Living within easy earshot of the high-decibel frenzy on the practice fields at the University of Georgia, it’s easy to forget that not everyone devotes slavish, year-round attention to any and all developments affecting college football. Yet, the story behind and within the latest changes to the game should interest all Americans because it offers a window into the broader history of reform in this country, in which the actions of would-be do-gooders sometimes unloose a torrent of unintended consequences. Stiffer but also costlier Progressive Era regulatory requirements aimed at curbing monopoly abuses often made it harder for smaller competitors to survive. Prohibition’s “noble experiment” in policing public morality succeeded mainly in bolstering organized crime. In much the same fashion, after more than a century of efforts to make college football less about the money, cutting players in on the massive earnings generated by the sport has thus far made money more important than ever.
Ironically, the aforementioned changes are also the product of a much-needed effort to reform the workings of the organization created to reform the workings of college football. The origins of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, date back to a 1905 meeting between President Theodore Roosevelt and representatives from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, whose football programs were then every bit as formidable as their academic reputations. The meeting led to a consensus on two major objectives. One was reducing the danger of a sport that had claimed 18 players’ lives that year alone. The other was ridding college football of the “pay for play” deals struck with brutish working-class “muckers,” who had never seen the inside of a classroom at the schools where they were hired to add additional heft and meanness to the squad.
Roosevelt and his allies denounced pay-for-play schemes as a threat to the “amateur athletic code,” an ideal rooted in late-19th-century British Victorianism, which envisioned athletic competition as the sole province of high-born “gentlemen” who engaged in sports purely for pleasure. This had been the formative vision behind the first Olympic Games (held just a decade earlier in 1896), and with the gentleman-scholars of the Ivy League so dominant in American college football, some spillover was all but preordained. (Fittingly enough, it was Yale coach Walter Camp who famously declared in 1900 that “a gentleman never competes for money directly or indirectly” lest he sacrifice his “honor” in the bargain.)