The trip across an ocean must have inspired the thought. The train ride from London had helped me reach cozy Vicarage Road Stadium, home of the Watford Hornets, who were meeting Nottingham Forest in a Football Association Cup game. This was an unplanned detour taken in the late 1980s, long enough ago that back in the States, the letters “BCS” were not yet spoken through gritted teeth and the annual study of bracketology appeared limited to those who lacked the time or inclination to move out of their parents’ basements.

I negotiated a reasonable price for a ticket in the Family Section, took my place in the bleachers, chatted with nearby fans and began to hear about a promising teenager who had recently signed a lucrative contract with Nottingham Forest.

That was the moment that inspired the thought: This is how it works in the rest of the world, where the paths of gifted young athletes are determined by market value or a less-than-open-minded government’s convenient necessity of military service. Not for us. At some point in the trajectory from James Naismith’s clever use of peach baskets to Dick Vitale’s first “Awesome, Baby,” the marketable link between elite-level athletes, popular culture and higher education became a uniquely American phenomenon. Or is that “peculiarly”?

How else to describe an industry that has provided us with the precision of Princeton’s Bill Bradley and his sense of where you are, the resolute approach — against all odds — of the 1966 Texas Western national champions, and the buffoonery of another university’s overnight package full of cash that busted open at a most inopportune moment?

Think of how the playing fields of Eton might have been perceived had a couple of recruiting gurus been in attendance. The athletes would have been categorized, evaluated and asked for their verbal commitments long before Waterloo appeared on the schedule and Napoleon stomped into the interview room.

How did we get to this place? For all the scoreboard updates, all the hours in front of the tube, all the podcasts and downloads and column inches, all the talk-show rants and watercooler playcalling critiques and recruiting speculation, all that time and effort we invest, how much do we understand about this business? On college campuses, the answer is not enough.

A meticulous study by a group of researchers led by Janet H. Lawrence, associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for Postsecondary and Higher Education, was discussed during a Faculty Summit on Intercollegiate Athletics sponsored by the Knight Foundation in October:

“The overarching finding is: A striking number of professors say they don’t know about and are disconnected from issues facing college sports. It’s all the more striking because the survey sample included faculty involved in governance or undergraduate teaching — those more likely to be informed about these issues.”

That reality is all the more understandable now that I occupy a place on that side of the fence. For more than three decades as a journalist, I visited campuses in an effort to understand how college athletics programs work. Last year, I joined the faculty at Penn State University as Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society and director of the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism.

As I sit in the stands on Saturday afternoon I think about a class on Tuesday morning. I wonder how anyone employed on this campus has any time to comprehend the business behind the spectacle. (Particularly when there is that mountain of emails to be answered, the one with questions ranging from “Can I have an extension?” to “Can I please have an extension?”) With all the tasks waiting on my desk at this moment, if Penn State was to announce tomorrow that 1973 Heisman Trophy winner John Cappelletti had been awarded one more game of eligibility and was going to play in the bowl game, I would not know unless Joe Paterno drove to my house to tell me.

There is one thread that extends from journalism to the academy. That is the long-held notion of sports as toy department, a subject unworthy of quality reporting or scholarly research. The 1956 Pulitzer Prize won by Arthur Daley of The New York Times, for his “Sports of The Times” columns, represented a breakthrough in recognition. The Inaugural Scholarly Colloquium on College Sports, to take place January 10-11 in Nashville, Tennessee, could play a similar role.

To register for the Colloquium, visit www.ncaaconvention and click the registration link under the Colloquium heading.

To understand what the Colloquium is, it is important to understand what it is not. As a member of the Advisory and Editorial Board, I can say that our discussions last January confirmed that this is not an exercise for what one former editor of mine described as the “raccoon coat crowd,” an outdated celebration of an industry that has, shall we say, issues.

This research is not designed to arrive at predetermined answers. It is not intended to offer blind endorsements or blunt-force assessments. The research may show that the truth is not to be identified in black or white, but only after close examination of all those shades of gray.

There will be a call for papers next year in a continuing effort to fill a void that has lasted too long. For years, researchers have carefully examined everything except the machinery that produces some of the most high-profile events in the life of a university community.

Malcolm Moran holds the Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society in the Pennsylvania State University College of Communication, where he serves as director of the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism.