Despite the NCAA's public statements about its concern for amateurism and physical fitness, its fundamental actions are readily explainable by means of conventional economic models of cartelization . This has been especially evident in the NCAA's recent activities in the area of football television and in its recent foray into the domain of women's Intercollegiate athletics. While it is likely that the NCAA will continue to undergo significant structural changes, it is unlikely that it will be destroyed by the problems that it currently faces. Intercollegiate athletics has assumed an increasingly significant role in American society in recent years. Attendance at intercollegia te athletic events continues to surge upward.^ Radio and television stations, to say nothing of television networks such as ESPN, flog our senses on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis with broadcasts of intercol- legiate athletic contests. Numerous head football coaches now earn annual salaries that exceed those of the presidents of the universities for whom they toil (Chronicle of Higher Education. 1982a). The NCAA, the dominant organization in intercollegia te athletics, has expanded at an astonishing rate and (inter alia) claims to control the rights to a television contract whose value exceeds one-quarter of a billion dollars. The NCAA has also arrogated to itself control over women's intercol- legiate athletics and now employs the service of a detective agency to monitor the activities of its membership (Chronicle of Higher Education, 1982b). The Sturm und Drang of intercollegia te athletics provoke an econ- omist to ask, "Can we explain and predict what has been occurring in intercollegia te athletics by means of the intellectual toolbox of economic theory?" It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate that we can utilize economic analysis to separate the wheat from the chaff in intercollegiate athletics. For, as Boulding (1970:2) has noted: