The History of American College Football

Institutional Policy, Culture, and Reform

Christian Anderson, Amber Fallucca, Christian K. Anderson, Amber C. Fallucca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000383751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

This volume provides unique insight into how American colleges and universities have been significantly impacted and shaped by college football, and considers how U.S. sports culture more generally has intersected with broader institutional and educational issues.

By documenting events from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including protests, legal battles, and policy reforms which were centred around college sports, this distinctive volume illustrates how football has catalyzed broader controversies and progress relating to race and diversity, commercialization, corruption, and reform in higher education. Relying foremost on primary archival material, chapters illustrate the continued cultural, social, and economic themes and impacts of college athletics on U.S. higher education and campus life today.

This text will benefit researchers, graduate students, and academics in the fields of higher education, as well as the history of education and sport more broadly. Those interested in the sociology of education and the politics of sport will also enjoy this volume.

1 Myths and Stories from College Football’s First One Hundred Years

Christian K. Anderson

American college football commemorated its 100th anniversary in 1969. Rutgers and Princeton played a “centennial game” one hundred years after their first game, generally considered the first intercollegiate football game. Events and banquets were held, including one that featured the president of the United States as a speaker. College teams wore a “100” decal on their helmets to commemorate the year. And two teams ended the season undefeated but, of course, only one would be declared national champion. This volume examines key stories from college football’s first one hundred years and how these developments affected its future trajectory.

The 1969 season was used to celebrate the game and to propel it forward. Chevrolet capitalized on this centennial spirit to advertise its 1969 sports models. It was “The year of Super Sports” their ads declared, referring to both the cars and the game of football, in advertising campaigns, including a brochure to be handed out to prospective customers at dealerships. They commissioned Arnold Friberg in 1968 to paint four images about the history of American college football: “The First Game” depicting the 1869 match between Rutgers and Princeton (officially known as the College of New Jersey at the time); “Knute Rockne—The Coach,” showing the famed Notre Dame coach prepping his team in the locker room; “Howell to Hutson—The Passing Game,” illustrating the importance of the introduction of the forward pass; and “O.J. Runs for Daylight,” showing the University of Southern California running back rushing for a touchdown against rival UCLA in 1967.¹ The pages of the booklet emphasized the size, power, and strength of the cars: a “300 hp Turbo-Fire V8” in the Camaro or that the driver could get up to “435-hp” in the ’69 Corvette. Like the uniquely American phenomenon of college football, they defined these cars as “the only genuine sports car built in America,” described as “beefed up” and full of “vim and vigor.” The final page includes the 1968 television schedule for games broadcast on ABC. The brochure also included a form for customers to order a set of prints of the four paintings, a Centennial Medallion or Collector’s Coin (based on Friberg’s “The First Game”), or a College Band Stereo LP featuring 20 famous college songs. The ads imply the cooperation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as a partner in promoting the centennial of football.

The company’s merchandising department also produced a 7” LP album, titled “Chevrolet Salutes the 100th Anniversary of College Football,” featuring four tracks telling the story behind the four paintings.² The record sleeve contains a booklet with the four paintings and an abbreviated version of the four stories given in the larger advertising brochure. Chris Schenkel, a sports broadcaster for ABC, narrates the story behind each painting (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 “The First Game” by Arnold Friberg (1968) is featured on the cover of a record produced by the Chevrolet Sports Department. (Permission from the General Motors Heritage Museum.) © Chevrolet

These paintings celebrate and promote the game. In the history given in the booklet the darker sides of college football history—injuries, deaths, scandals, and exploitation of players—are either only mentioned in passing (and then only to set up the NCAA as the savior of the game) or ignored altogether. These images and the sounds on the record were meant to both take advantage of the intense level of interest in college football and to further imprint the mythology of the game in the minds of fans.

While Chevrolet was using football to sell cars, players, students, and fans were using it to highlight social problems such as racism and the war in Vietnam. During the 1969 season 14 Black players at the University of Wyoming were summarily dismissed from their team for protesting racism. Students at the University of Arkansas used the biggest game of the year, coined “The Game of the Century,” to protest against the Vietnam war with none other than the sitting president of the United States in the stands.

The purpose of this new addition to the Perspectives series is to illuminate significant aspects of the history of college football by analyzing the institutions and culture of college football. We understand institutions to mean not just colleges and universities but athletic conferences, news corporations, and of course the NCAA. Furthermore, the essays collected here illustrate the impact of football culture and how it affects the broader American culture. Each chapter shines new light on stories that might already be partly familiar, giving new interpretation to these stories. Many of these stories will be new to some readers. We see attempts at reform from within these institutions and by those who are part of football’s culture.

