National Collegiate Athletic Association

The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a nonprofit organization. It regulates student athletics at about 1,100 schools in the United States and at Simon Fraser University in Canada. The NCAA also organizes the athletic programs of colleges and helps over 500,000 college student athletes who compete each year in college sports. Its headquarters is in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Until the 1956–57 academic year, the NCAA was a single group for all schools. That year, it split into the University Division and the College Division. In August 1973, its members adopted the current system of three divisions: Division I, Division II, and Division III. Division I and Division II schools can offer athletic scholarships to students, but Division III schools cannot. Generally, larger schools compete in Division I, while smaller schools compete in Divisions II and III. In 2006, the divisions for football were renamed the Football Bowl Subdivision and the Football Championship Subdivision. In its 2022–23 fiscal year, the NCAA earned $1.28 billion, and $945 million of that (74%) came from airing rights to the Division I men's basketball tournament.

The NCAA has strict limits on the benefits and pay that college athletes can receive from their schools, and this has been controversial. Economists generally agree that these limits help the schools, through rent-seeking, at the expense of the athletes. Economists have since described the NCAA as a cartel. In 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled that some of these NCAA restrictions on student athletes are in violation of US antitrust law.

The NCAA settled a lawsuit in May 2024, allowing member schools to pay Division I athletes who had played since 2016. On September 28, 2026, the Protect College Sports Act passed the Senate by a bipartisan vote of 77 to 22. The bill would give the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption to enforce rules on eligibility, transfers, and compensation. If the bill passes, it will also protect the NCAA, its conferences, and its schools from federal and state antitrust liability when they enforce the Act's rules.

History

Further information: List of charter members of the NCAA

Intercollegiate sports began in the United States in 1852, when crews from Harvard and Yale universities met in a challenge race in the sport of rowing. The NCAA traces its beginnings to two White House meetings held by President Theodore Roosevelt after many injuries and deaths in college football. In 1905, 62 colleges and universities became charter members of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, which took the name NCAA in 1910. The first NCAA national championship was held in 1921, and a basketball championship followed in 1939. In 1951, Walter Byers was named executive director, and a national headquarters was set up in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1952. In 1973, the membership was divided into three divisions. Until the 1980s, women's sports were governed by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, and by 1982 all NCAA divisions offered national championships for women.

In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Board of Regents that the NCAA's complete control of television rights broke antitrust laws, which opened the way for schools and conferences to make their own TV deals. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Smith that the NCAA was not subject to Title IX in a case about discrimination against female athletes. In 2009, Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, became the NCAA's first non-US member institution. In 2021, the Supreme Court supported a ruling in NCAA v. Alston that allowed schools to give athletes more compensation as long as it was connected to their education, which showed changing ideas about amateurism in college sports.

Headquarters

In July 1955, executive director Walter Byers, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, moved the NCAA's headquarters from the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago, where it shared offices with the Big Ten Conference, to the Fairfax Building in Downtown Kansas City. The move was meant to separate the NCAA from the direct influence of any one conference and keep it centrally located. The Fairfax was a block from Municipal Auditorium. In 1964, the NCAA moved three blocks away to the Midland Theatre, and in 1973 it moved to a new building on Shawnee Mission Parkway in suburban Mission, Kansas. In 1989, it moved about 6 miles farther south to Overland Park, Kansas. The NCAA was unhappy with this Johnson County, Kansas location, which was more than 40 minutes from Kansas City International Airport.

In 1997, the NCAA asked for bids for a new headquarters. The two finalists were Kansas City, which proposed a location near Crown Center with a visitors' center in Union Station, and Indianapolis. Kansas City's main sports venue, Kemper Arena, was nearly 23 years old. Indianapolis argued that it was more central, since two-thirds of the members are east of the Mississippi River, and its 50,000-seat RCA Dome (since replaced by the larger Lucas Oil Stadium) was much bigger than Kemper Arena. In 1999, the NCAA moved its 300-member staff to White River State Park in Indianapolis, Indiana. Next to the headquarters is the NCAA Hall of Champions.

