ABSTRACT
The earliest competitive collegiate sports were extracurricular and organized by the students themselves. There was no pretense that these games had anything to do with the college’s mission. In the decades between the first intercollegiate competition—the 1852 Harvard-Yale regatta, which served to publicize a railroad—and the early twentieth century, athletics were increasingly subject to the control of the universities and often disapproving faculties. The explosion of interest in intercollegiate sport, particularly football, gave rise to spectacles receiving lavish coverage in newspapers hungry for enticing copy. College football served as a rallying point for alumni and, especially in the South, regional identity. The sport’s brutality, however—upwards of a dozen players died of game-related injuries in 1905—and the use of “ringers” on college teams led to calls for its banning. These were doused by a series of reforms whose most influential promoter was President Theodore Roosevelt. The threat of abolition led to the founding of the NCAA. This chapter also treats competing conceptions of amateurism and the birth of the “conferences” into which schools have been organized; and it profiles key figures including Yale football coach and rule-writer Walter Camp; Harvard president and football critic Charles W. Eliot; and Howard Savage, author of the Carnegie Foundation’s seminal 1929 report “American College Athletics,” which is examined in depth.
