The intersection of athletics and academics is legitimized through eligibility rules, which provide standards that bind commercial athletics to the educational purposes of higher education. To compete in intercollegiate athletics, freshman student athletes must meet the initial academic eligibility criteria set by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) membership. Proposition 48 crystallized many of the calls for reform regarding inadequate academic standards in the public and postsecondary institutions that occurred during the early 1980s. In this article, the authors propose and test a time series structural equation model to investigate Proposition 48's impact on raising Division IA freshman student athletes' graduation rates in football and its impact in changing football programs' recruiting practices regarding freshman and junior college student athletes. (Contains 4 figures, 2 tables, and 8 notes.)