College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy

By John Sayle Watterson

Book Overview

The rules of the game have changed in the past hundred years, but human nature has not.

"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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080187114X
• ISBN13: 9780801871146
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Bough this for my dad

I purchased this for my dad because he is an absolute college football fanatic. He seems to really love the book. He started reading it immediately after he opened. Seems like a real page turner.

Bravo! (Pity about the editing though)

This enlightening book covers the history of college football from an interesting and neglected point of view. That is to say, it contains none of the usual lionisation of players and coaches, and no re-working of big games we're all familiar with. Rather, Watterson examines (and questions) the place of the game in American society and its role on campus. The book establishes quite clearly that the over-emphasis placed on gridiron is hardly a recent phenomenon or even (as I foolishly suspected) down to the evils of television - that schools have been fielding ineligible players, fiddling grades, and operating slush funds from the days of Walter Camp. Watterson details the various movements which have attempted to reform the game and how it is run, and explains lucidly why virtually all of them failed. A seemingly insatiable desire for victory and glory to the alma mater has resulted in a gradual yet steady erosion of the original purpose of sport on campus, to the point where today a college President can express a desire to "build a university the football team can be proud of" without a trace of irony. 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.

Perfect.. but not for the beginners

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

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.

College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy

Ever since publication of the landmark work on college football's history by Allison Danzig in 1956 ("The History of American Football"), sport historians have been patiently waiting for another well-written work about college football's storied past which would bring the tale up to modern times. After any number of unsuccessful attempts by various authors, at long last we have that book with the release of John Watterson's "College Football" by John Hopkins Press; a work that is recommended by this reviewer.Watterson, a professor at James Madison University, has previously delivered talks and written a considerable number of articles on the early history of college football, and to his book "College Football" he brings the same attention to research and an easy-to-read style of writing that has characterized his earlier work.Rather than droning on endlessly about one season after another in college football's past that dates to 1869, Watterson has instead tackled football's history by using each chapter to examine the predominate and notable events through the years that served to gradually transform the game into what we see today. The result is a history of college football that provides an essential foundation for the novice historian, while still providing plenty of new and interesting material for the more experienced reader.The author takes up his story with the origins of big-time football in the 19th century, including the major controversies of the 1890s that evolved from the game's increasing violence and serious injuries. After examining the crisis of 1905-1906 when college football faced the threat of being outlawed, Watterson moves on to review the more significant battles over the rules in 1910 that directly provided the origins of modern football. The struggles of 1910 ultimately overcame Walter Camp's continued opposition to forward passing and eliminated the mass plays that had evolved since 1906, a topic that is one of the most significant in the sport's history yet is frequently ignored in most attempts at football history.Watterson continues the story of college football with the over-emphasis and abuses of the 1920s; then moves on through the hard times of the Depression, the war years, and the challenges of de-emphasis in the 1950s. A considerable amount of this material is the result of the author's tireless research, and again touches on significant material seldom seen in other football histories.After examining the many areas that characterized the game's entry into the big-money days made possible by television, along with the NCAA's attempts at controlling the frequent recruiting scandals; the author sconcludes with chapters on African-American plays at predominantly white schools, and the revolt of the major universities against the NCAA that led to the formation of the College Football Association (CFA)."College Football" by John Watterson is an essential work for anyone interested in the history of the interco