College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy

"In March [1892] Stanford and California had played the first college football game on the Pacific Coast in San Francisco... The pregame activities included a noisy parade down streets bedecked with school colors. Tickets sold so fast that the Stanford student manager, future president Herbert Hoover, and his California counterpart, could not keep count of the gold and silver coins. When they finally totaled up the proceeds, they found that the revenues amounted to $30,000 -- a fair haul for a game that had to be temporarily postponed because no one had thought to bring a ball!" -- from College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, Chapter Three

In this comprehensive history of America's popular pastime, John Sayle Watterson shows how college football in more than one hundred years has evolved from a simple game played by college students into a lucrative, semiprofessional enterprise. With a historian's grasp of the context and a novelist's eye for the telling detail, Watterson presents a compelling portrait rich in anecdotes, colorful personalities, and troubling patterns.

He tells how the infamous Yale-Princeton "fiasco" of 1881, in which Yale forced a 0-0 tie in a championship game by retaining possession of the ball for the entire game, eventually led to the first-down rule that would begin to transform Americanized rugby into American football. He describes the kicks and punches, gouged eyes, broken collarbones, and flagrant rule violations that nearly led to the sport's demise (including such excesses as a Yale player who wore a uniform soaked in blood from a slaughterhouse). And he explains the reforms of 1910, which gave official approval to a radical new tactic traditionalists were sure would doom the game as they knew it -- the forward pass.

As college football grew in the booming economy of the 1920s, Watterson explains, the flow of cash added fuel to an already explosive mix. Coaches like Knute Rockne became celebrities in their own right, with highly paid speaking engagements and product endorsements. At the same time, the emergence of the first professional teams led to inevitable scandals involving recruitment and subsidies for student-athletes. Revelations of illicit aid to athletes in the 1930s led to failed attempts at reform by the fledgling NCAA in the postwar "Sanity Code," intended to control abuses by permitting limited subsidies to college players but which actually paved the way for the "free ride" many players receive today.

Watterson also explains how the growth of TV revenue led to college football programs' unprecedented prosperity, just as the rise of professional football seemed to relegate college teams to "minor league" status. He explores issues of gender and race, from the shocked reactions of spectators to the first female cheerleaders in the 1930s to their successful exploitation by Roone Arledge three decades later. He describes the role of African-American players, from the days when Southern schools demanded all-white teams (and Northern schools meekly complied); through the black armbands and protests of the 60s; to one of the game's few successful, if limited, reforms, as black athletes dominate the playing field while often being shortchanged in the classroom.

Today, Watterson observes, colleges' insatiable hunger for revenues has led to an abuse-filled game nearly indistinguishable from the professional model of the NFL. After examining the standard solutions for reform, he offers proposals of his own, including greater involvement by faculty, trustees, and college presidents. Ultimately, however, Watterson concludes that the history of college football is one in which the rules of the game have changed, but those of human nature have not.

The book's only real fault lies in some woeful editing, which results in a few stories being re-told, and several paragraphs being repeated almost word-for-word many pages later (not to mention some grammatical howlers which don't strike me as being the author's fault). I found myself able to to overlook this, though, and can unreservedly recommend it. It may not be one which the more avid Sooner, Fighting Irish, Crimson Tide, or Buckeye-backer will gravitate toward, but those who enjoy big-time football and yet abhor how tainted it has all become will find it difficult to put down.


Should be a mandatory read for all college faculty -   January 6, 2003
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This a dry read and takes some effort as it is essentially an academic tome that is concerned with the evolution of modern college football from a political, policy, and business standpoint. But it is quite thorough and hits the nail on the head. The final pages discuss how the game can be saved .... since reform is not an option. This is the weakest part of the book, but understandably so since it would take the wisdom of Solomon to fix this problem. I have always felt that a return to one platoon football makes a lot of sense regarding costs (less insurance, travel and equipment, scholarship dollars).

The editing in the book leaves something to be desired. There are a number of typos - and a few sentences that make contradictory statements. The author is not a well versed student of the game since there are several technical mistakes which indicate some deficiencies in research. Some of these are listed below as examples.

(1) Identifying Brian Bosworth as an Oklahoma lineman when he was a linebacker,
(2) Claiming All American status for 4 years (1982-1985)for a very average SMU running back,
(3) Confusing the major Western Athletic Conference (WAC) with the minor Rocky Mountain Conference,
(4) When describing the 1943 game between the College of the Pacific (COP) and USC attributing Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) membership to COP which was in fact an independent school during the 40's and never was a member of the PCC or its later version, the Pac 10.

That said I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in the history of college football.


Perfect.. but not for the beginners   February 2, 2001
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

A useful book for everyone who has a long-lasting interest and knowledge on the College Football, but it can be a little bit dazy and hard-to-understand for the beginners. College Football by Watterson is an analytical book which also solves the past-time football's problems according to the periods national crisis' and situations with huge acknowledgements. If you already have a good knowledge on College Football, then you will find a lot of interesting things in this book; if you have no or a little knowledge, then I will suggest you to read easier books to prepare yourself for this book. I really liked reading and learned a lot from this book though.


An Outstanding and Important Work   January 5, 2001
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

College Football is an outstanding and important work. It is a true history--not a greatest teams and greatest players-type of celebratory writing--and falls under the rubric of sport history. Sport history, which is a subcategory of social history, relates sports to broader themes in society, and John Sayle Watterson in this regard does a terrific job in relating the history of football to the issue of collegiate life as a whole, and even to society as a whole (particularly where the colleges had to fight the pro game for the public's entertainment dollar).

College Football is published by a university press (Johns Hopkins), but it is marketed as a trade book. Thus, the misleading subtitle "History-Spectacle-Controversy," as there is not much spectacle in this book. But there is plenty of controversy, relating to violence, subsidies, and cheating scandals throughout the sport's history and the mostly failed attempts by the college football establishment to reform the sport.

Watterson's work is actually a more narrow history of the governance of college football, rather a broad history of the sport (Johns Hopkins surely did not want to put the word "governance" in the title). As such, however, College Football is the best overview of the subject ever written, primarily because the author takes the story from the beginning up to the present day.

I have some minor carping: there is an excessive number of typos and errors in this book for a university press book.