Key questions to consider while reading this volume include: Who controls college football? What are the roles of students, players, alumni, coaches, faculty, presidents, and institutions in football’s history? Why do we want and need to understand the history of college football? And what is its significance to the study of higher education and to the history of colleges and universities?

November 6, 1869: The Birth of Intercollegiate Football?

Arnold Friberg’s portrayal of the game between Rutgers and Princeton on November 6, 1869 in “The First Game” depicts rugged, hypermasculine men battling each other for a win. That Chevrolet would commission him for this and the other three paintings is understandable if what they wanted was a heroic telling of the origins and history of the game of football. Friberg had become famous for paintings Charleston Heston as Moses and other scenes for Cecil B. DeMille’s epic 1956 movie The Ten Commandments.³

On the record produced by Chevrolet Chris Schenkel gives an imagined play-by-play of this game, probably based in part on the historical accounts and in part on how he imagined the game might have unfolded. (He gets the date of both the first game and the rematch wrong.) The booklet builds on the story that has been created around this game: that it developed from earlier roots of Colonial boys kicking around an inflated pig bladder, having adapted an English game of association football and rugby, which they fashioned after a game borrowed from the conquering Romans who had borrowed it from Greek game of harpaston. The recording promotes the mythos that this game originated in antiquity and was destined to be the start of what we now know as college football.

The elevation of this “first” game takes place in other ways. One of the opening pages of Sports Illustrated’s hefty The College Football Book (2008) features a full-page color photograph of dirt and rocks. This soil sits in an opened box, wrapped in what appears to be aluminum foil, presumably for its preservation. The caption reads: “HALLOWED GROUND from the field on which Rutgers beat Princeton in 1869 now resides in the Hall of Fame, an elemental link to the modern game.”⁴ At the site of that first game stands a plaque marking it as “The Birthplace of College Football.” It is now a parking lot.⁵

The existence and promotion of a specific date of a game should not, of course, be mistaken for the actual origins of the game. As early historian of college football, Park Davis explained, “Football history, like all other history, must suffer from the uncertainty which invariably cloaks an original occurrence.”⁶ And, of course, football’s eventual destiny was not guaranteed. That first year saw two games, 1870 had three games, and in 1871 there were no games. The following year five teams each played between one and five games and it was nearly a decade (1878) before any team played six games (Princeton, 6–0), but still most teams played between one and four matches. In the following year, football’s tenth anniversary (if it would have been recognized as such at the time), 16 teams played between one and five games each. Gallaudet introduced football in 1883 and won both of its games that year as Richard Kimball further explains in the next chapter. At the two-decade mark, the first regional conferences were created, which would become crucial institutions for football as we know it today, as Eric Moyen explains in Chapter 5. That same year the first All-American team was named.

Historians of higher education allow for some wiggle room concerning the start date of college football. Philo Hutcheson declares plainly that football “likely began” (emphasis added) in 1869, explaining that the game “bore little resemblance to the contemporary version.”⁷ Roger Geiger lends some support to the idea that the game’s origins date later than 1869: “A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Contributors
• Editors’ Preface
• Chapter 1: Myths and Stories from College Football’s First One Hundred Years
• Chapter 2: “As Good as the Best”: Gallaudet Football and the Battle Against Normalization at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 3: Football Culture at New South Universities: Lost Cause and Old South Memory, Modernity, and Martial Manhood
• Chapter 4: “The Great Dartmouth Team is No Longer”: The 1925 Dartmouth Big Green, “The Present Evil,” and the Transformation of College Football
• Chapter 5: Redefining Reform: Presidents, Football, and Athletic Policy in the Southeastern Conference, 1929–1936
• Chapter 6: Saints Embrace Savagery: BYU Football and the Making of Modern Mormonism
• Chapter 7: Football, Athletic Protest, and Reform at Cal State Campuses in the 1960s
• Chapter 8: Mugs, Jugs, Bells, and Bowls: Traveling Football Trophies as Campus Traditions and Windows into Institutional Culture at Division III Institutions
• Chapter 9: Last Stand for a Less Commercialized Game: Contesting Football’s Place in Higher Education in NCAA v. Board of Regents, 1984
• Chapter 10: Conclusion: Understanding Current Controversies in College Football through Its Colorful Past
• Index