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201423 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.201423 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0 2025-05 79 pages Krick, Willem O'Flaherty, Katherine Jackson, Victoria Barrett, The Honors College Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Comm Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch This project focuses on how college sports have changed over time. The process included first-person interviews, archival research at two major universities, and comparative analysis of three separate eras of college athletics - the past (from the 1960s to 2010s), the present (2010s to 2025), and the future (2025 onward). The result is this written portfolio and short documentary. When this project started, broad questions about the current landscape came to mind: What did college athletics in the United States look like in the past (anywhere between 10-40 years ago)? What does it look like now, in this era of increasing professionalization in football and men’s basketball (and a stark difference in decision-making between revenue and non-revenue sports), and what might it look like in the future? Out of these broader questions came more focused ones: How have these changes impacted the day-to-day operations of Olympic, non-revenue sports programs (those outside of football and men’s basketball), how could this affect the quality of the teams that will compete in the Olympics in 2028, since the American collegiate system plays a significant role in the development of both US and international Olympic athletes? While several American colleges and universities develop and produce Olympic athletes, Arizona State University has a notable legacy of excellence in Olympic sports, which fall outside of football and men’s basketball and don’t often generate revenue for a university or its athletic department. Since the 1948 London Summer Olympics, the university has produced 217 Olympians who competed for 48 countries across 19 different sports. Much of ASU’s success came while they were a member of the Pacific-12 Conference, the winningest conference in the history of American intercollegiate athletics - which had over 500 National Collegiate Athletic Association team titles - and was one of the best incubators (if not the best incubator) of American and international Olympic athletes in the world, before Arizona State moved to the Big 12 Conference in August of 2024. According to the university athletic department website, ASU has won 148 team national championships - including 25 NCAA team national titles - in program history, with the most recent coming in late March of 2024 courtesy of the men’s swim and dive team, the first national title for that program. With the breakup of the Pacific-12 in 2024, the US Olympic Committee and several international Olympic committees lost a highly concentrated pool of world-class talent from which to draw. As a result, these committees and the sport-specific teams they oversee need to adjust their scouting and recruiting strategies in the run-up to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, particularly those teams from outside the United States, as the potential for reduced Olympic sports funding increases with the introduction of athletes being able to profit off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) and a new model of revenue sharing in college sports (e.g., athletes will get paid outside of just NIL endorsements and deals, and will be paid directly from universities), despite the benefits for college athletes on an individual basis. With the introduction of this new model, the revenue-generating sports of football and men’s basketball are likely to continue taking precedence over the non-revenue sports. They will receive even more funding, reducing money and resources for athletes in Olympic sports. These moves could have significant ramifications for non-revenue sports, from the reduction of the number of spots available for potential athletes (which could come from a shift from the current scholarship-based model to one that is roster-based that would only allow for a fixed number of athletes per team) to the complete elimination of teams and certain sports altogether. Athletics College Sports Olympic Development Olympics ASU and the Olympics: A History