Then again, the N.C.A.A.’s culture to this day — overly bureaucratic and rules-obsessed, and utterly lacking in empathy or compassion for the 18-year-old athletes who come under its purview — is one that Byers instilled. Convinced of the N.C.A.A.’s — and his — moral superiority, he rejected any suggestion that it played favorites, conducted vendettas, and meted out punishment for the pettiest of violations, though it plainly did. Confiding in no one, he ruled by fear, not consensus.

Byers also failed at the thing that he claimed to care most about. He wrote in his memoir that his goal was always to preserve “the amateur collegiate spirit I so much loved as a youth and admired as a young sports reporter.” The N.C.A.A. developed an absurdly thick rulebook on his watch meant to “keep college athletics more a student activity than a profession,” as he put it, none of which slowed down the growing commercialism of college sports. His basketball tournament, now known as March Madness, became a moneymaking juggernaut. And in the early 1980s, when the big football schools sued the N.C.A.A. to regain their television rights, he stubbornly refused to negotiate a compromise that might have prevented the situation we have today, in which football-driven television contracts are the holy grail of college athletics. Instead, in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled against the N.C.A.A., giving schools and conferences the right to cut their own television deals. Which they did.

By the time Byers retired, he had turned against his own creation, claiming that commercialism had won and the N.C.A.A. should face reality. In 1995, he published his memoir, entitled “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes.” Much of it consisted of his recounting Sisyphean battles to keep college sports “clean,” and high-stakes negotiations with the television networks.

But at points along the way, he also decried the “cartel” — his word — that he helped create. He used other words, too, including “hypocrisy,” which is what so many modern critics see when they look at the N.C.A.A. Byers laid out a full-blown reform agenda, including eliminating “oppressive N.C.A.A. laws,” treating athletes the same as every other student on campus, and allowing them to make money from endorsements. And he noted — with no apparent irony — how resistant the N.C.A.A. was to change.

When I first realized that the man who built the modern N.C.A.A. had many of the same complaints that critics have today, my jaw dropped. But I also couldn’t help noticing that he never accepted any blame for the onerous rules, or the egregious restrictions on athletes, or the N.C.A.A.’s resistance to change. Instead, he blamed “the new generation of coaches and staff” who “didn’t know and didn’t care to learn about old ideals.”