Taylor Branch on the Crisis of College Sports

In this episode of History Talk, host Leticia Wiggins interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Taylor Branch on the contentious yet interlinked history of the American university system and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA. How we debate college sports connects to a long history, dating all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. In addition to completing the monumental King Era Trilogy, Branch has published The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA. He has also been featured in The Atlantic, MSNBC, and NPR to list but a few places. An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/historytalk/taylor-branch-crisis-college-sports Read More on our historical interpretation of college sports "Savage Gladiators vs. Civilized Amateurs: Rome and Athens in American Sports Culture" at origins.osu.edu.