Structure

The NCAA's Board of Governors (once called the Executive Committee) is the main body of the NCAA, and it elects the NCAA's president. Ideas for new rules first go through committees and cabinets, which include representatives from member schools. They then go to the Management Council, which includes school leaders such as athletic directors and faculty advisers. Finally, the Board of Directors, made up of school presidents, gives final approval. The NCAA national office staff supports this work. The NCAA also runs the officiating software company ArbiterSports, based in Sandy, Utah. It is owned through two NCAA subsidiaries, Arbiter LLC and eOfficials LLC, and aims to make officiating in amateur sports fairer, higher quality, and more consistent. The NCAA had no full-time leader until 1951, when Walter Byers became executive director. The title changed to president in 1998. Later leaders include Dick Schultz, Judith Sweet, Cedric Dempsey, Myles Brand, Jim Isch (interim), Mark Emmert, and Charlie Baker, who has led since 2023. In 2013, the NCAA hired Brian Hainline as its first chief medical officer.

Before 1957, all NCAA sports used a single division. That year, men's basketball split into the University Division and the College Division, and other sports gradually followed. In 1973, the College Division split into Division II and Division III, and the University Division was renamed Division I. The NCAA held a separate Division II championship for men's ice hockey from 1978 to 1984 and again from 1993 to 1999. Some sports also use a single-division format, where one tournament decides a national champion among all three divisions.

Further information: List of NCAA Division I institutions, List of NCAA Division II institutions, and List of NCAA Division III institutions

See also: Amateurism in the NCAA

Player eligibility

The NCAA requires all of its athletes to be amateurs, and all new athletes must be certified as amateurs. To stay eligible, athletes cannot sign contracts with sports clubs, earn a salary for playing a sport, try out for professional sports, or make agreements with agents. To play college sports as freshmen, students must have graduated from high school, completed the required academic courses, and have a qualifying grade-point average (GPA). For Division I, the lowest GPA that can make a freshman eligible is 2.30 (2.20 for Division II or III), but students can play starting in their second year with a 2.00. Student-athletes can also keep prize money from competitions, as long as it does not go over the event's total expenses. For example, during high school, D1 tennis players may take up to $10,000 in prize money. Going over that amount in a calendar year means losing eligibility.

As of the 2017–18 school year, high school football players may sign a letter of intent to play for a Division I or Division II college during either of two periods. The first is a three-day period in mid-December, introduced in 2017–18. The second, which was the only period before 2017, starts on the first Wednesday in February. In August 2011, the NCAA announced plans to raise academic requirements for postseason play, including for football's Bowl Championship Series, which is now defunct and was replaced in 2014 by the College Football Playoff, and for the Division I men's basketball tournament. These requirements are based on an "Academic Progress Rate," which measures retention and graduation rates. Students can compete for only four years. They can sit out a year while still attending school by redshirting without losing a year of eligibility, so they have five years from starting college to play four seasons.

NCAA sponsored sports

The NCAA currently awards 94 national team championships each year: 49 for women, 43 for men, and 2 coed championships for rifle and skiing. The sports it sanctions include acrobatics & tumbling (women), basketball, baseball (men), track and field, softball (women), football (men), cross country, field hockey (women), bowling (women), golf, fencing, lacrosse, soccer, gymnastics, rowing (women), stunt (women), swimming & diving, beach volleyball (women), volleyball, ice hockey, water polo, tennis, and wrestling. The newest sports are acrobatics & tumbling and stunt, which will hold their first official championships in spring 2027. Before them, women's wrestling held its first championship in March 2026, and beach volleyball held its first championship in spring 2016. The NCAA had called beach volleyball "sand volleyball" until June 23, 2015, when it switched to the internationally recognized name "beach volleyball." In June 2025, the NCAA voted to separate men's and women's scoring in fencing, which will create separate men's and women's championships. The College Football Playoff decides the Football Bowl Subdivision champion separately, and this is not an official NCAA championship. The NCAA also sanctioned a boxing championship from 1932 to 1960, but it ended that sport after it declined in the 1950s and after a boxer died at the 1960 tournament.

Through the 2026–27 school year, Division II schools will keep competing for the bowling championship, and Division III schools will keep competing for the women's wrestling championship. In the 2027–28 school year, separate divisional championships will begin in those two women's sports.

Emerging sports for women

Main article: NCAA Emerging Sports for Women

The NCAA also recognizes Emerging Sports for Women. These sports do not yet have official NCAA championships, but schools can use them to meet sports requirements for their division. The four current Emerging Sports for Women are equestrian (Divisions I and II only), flag football, rugby, and triathlon. Wrestling left the program in January 2025 when it became an official championship sport, and acrobatics & tumbling and stunt left in January 2026. Flag football was added in January 2026.

Sports added and dropped

The popularity of each sports program has changed over time. From 1988–89 to 2010–11, NCAA schools added a net total of 510 men's teams and 2,703 women's teams. The tables below show how the number of NCAA schools in all three divisions combined that offer each men's and women's team sport has changed.

Men's sports

From 1988–89 to 2010–11, indoor track and field, lacrosse, and cross country had the biggest net gains among men's sports, each with more than 100 new teams. Wrestling lost the most teams (104), followed by tennis and rifle. Water polo had the most net losses among men's team sports. Eight men's sports had fewer Division I schools offering them in 2020 than in 1990, even though Division I membership grew by nearly 60 schools. Men's tennis dropped the most as a share of Division I schools: 71.5% had it in 2020, compared to 93.2% in 1990.

The following table lists the men's individual Division I sports with at least 5,000 participating athletes, ranked by number of athletes.

Women's sports

From 1988–89 to 2010–11, soccer had the biggest net gain among women's sports, with 599 more teams. Golf and indoor track and field also grew. No women's sports had double-digit net losses.

The following table lists the women's individual NCAA sports with at least 1,000 participating athletes, ranked by number of athletes.

Championships

Further information: List of NCAA schools with the most NCAA Division I championships and List of NCAA schools with the most Division I national championships

See also: NACDA Directors' Cup, Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championships, List of college athletics championship game outcomes, and Intercollegiate sports team champions

The NCAA gives trophies to its champions. For most sports, the first-place team receives a gold-plated trophy, the second-place team a silver one, and the third-place team a bronze one. Winning teams keep their trophies permanently unless it is later found that they won by breaking serious rules. As of May 30, 2022, Stanford, UCLA, and Southern California (USC) have won the most NCAA championships. Stanford has won 131, UCLA has won 119, and USC is third with 111, counting men's and women's sports.

Main articles: College football national championships in NCAA Division I FBS and College Football Playoff

The NCAA has never held an official championship for its highest level of football, Division I FBS. Instead, several outside groups award their own titles. In the past, teams that finished first in season-ending polls, most notably the AP Poll of writers and the Coaches Poll, were said to have won the "national championship." From 2014 through 2023, the College Football Playoff, made up of conferences and independent schools that compete in Division I FBS and six bowl games, placed the top four teams into two semifinal games. The winners then played in the College Football Playoff National Championship, which the NCAA does not officially sanction or recognize. The playoff expanded to 12 teams starting in 2024.

Conferences

See also: List of NCAA conferences and List of college athletic conferences in the United States

Main articles: NCAA Division I and List of NCAA Division I athletic directors

Main article: NCAA Division II

Main article: NCAA Division III

The NCAA is divided into three levels of conferences: Division I, Division II, and Division III. The divisions are organized by program size, and each has many smaller groups inside it. Most schools belong to one main conference for most of their sports, but they may belong to different conferences for different sports. Schools that do not belong to a conference for a certain sport are called "Independents." For example, Notre Dame mostly belongs to the Atlantic Coast Conference, but its ice hockey team plays in the Big Ten Conference, and its football team is an independent.

Each division has its own rules. Division I conferences must have at least seven member schools and offer at least 12 sports. Division II schools must offer at least five sports for men and five for women, or four for men and six for women. Division III schools cannot offer athletic scholarships, and they must offer at least three team sports for each sex.

