The quarterback sends his wide receiver deep. The crowd gasps as he
launches the ball. And when he hits his man, the team's fans roar
with approval--especially those with the deep pockets. Make no
mistake; college football is big business, played with one eye on
the score, the other on the bottom line. But was this always the
case?
Brian M. Ingrassia here offers the most incisive account to date
of the origins of college football, tracing the sport's evolution
from a gentlemen's pastime to a multi-million dollar enterprise
that made athletics a permanent fixture on our nation's campuses
and cemented college football's place in American culture. He takes
readers back to the late 1800s to tell how schools embraced the
sport as a way to get the public interested in higher learning-and
then how football's immediate popularity overwhelmed campuses and
helped create the beast we know today.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Ingrassia proves that the
academy did not initially resist the inclusion of athletics;
rather, progressive reformers and professors embraced football as a
way to make the ivory tower less elitist. With its emphasis on
disciplined teamwork and spectatorship, football was seen as a
"middlebrow" way to make the university more accessible to the
general public. What it really did was make athletics a permanent
fixture on campus with its own set of professional experts,
bureaucracies, and ostentatious cathedrals.
Ingrassia examines the early football programs at universities
like Michigan, Stanford, Ohio State, and others, then puts those
histories in the context of Progressive Era culture, including
insights from coaches like Georgia Tech's John Heisman and Notre
Dame's Knute Rockne. He describes how reforms emerged out of
incidents such as Teddy Roosevelt's son being injured on the field
and a section of grandstands collapsing at the University of
Chicago. He also touches on some of the problems facing current day
college football and shows us that we haven't come far from those
initial arguments more than a century ago.
"The Rise of Gridiron University" shows us where and how it all
began, highlighting college football's essential role in shaping
the modern university-and by extension American intellectual
culture. It should have wide appeal among students of American
studies and sports history, as well as fans of college football
curious to learn how their game became a cultural force in a matter
of a few decades.
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