The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletes from up to 1,268 North American institutions and conferences. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, and helps over 480,000 college student athletes who compete annually in college sports. The organization is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) is a college athletics association for small colleges and universities in North America. For the 2021–22 season, it has 252 member institutions, of which two are in British Columbia, one in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the rest in the conterminous United States. The NAIA, whose headquarters is in Kansas City, Missouri, sponsors 27 national championships. The CBS Sports Network, formerly called CSTV, serves as the national media outlet for the NAIA. In 2014, ESPNU began carrying the NAIA Football National Championship.
National Signing Day has traditionally been the first day that a high school senior can sign a binding National Letter of Intent for a collegiate sport with a school that is a member of the United States National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
NCAA Division III (D-III) is a division of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States. D-III consists of athletic programs at colleges and universities that choose not to offer athletic scholarships to their student-athletes.
College baseball is baseball that is played on the intercollegiate level at institutions of higher education. In comparison to football and basketball, college competition in the United States plays a smaller role in developing professional players, as baseball's professional minor leagues are more extensive, with a greater history of supplying players to the MLB. Moving directly from high school to the professional level is more common in baseball than in football or basketball. However, if players do opt to enroll at a four-year college to play baseball, they must complete three years to regain professional eligibility, unless they reach age 21 before starting their third year of college. Players who enroll at junior colleges regain eligibility after one year at that level. In the 2020 season, which was abbreviated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 300 NCAA Division I teams in the United States.
College athletics in the United States or college sports in the United States refers primarily to sports and athletic competition organized and funded by institutions of tertiary education.
An athletic scholarship is a form of scholarship to attend a college or university or a private high school awarded to an individual based predominantly on his or her ability to play in a sport. Athletic scholarships are common in the United States, but in a majority of countries they are rare or non-existent.
The Academic Progress Rate (APR) is a measure introduced by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the nonprofit association that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, to track student-athletes chances of graduation. The Academic Progress Rate (APR) is a term-by-term measure of eligibility and retention for Division I student-athletes that was developed as an early indicator of eventual graduation rates.
Redshirt, in United States college athletics, is a delay or suspension of an athlete's participation in order to lengthen their period of eligibility. Typically, a student's athletic eligibility in a given sport is four seasons, aligning with the four years of academic classes typically required to earn a bachelor's degree at an American college or university. However, in a redshirt year, student athletes may attend classes at the college or university, practice with an athletic team, and "suit up" for play – but they may compete in only a limited number of games. Using this mechanism, a student athlete has at most five academic years to use the four years of eligibility, thus becoming what is termed a fifth-year senior.
A walk-on, in American and Canadian college athletics, is an athlete who becomes part of a team without being recruited and awarded an athletic scholarship. A team's walk-on players are normally the weakest players and relegated to the scout team, and may not even be placed on the official depth chart or traveling team, while the scholarship players are the team's main players. However, a walk-on player occasionally becomes a noted member of the team.
The death penalty is the popular term for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)'s power to ban a school from competing in a sport for at least one year. It is colloquially termed the "death penalty" as a nod to capital punishment, being the harshest penalty that an NCAA member school can receive.
In college athletics in the United States, recruiting is the process in which college coaches add prospective student athletes to their roster each off-season. This process typically culminates in a coach extending an athletic scholarship offer to a player who is about to be a junior in high school or higher. There are instances, mostly at lower division universities, where no athletic scholarship can be awarded and where the player pays for tuition, housing, and textbook costs out of pocket or from financial aid. During this recruiting process, schools must comply with rules that define who may be involved in the recruiting process, when recruiting may occur and the conditions under which recruiting may be conducted. Recruiting rules seek, as much as possible, to control intrusions into the lives of prospective student-athletes. The NCAA defines recruiting as “any solicitation of prospective student-athletes or their parents by an institutional staff member or by a representative of the institution’s athletics interests for the purpose of securing a prospective student-athlete’s enrollment and ultimate participation in the institution’s intercollegiate athletics program."
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, often referred to simply as the Knight Commission, is a panel of American academic, athletic and sports leaders, with an eye toward reform of college athletics, particularly in regard to emphasizing academic values and policies that ensure athletic programs operate within the educational missions of their universities.
A student athlete is a participant in an organized competitive sport sponsored by the educational institution in which the student is enrolled. Student-athletes are full-time students and athletes at the same time. Colleges offer athletic scholarships in many sports. Many student athletes receive scholarships to these institutions, but having a scholarship is not mandatory for a student athlete. In the United States, athletic scholarships are largely regulated—by either the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) or the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which sets minimum standards for both the individuals awarded the scholarships and for the institutions that grant them. Also students that are very talented may get scholarships for playing a particular sport. The term student-athlete was coined in 1964 by Walter Byers, the first-ever executive director of the NCAA, to counter attempts to require universities to pay workers' compensation.
NCAA student-athlete recruiting adheres to a strict process set forth by the NCAA, which includes timetables, regulations, and consequences for violations.
College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) is an organization that focuses on professional development and support for sports information directors at all levels. It offers awards, scholarships, and grants in support of SIDs and prospective SIDs in the industry. Since 1952, CoSIDA has bestowed Academic All-American recognition on male and female athletes in Divisions I, II, and III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)—covering all NCAA championship sports—and NAIA athletes.
Oversigning is an unofficial term for the practice of American college athletic departments signing prospective student-athletes to a National Letter of Intent (NLI) that may exceed the maximum number of athletic scholarships permitted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The NCAA limits the total number of scholarships that may be awarded in all of its sponsored sports, and in football also limits the number of scholarships awarded in a given year. Those limits differ by sport and the division in which that school participates. Most conferences have additional rules governing signing NLI.
The 2013 Missouri Tigers football team represented the University of Missouri in the 2013 NCAA Division I FBS football season. It marked the Tigers' second season as a member of the Southeastern Conference (SEC) in the Eastern Division. The team was led by head coach Gary Pinkel, in his 13th year and played its home games at Faurot Field in Columbia, Missouri. The Tigers went into the season hoping to return to a bowl game after missing out the previous season. They succeeded after an 11–1 regular season and their first-ever SEC Eastern Division title. After a loss to Auburn in the SEC Championship Game they played in the 2014 Cotton Bowl Classic on January 3, 2014 against Oklahoma State, which they won 41–31. The two teams had last met on October 22, 2011.
The 2017 Ole Miss Rebels football team represented the University of Mississippi in the 2017 NCAA Division I FBS football season. The Rebels played their home games at Vaught–Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Mississippi and competed in the Western Division of the Southeastern Conference (SEC). They were led by then-interim head coach Matt Luke. They finished the season 6–6, 3–5 in SEC play to finish in sixth place in the Western Division.
The Cheyney Wolves are the athletic sports teams for Cheyney University. They compete as an independent and formerly played in the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (PSAC). Women's sports include basketball, cheerleading and volleyball. Basketball is the only men's sport the university currently offers as of 2019.