The NCAA has media deals with several TV companies, including CBS Sports Network, ESPN, ABC, ESPN+, TNT Sports, and Golf Channel. Together they cover 43 of the NCAA's 93 championships. ESPN and its networks have the rights to 40 championships, CBS has two, TNT Sports has one, and NBC's Golf Channel has two. The biggest event, the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, is shown by CBS Sports and TNT Sports. Championships that these partners do not show can be watched on NCAA.com. Westwood One has the radio rights to the men's and women's basketball Final Fours and the Men's College World Series for baseball.

From 1998 to 2013, Electronic Arts made college sports video games using the NCAA's name. These included NCAA Football, NCAA Basketball, and MVP Baseball. The NCAA ended this license because of lawsuits, most notably O'Bannon v. NCAA, which were about using players' likenesses in these games. After players were allowed to earn money from their names, images, and likenesses, EA brought back its football series in 2024 under the name EA Sports College Football.

Office of Inclusion

The NCAA says it is committed to gender equity, diversity, and inclusion for its athletes, coaches, and leaders. In 2018, it ran a week-long social media campaign to promote these values. Title IX, which was added in 1972 to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, bans discrimination based on sex in schools, including college sports. In 2022, the NCAA adopted a new policy for transgender athletes. Under it, each sport's governing body, international federation, or International Olympic Committee rules generally decide who can take part. Athlete Ally and former NCAA LGBTQ OneTeam facilitator Rhea Debussy criticized the change. The NCAA's earlier policy had used testosterone levels to decide eligibility.

The NCAA has also used its power to choose championship host cities to protect its values. In 2015, Indiana passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act that could allow businesses to discriminate against people based on who they love. After pressure, Indiana's governor, Mike Pence, changed the law to protect against that kind of discrimination, and the NCAA kept hosting events there. In 2016, the NCAA moved its championship events out of North Carolina because of the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act. It returned the events after the state replaced that law in 2017. In December 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the NCAA over allowing trans women to compete in women's events. On February 6, 2025, the NCAA limited women's college competitions to athletes assigned female at birth, the day after President Donald Trump signed the order Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports.

College team name changes

As of 2018, colleges have kept changing school mascots that some people say are based on unfair or offensive stereotypes. Schools under NCAA policy have been looked at closely for mascots inspired by Native Americans. Many colleges have changed their mascots, but some got permission from the tribe they represent and kept them. This Native American mascot controversy has not been completely settled, but many issues have been resolved.

Stanford, Dartmouth, and Marquette are among many colleges that have changed Native American mascots or nicknames. Utah, Central Michigan, Florida State, and Mississippi College all appealed to the NCAA after being called "hostile and offensive," and their appeals succeeded. Each pointed to positive relationships with neighboring tribes.

Rules violations

See also: List of NCAA institutions on probation

Member schools promise to follow the NCAA's rules. In 1952, the members agreed on a way to enforce them. When someone reports a possible rule violation, the NCAA's enforcement staff looks into it and brings serious cases to the Committees on Infractions. If the NCAA finds several violations, it may decide that the whole school has a "lack of institutional control." Schools that are found to have broken the rules can receive penalties, such as being placed on "probation" for a period of time. A school can appeal these decisions. In the most serious cases, the NCAA can ban a school from a sport, which is called the "Death Penalty." This has only been used three times in its modern form. The most well-known case involved Southern Methodist University's (SMU) football team, which lost its 1987 season because of massive rules violations. SMU's football program took many years to recover. The NCAA has rarely used this penalty since then. It was considered for Penn State because of the Jerry Sandusky incident, but Penn State received a large fine and other penalties instead. The NCAA later reversed some of these penalties.

In very serious cases, coaches, athletic directors, and support staff can be barred from working at any NCAA member school without the NCAA's permission. This is called a "show-cause penalty." A school that hires someone under this penalty may face its own punishments. Because of this, a show-cause order makes it very hard for those individuals to get hired. One famous scandal involved Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Cam Newton of the Auburn Tigers in 2011. His family was reported to have asked for more than $100,000 for him to play at Mississippi State instead. Newton was later cleared because there was not enough evidence against him.

Sponsors

The NCAA has two levels of sponsors. AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Capital One are NCAA Corporate Champions. All of the other sponsors are NCAA Corporate Partners.

Finances

Main article: House v. NCAA

See also: NCAA v. Alston and Fair Pay to Play Act

The NCAA is a tax-exempt not-for-profit organization, so it does not have to pay most of the taxes that companies pay. In 2017, the NCAA's total revenue was more than $1.06 billion. Most of this money came from television and marketing rights for the men's basketball tournament, along with championship ticket sales. The NCAA spends this money on sports, scholarships, and support for student athletes. An ESPN review found that about $560.3 million went back to the NCAA's member schools that year.

For many years, the NCAA limited how much money players could receive, mostly to scholarships that cover tuition and school costs. Many people argued this was unfair, since schools earn large amounts from sports. Some economists said the rules helped schools rent-seeking at the athletes' expense, and they described the NCAA as a cartel and a collusive monopsony. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Alston that some limits on education-related payments broke the Sherman Act. That year, Brian Kemp signed a law letting college athletes earn money from their name, image, and likeness, and players such as D'Eriq King, Bo Nix, Paige Bueckers, and Olivia Dunne began signing deals. In 2024, the NCAA and its major conferences agreed to let schools pay players directly for the first time.

Individual awards

See also: Academic All-America, Best Female College Athlete ESPY Award, Best Male College Athlete ESPY Award, Senior CLASS Award, Honda Sports Award, List of college baseball awards, and List of 2009 all-decade Sports Illustrated awards and honors#College basketball honors.

The NCAA gives many awards to people who take part in college sports. Some are given to people who show courage, leadership, or good sportsmanship. Others honor students who do well in both school and sports.

• NCAA Award of Valor (not given every year) honors a heroic action during the school year.
• NCAA Gerald R. Ford Award honors a person who has strongly supported college sports.
• NCAA Inspiration Award (not given every year) honors an inspiring action.
• NCAA Sportsmanship Award honors student-athletes who have shown good sportsmanship.
• The NCAA Theodore Roosevelt Award is the highest honor the NCAA can give to a person.
• NCAA Woman of the Year Award honors a senior student-athlete who has done well in school, sports, service, and leadership.
• Elite Scholar-Athlete Award honors the student-athlete with the highest grades who has reached the finals of an NCAA championship.
• Silver Anniversary Awards honor six former student-athletes on the 25th anniversary of their graduation.
• The Flying Wedge Award is one of the NCAA's highest honors for leadership and service.
• Today's Top 10 Award honors ten outstanding senior student-athletes.
• Walter Byers Scholarship honors the top male and female scholar-athletes.

In earlier years, the NCAA also gave awards at its NCAA Honors event. These included salutes to astronauts, business leaders, Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, governors, Olympians, performers, members of the President's Cabinet, national media figures, and members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

Other collegiate athletic organizations

The NCAA is the largest collegiate athletic organization in the United States, but it is not the only one. Several others also exist. The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) disbanded in 1982, after the NCAA began sponsoring championships in women's sports. Other American groups include the California Community College Athletic Association (CCCAA), which serves two-year colleges in California, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA), and the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA), which serves two-year colleges but does not operate in California or the Pacific Northwest. The Northwest Athletic Conference (NWAC) serves two-year colleges in Oregon and Washington, plus one member in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The United States Collegiate Athletic Association (USCAA) is another group.

Other countries have their own versions of these organizations. In Australia, there is UniSport Australia. In Canada, there are U Sports and the Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA). Indonesia has Liga Mahasiswa (LIMA), and Nigeria has the Nigerian University Games Association (NUGA). In the Philippines, there are the National Collegiate Athletic Association (Philippines) (NCAA) and the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP). Poland has the Academic Sports Association (AZS), South Africa has Varsity Sports (South Africa), and the United Kingdom has British Universities & Colleges Sport.