The word “fundamental” is dear to NCAA president Mark Emmert’s heart. “Fundamental” or “fundamentally” appeared 26 times in Emmert’s testimony at the Ed O’Bannon trial over the rights to the names, images and likenesses of college athletes.

This is nothing new. Emmert talked about the “fundamental tone” around amateurism in September 2013. In August 2011, he said “fundamental change” was needed at the University of Miami following a scandal over what the NCAA calls “impermissible benefits.” In October 2012, Emmert said of the Penn State football team, “you’ve got some fundamental culture problems here.”

It’s fitting, as fundamentals are at the heart of Emmert’s job description. As challenges like the O’Bannon lawsuit have mounted in recent years, Emmert’s public role has increasingly become explaining why the NCAA and the concept of amateurism are fundamental to the existence of college sports. Without them, Emmert and others within college athletics suggest, teams would flee to the scholarship-free world of Division III. National championships, women’s sports, and even entire athletic departments would fold. College sports as you know them would cease to exist.

These implications and others compiled by NCAA lawyers in defense of the system are dubious, irrelevant, or flat-out wrong, as Patrick Hruby laid out in detail at Sports on Earth in June. It has led many NCAA critics like Hruby and myself to wonder if Emmert can possibly believe his own rhetoric.

Emmert’s full testimony can be read here. Whether under direct examination by the NCAA’s lawyer or under cross examination by O’Bannon’s attorney, Emmert almost exclusively deals in absolutes and, yes, fundamentals. He makes claims unsupported by evidence and claims which cannot even be tested. His testimony, and indeed much of his public speaking, cannot be described as argument in support of the NCAA’s claims. Rather, Emmert is speaking in ideology. In The American Business Creed, a 1956 analysis of business ideology through symbols, advertisements, and other public statements of businessmen. Authors Francis X. Sutton et al explain the character of ideology as such:

Ideology exaggerates and oversimplifies, it is dogmatically certain where social science is uncertain, [and] it only tells parts of many stories.

Ideology exaggerates and oversimplifies:

Ideology is dogmatically certain where social science (or other research) is uncertain:

Ideology only tells parts of many stories:

There is at least partial truth to Emmert’s statements. College sports with paid athletes would be hardly distinguishable from a minor league. A move to a pay-for-play model could result in many schools dropping out of current national championship seasons or tournaments. And athletics have opened up educational opportunities at prestigious institutions for many who otherwise would not have the chance. These are the cornerstones of the NCAA mission, and these are what the organization can point to as their contribution to society at large, and college sports specifically.

But there is no attempt made within the NCAA’s ideology — what the NCAA is willing to express in public, whether in editorials, press conferences, or on the witness stand — to evaluate the truth or completeness of these statements. There is no consideration of the possibility of a functional, successful business model with paid college athletes. There is no acknowledgement of the success of, for instance, minor league baseball, which drew over 40 million fans in 2013, or that FBS football is effectively a farm system for the NFL. There is no analysis of the fact that national championship competitions continue to exist without resistance from the schools, despite the obvious and known influence of boosters on players. And there is no acknowledgement that many athletes are shuffled through tutor systems and phantom classes to the point where their college experience can hardly be called an education.

These contradictions are strains for anybody who participates in college sports, including NCAA executives, athletic directors, coaches, non-athletic faculty or staff, fans, and, of course, athletes themselves. Responses to these strains will vary based on the role. Some athletes quit, others give themselves fully to the system. Kain Colter and the College Athletes Players Association responded with an attempt to unionize athletes. The NCAA and executives like Emmert respond with ideology. From Sutton et al.:

First, the elaboration of ideology is not the individual’s only response to strain; many non-ideological responses—from nail chewing to alcoholism—are possible. Second, the general mode of relation between strain and ideology is that of symbolization: the ideology is a symbolic outlet for the emotional energy which the strain creates.

The NCAA’s symbols are plenty. Foremost is the student-athlete, the symbol of the idealized amateur, a student first who also puts effort into his or her sport for the love of the game. The coach serves as a maker of men. The tailgate and other campus traditions serve as symbols of the community values around the games.

The strains the NCAA faces now have forced focus onto negative symbols. The professional athlete, in particular, represents the corruption and lost innocence of a pay-for-play system in opposition to the current honorable state of college athletics.

The actual truth of these statements is irrelevant to those inside the NCAA. There is no question of truth. Rather, they are the fundamentals by which the organization operates. Without these fundamental “truths,” the NCAA has no purpose.

Last Thursday, as America prepared for a much-needed long weekend, the NCAA filed a brief on Northwestern’s appeal of the National Labor Review Board’s ruling that the university’s football players were school employees. Section E of the brief is devoted to amateurism, and it is dripping with ideology:

Our educational leaders have arrived at the considered decision that student-athletes must remain amateurs to ensure that athletics remains an activity for their educational development, rather than a professional activity that would present distractions from the student’s overall development. Maintaining this model is crucial to preserving an environment where participation in sports is properly integrated into the total educational program and plays an appropriate role in relation to the students’ academic development. The NCAA, along with the academic leaders of its member institutions believe that abandoning the amateur college sports model would be contrary to the developmental and educational purposes of having students participate in college sports.

Here, words and phrases like “crucial,” “must remain,” and “would be contrary to” replace Emmert’s favorite “fundamental.” But the effect is the same. Even in its legal briefs, the NCAA operates in a world where these are not statements that can be argued against, but innate fundamental truths of the system.