The Shame of College Sports Summary from image-mapping notes

     The Shame of College Sports, by Taylor Branch, reveals the corrupt and malicious underside to the guiding forces of modern-day higher educational athletics.  It started by divulging the massive financial numbers supporting the media and corporations involved—and how the NCAA, the ‘mastermind’ behind the crooked foundations, generated 40-80 million dollars in revenue in recent years, along with the endorsement of multimillion-dollar-salaried coaches; the whole system thrives on “tribal” stakes.  Then it disintegrated some of the well-known founding myths, such as the transition to safer conduct out of concern for the athletes, or the idea that the success backing the sports industry in America is based off of its face-value of being a “Darwinian Struggle”, and not because of the exploitation and excessive use of loopholes by its captains.  Branch delved into the history of the NCAA’s evolution, from the later-regretted ideals of master manipulator and college drop-out Walter Byers and the early power granted to NCAA to pick and choose all the sports available on television, to the initiation of the “Restitution” law and the term “Student-Athlete”—both of which used fear, bureaucracy, and bribery to claim the majority of college athletic programs’ profits for of the NCAA.  The Student-Athlete “myth” used cyclical logic to state that even though an athlete didn’t have to be completely academically competent if they were just attending college for sports, they would still receive no compensation in the case of injury or death since they were just a student; on the other hand, the Restitution rule dictated that a student athlete was not allowed to have advisors—it stretched so far that most educational bodies were afraid to even communicate with those under investigation by the NCAA as if for fear of contamination. It was even later uncovered that the creation of these rules was for the sole purpose of the NCAA avoiding due process.  As the NCAA began to lose power through endorsement, it began to exploit the names and likenesses of popular college athletes, while simultaneously instating ludicrous rules that said athletes were not only not allowed to make any profit off of their identity, but were not even allowed to accept discounts or gifts on account of their popularity: those who did so were suspended from their respective sport. This made it so the NCAA could cultivate all the money it desired off of the identities of athletes under its jurisdiction, while the athletes would be punished for trying to make any profit at all—called the “Plantation Mentality”, a defense against its injustice was manned by Sonny Vaccaro, a former employee of the NCAA, and Michael Hausfeld, a lawyer, derived from several cases in which the NCAA was indirectly made legally untouchable while several student-athletes, the very ones responsible for the  NCAA’s inherent wealth, and their supporters were branded as troublemakers or law-breakers because of violations against the association’s conquest for greed.