The N.C.A.A., the nonprofit organization that once governed college athletics and now more closely resembles a sprawling sales team for high-end workout gear, was, like so many despots before it, meant to be a force for good. Its first executive director, a former sportswriter named Walter Byers, built the organization as a buffer against creeping capitalism and shady gambling interests — a way to protect ­student-athletes from the rampaging hordes of greed charging in from the sidelines. It was meant to be a place of purity.

But like most theoretical utopias, it has ended up doing more harm than good. As documented in Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss’s new book, “Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA,” it has lost its way so many times that it is now the organization from which players need protection. The reason is as simple as humanity itself: the collision of zealotry and commerce. When (rich, white) men convince themselves that (poor, black) athletes need to be shielded from the corrupting influence of money, measures to keep them from it — even as the world of collegiate sports begins clearing more than $900 million a year in revenue — are not seen as plunder; they are seen as noble, just and vital. That those men end up keeping so much of that money for themselves? Hey, it has to go somewhere.

Thus, college sports grow ever more lucrative and the players — still — are denied even basic compensation above scholarships, which can be pulled for no reason and without explanation. No­cera and Strauss explain how this was baked into the concept of the N.C.A.A. in the first place. Byers and his successors recognized the importance of increasing revenue streams not as a way to spread the wealth but to expand the N.C.A.A.’s power, to ensure that their “protection” of college athletes would be total. The N.C.A.A. — and the college presidents it serves — ennoble themselves to maximize college sports’ revenue as a matter of self-preservation. They see income as ammunition to protect the athletes, when in fact it is gunning them down.

This was sustainable for a surprising number of years until, thanks to the power of television and ballooning broadcast contracts, the amount of money surrounding college athletics became so insane that the corruption could no longer be ignored. To wit: ESPN paid the N.C.A.A. $7.3 billion for a 12-year contract to air the college football playoffs starting in 2014; that same year, when the University of Connecticut Huskies won the men’s basketball championship, their star point guard Shabazz Napier complained that N.C.A.A. rules literally made him go to bed hungry.