History
The National Collegiate Athletic Association has never been apposed to gaming but many factors has kept it from supporting it. The argument for esports to be govern by the NCAA began in 2015. It did not gain much momentum until 2019. This was the peak of organizations like NACE and TESPA forming with the idea to become that governing body. One of the primary reasons that the NCAA did not choose to govern esports was because they felt that it could not be unionized successfully.
Once the argument got picked up again in 2019 we saw other factors come into play. These included the NCAA stating that esports is to heavily a male focused sport. This could bring some Title IX complications. Which can negatively affect their image. Another key point they spoke about was the natural violence of games such as Counter Strike and Call of Duty. These titles could potential damage partnerships.
Personal Opinion
I know my opinion on this topic is unpopular. I am one of the few who is against the NCAA governing esports. Esports is still to young for something like this to be successful. Most colleges do not even recognize gaming as a official club or program. If these schools were held to NCAA standards then most if not all of these programs would simply be shutdown. Between NCAA requiring scholarships for all regulated sports and requiring these programs to have full time staff members a lot of these schools do not have the resources for it.
I seen a lot of people argue that forcing these requirements on schools would help esports. It simply would not. The main reason being that even the "Big 10" of esports have little to no funding. Some even have volunteer staff for roles such as "Director of Esports". A lot of people in the scene fail to realize that most of even the tier 1 esports programs across the nation are student funded. I feel we need to get to a point where the majority of schools properly support esports before being required to by the NCAA for us to really see what some think we would.
