The Intercollegiate Football Spectacle

After a rocky start that involved heated conflicts over injuries, deaths, eligibility, recruitment, and payments for players, college football expanded enormously in the early twentieth century, becoming an institution in communities across the nation. The growing spectacle of college games could draw upward of 100,000 fans a week to newly built, often palatial stadiums. In a society that celebrated few holidays, college football became a time of pageantry and revelry that served, in a vital sense, as the U.S. equivalent of Europe’s great carnivals and festivals. Charismatic coaches such as Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne became household names, and successful teams became sources not only of excitement but also of individual and community identity. The great popularity of college teams heightened the dilemmas that big-time sports posed for university officials, who sought to maintain an academic tenor in a game that was increasingly a major commercial enterprise. But well-documented reports of misplaced priorities and under-the-table payments did little to dent the sport’s popularity.