donations, for […]

Read More