For decades, a small but passionate group of academics has offered a potential balm for the fraught relationship between athletics and education at major universities: Allow students to major in sports.

One such educator is David Hollander, a clinical professor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. He has spent years espousing the intellectual value of basketball — positionless play, he says, can teach entrepreneurial thinking, and fast breaks can teach interpersonal communication. Hollander lobbied for the Catholic Church to name a patron saint of basketball (it did) and helped persuade the United Nations to declare Dec. 21 World Basketball Day.

Within the next year, in what he sees as a small step toward athletics being taken seriously in the academy, Hollander is planning to teach a course for varsity, Olympic and professional athletes in which their experiences playing and practicing their sport will be part of the curriculum.

“You can get a degree right now in higher education, in dance and art and music, drama,” Hollander said. “And I think those are totally valid degrees. They’re portals into the human condition.”

He added: “I don’t see how athletics is any different. How that ancient cultural form, like those ancient cultural forms that I’ve mentioned, are not intrinsically academically meritorious.”

Recently, the ideas of educators like Hollander found a notably influential audience: sports apparel company Nike, which pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into college sports through its numerous sponsorship agreements.

Nike wants to lobby universities to offer minors or majors in athletics. Students would earn credits for time spent working on their sport (that is, practicing and playing it) and also for taking classes in a more theoretical curriculum that helps them understand the social, cultural, anthropological and physiological elements of athletics.

Some models suggest the major could include sport-specific strategy courses, along with courses in nutrition, performance psychology and physiology. It is an idea that has gained momentum in an era when athletes are now able to be compensated for their name, image and likeness, or NIL, which allows some of the most popular student athletes to be paid as much as or more than some professionals.

“We think that there’s enough interest from the colleges that Nike works with to be able to make this happen,” said John Jowers, Nike’s vice president for communications.

Jowers said he believed that while NIL was disrupting the financial models of college athletics, the focus on money took college sports “further and further away from the kind of core principles around education and college athletics in general.”

Giving athletes the opportunity to major in sports “closes that gap by offering something really, really radical, really new and actually really beneficial to colleges and universities,” he said.

Jowers said the notion of offering a major in sports interested Nike because it would allow it to create cultural impact in a way that benefits athletes and be at the forefront of important conversations.

Skeptics, however, postulate that for Nike to help bring about this change in the way colleges treat sports would be a marketing coup for the company, and a way for it to further ingratiate itself with young athletes.

“I think the sports major is basically being proposed to rationalize and justify the time on the field,” said Nathan Tublitz, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Oregon. “And it certainly wouldn’t be as intellectually rigorous as any other academic subject.”

For some skeptics, that’s part of the concern. Tublitz, who was the president of the university senate at Oregon, said most of the athletes who took his courses were excellent students, but he did not think sports satisfied universities’ goals of “critical thinking skills and improving oral and written expression.”

Tublitz said the amount of money involved in college sports makes it difficult to compare to subjects like dance or theater. If a dancer misses a performance because they become ineligible because of poor grades, that doesn’t affect a university’s bottom line in the way it could if a star football player misses games.

John Davidson, a professor of Germanic language and film studies at Ohio State University and its faculty athletics representative, said he worried about conflicts of interest if coaches were allowed to weigh in on players’ grades.

He said he also had concerns about the new financial models for college sports and how they would interact with offering majors in sports.

“I could see that being problematic for the attempts to put some kind of academically based frame around athletics,” Davidson said.

Davidson said universities already have majors that would satisfy the desire for an athlete to be able to focus on a career in sports — such as kinesiology and sport industry. Those, he said, meet “academic and intellectual tests” better than some ideas he’s seen about sports majors.