As an analyst and planner who has worked extensively to understand the system of educating student-athletes, I have become quite familiar with the "reform" rhetoric that has accompanied the evolution of college sports. I have come to this awareness through a rather simple analytical technique that can best be described as "understanding the current reality within a historical context."

For example, my current understanding of the "reality" of educating student-athletes is significantly informed by an analysis of the historical systems and structures from which they evolved. However, in my research, I have repeatedly run across a disparate accounting of the genesis story of the NCAA.

The popularly held belief is that grand old President Theodore Roosevelt was the catalyst for the establishment of the NCAA. Indeed, the NCAA Theodore Roosevelt Award, the organization's highest honor, is bestowed annually on "a distinguished citizen of national reputation and outstanding accomplishment." I can empathize with those who perpetuate "Theodore Rex" folklore, as there is no greater cultural artifact more suitable to align college sports with than Roosevelt. He was, after all, the personification of the "strenuous life" that was at the core of his larger-than-life persona.

Small of stature, asthmatic and physically weak as a child, Roosevelt reinvented himself through a variety of rugged outdoor and sporting activities, including riding, boxing, wrestling, tennis, hiking and hunting. Roosevelt was convinced that rugged sports and strenuous activity prepared American men and women for the struggle between the "nations and the races of the world." In "The Strenuous Life," Roosevelt noted, "In the last analysis, a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk."

An ardent fan of American college football, his predilection for the rugged nature of the game was never more evident than in 1894 when, in a note to Yale's legendary Walter Camp, he wrote that he hoped Harvard President William Eliot would do the "baby act" and drop football. A decade later, however, amidst muckraking reports of abuses in college sports and outcries of excessive violence of the game, Roosevelt did indeed take a vested interest in reforming the game. He invited the alumni representatives and head football coaches from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House for an October 8 summit, one week after the start of the 1905 season, to discuss reforming the rules of the game to make it safer and morally sound. It is this event, punctuated by the president's unsubstantiated threat to abolish football if reform did not occur, that has been portrayed as the impetus for the founding of the NCAA.

This is a great story containing several stains of truth. Roosevelt did advocate for football reform. He met with personal friend Henry Beach Needham in the summer of 1905 after Needham published two muckraking articles on college sports in the June and July issues of McClure's Magazine. The purpose of the meeting at Roosevelt's Oyster Bay summer retreat on Long Island was to inform Roosevelt of the depth of the abuses in college sports. Roosevelt did later deliver a scathing rebuke of the ethical pitfalls of college sports at a Harvard commencement. He did heed the earlier advice of another personal friend, Endicott Peabody, founder and headmaster of Groton Preparatory School, to gather representatives of the Big Three colleges to curb the abuses that infected the elite Eastern preparatory schools. He did ultimately meet with representatives of the Big Three at the White House and also subsequently met with Harvard football coach Bill Reid on at least two other occasions.

Yet, if I am to trust the historians from whom I draw my historical understanding, which I do, then I am left with an uncomfortable knowledge that this story is an inaccurate -- or at least embellished -- account of the historical reality. For example, Ronald Smith author of "Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics," notes that the hoped-for result of the White House summit never emerged. John Watterson, author of "College Football: History, Spectacle, and Controversy," agrees with Smith: "(T)he memorandum drawn up and signed by the Big Three after the White House Conference became virtually a dead letter in the final month of the season."

Watterson adds that despite the persistent myth that Roosevelt threatened to abolish college football failing reform, there is nary a stitch of evidence that Roosevelt ever uttered those words, nor did the office of the presidency give him the authority to do so even if he so desired. Moreover, there is little evidence that aggressive tactics persisted on the football field during the 1905 season, but not wanting to become embroiled in the issue, Roosevelt eventually distanced himself from the issue without ever having rebuked the Big Three for their failure to reform. Thus, the historians tell us that the White House summit was, for all intents and purposes, a failure.

A more accurate, though less provocative, genesis story of the NCAA would give far more credit to New York University President Henry MacCracken. After Harold Moore, a halfback for Union College, suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage in a game against New York University, MacCracken took it upon himself to pursue reform after Harvard's outspoken President Charles Eliot refused his request for assistance in the effort. Just six weeks later, representatives from 12 New York area colleges gathered to discuss reform -- or abolition -- of college football.

A second meeting December 28 was more representative of the nation's colleges and universities, though the bulk of the delegates hailed from small New England or Midwestern colleges. Not one of the Big Three attended either session and, indeed, the "old guard" Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee (Yale, Penn, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Chicago) only begrudgingly formed a partnership with an upstart rules committee from the MacCracken group. When the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was officially chartered later in the spring of 1906, none of the Big Three, nor a host of other influential colleges, joined the new organization.

Again, I understand why the NCAA perpetuates the White House summit as part of its cultural folklore, whether tacitly or by design, as one should never underestimate the importance of symbolism, ritual and folklore in college sports. The grandness of the tale captures the very essence of the tumultuous era that resulted in the emergence of America as a world power. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that the NCAA embrace the planning technique of understanding the organization's current reality within a historical context. I'm not suggesting the NCAA change the Roosevelt award to the MacCracken award, but as an individual who values both academic rigor and the strategic-planning process, I would simply like to suggest that the NCAA ensure that the portrayal of its own historical context is accurate and clearly articulated.

Eric Ferris is a policy analyst at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.