Semi-Pro: The Arc of College Sports from Amateur Ideal to Professional Reality

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By William Reimers

The question of whether college athletes should be paid has been answered, if not cleanly, then at least irreversibly. Name, image, and likeness rules changed that. What has not been answered, and what Clay M. Grayson argues no one is thinking hard enough about, is what the NCAA actually becomes now that the amateur ideal has been set aside.

Grayson comes to this question as an attorney and a nationally recognized advisor on governance and higher education, which means he has spent years inside the legal and institutional machinery that governs college athletics. Semi-Pro is the work of someone who has watched that machinery strain under pressures it was not built to handle, and who wants to help redesign it rather than simply declare it broken.

The book traces a long arc, beginning with the arrival of college football in 1869 and the NCAA’s formalization of the amateur model in 1906. The real turning point, in Grayson’s telling, came with a 1991 IRS ruling that taxed corporate sponsorship revenue at college games, a moment that quietly acknowledged what the institutions themselves resisted admitting: that big-time college sports had become a commercial enterprise. The decades since have been one long negotiation between that reality and the language of amateurism used to contain it.

Where Grayson distinguishes himself is in shifting the debate from ought to how. Rather than relitigating whether the old model was fair, he asks what a better business model for college athletics would look like, often looking to the NFL as a structural reference point. His training as a governance advisor shapes the analysis throughout, giving it a practical seriousness that more polemical treatments of the subject tend to lack.

For anyone trying to understand how college sports arrived at this particular moment of transformation, Semi-Pro is a clear-eyed and unusually well-informed guide.

About the Author

Clay M. Grayson

Clay M. Grayson is an attorney, author, and nationally recognized advisor on governance, nonprofit organizations, and higher education. He works with universities across the country to design legal and governance structures for the modern era of college athletics. He is the author of The Philanthropist Handbook and Semi-Pro: The Arc of College Sports from Amateur Ideal to Professional Reality. Together, his work and writing reflect a single throughline: designing durable systems that allow universities to operate effectively at scale without losing sight of their core mission. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.