Lessons from the History of College Football
Beware the popular press
College football is said to have begun with a match between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. Essentially, it was a modified soccer game. At the time, each home team had its own set of rules. You went to Rutgers, you played by their code.
Princeton and Rutgers came together with Yale in 1873 to create a common rule code so that the game didn't inherently change depending on whose turf you played on. Harvard held out, for it had its own rules that it liked called the "Boston game."
In the Boston game, it was a cross between English soccer and rugby football that had some currency in a few Canadian universities. Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia hammered out a code of rules to play by in 1876. Yale would join their coterie in 1879.
Yale's Walter Camp, widely considered the "father of American football," was instrumental in several of these early meetings. One of his first suggestions was the 11-man team, downsizing from a 15-on-15 game. Reportedly, the first Princeton-Rutgers tilt had perhaps 20 or more per side.
Camp's most notable contributions in the early days of the sport were the line of scrimmage and the snap.
Amendment #1 from the 1880 rules convention - Intercollegiate Football Association (consisting of representatives from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia)
A scrimmage takes place when the holder of the ball, being, in the field of play, puts it down on the ground in front of him and puts it in play with his foot. The man who first receives the ball from the snap-back shall be called the quarter-back, and shall not then rush forward with the ball under penalty of foul.
Needless to say, the RPO package was not part of the deal. Forward passing wasn't even legalized until 1906 and rarely utilized until the Notre Dame combo of Gus Dorais to Knute Rockne knocked off heavily-favored Army in 1913 during the first season where the rules for throwing the pigskin were moderately liberalized. The Cadets only loss that season was to the undefeated Irish.
The previous season, Army had a halfback, who the New York Times dubbed the "Kansas Cyclone" and called him "one of the most promising backs in Eastern football." In a late season game versus Tufts, a twisted knee led to what would prove to be a career-ending injury in the football career of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Amendment #1 from the 1882 convention (same teams)
If on three consecutive fairs and downs a team shall not have advanced the ball five yards or lost ten, they must give up the ball to the other side at the spot where the fourth down was made. Consecutive means without leaving the hands of the side holding it.
What's the point of this little history lesson?
Camp declared in 1913, "Athletics are the safety-valve that direct the superabundant vitality of many a man into an honest outlet."
Sigmund Freud acolyte and first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States, A.A. Brill, wrote in 1929, "sports are a great and necessary catharsis, indispensable to civilized man—a salutary purgation of the combative instincts which, if damned [sic] up within him, would break out in disastrous ways."
These narratives about sport have stayed with us in some shape for a century or more. The problem is that it's junk. Pure bloviating.
I'll be the first to say that I love the game of football, but it is simply not true that the game serves as a safety-valve or that it is a purgation of the combative instincts in any way. Perhaps it is the opposite?
Mark Twain, in the "Notice" for 1884's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, might as well been talking about football.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
Sport is played for many reasons, but it is not a "catharsis" or the notion that Progressive Era moralizers had about the game being a "substitute for war." More remarkable is that their ideological descendants, today's nutjobs on the cultural Left want to eliminate any violence emanating from the game.
In a few years, we will be seeing Flag Football in the Olympics. Flags may replace tackling at the higher levels of football soon enough.
So, the point is that the game changes. Sometimes for the good and usually for the bad.
We cannot have nice things.
Michael Oriard, former Kansas City Chiefs player and longtime professor of English at Oregon State University, wrote in 1993's Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle:
Football neither reinforces nor undermines existing power arrangements; it tells stories that serve individual needs from wherever they arise. In the 1990s as in the 1890s, football generates multiple narratives about work, gender, race, success, many of our most hopeful and most disturbing fantasies. Print and electronic media powerfully influence our ideas about these matters, yet without resolving our conflicting beliefs into a single master narrative.
As the integrity and ability of the popular press has declined, so has the need for its narrative. Pro and college sports are more popular than ever it seems, but the impact of the stories largely fall flat.
It's too bad. It goes hand-in-glove with the devolution of the American culture.
The mission of my podcast (and the emails and all the rest of it) is to provide "serious content amidst an unserious culture." We're getting toward the end of anything resembling serious.
My perspective comes from the world of sports—almost all my energy as a youngster was spent on something to do with athletics.
After diving back into the origins of football, and with the World Series—an event I looked forward to every fall and long-considered the pinnacle of sporting life in the U.S.—also a "meh" event this year, it has led me to conclude that it is not the sports themselves that are bad. It is not necessarily "the leagues," that are corrupted, though I have expressed my dismay at these structures for the better part of three years or more.
It is the popular press—the corporate media—which is to blame.
The narrative is created by the corporate media, and it does not benefit the American public. The same thing goes with political coverage and the reporting on foreign wars.
JD Breen's (@realjdbreen on 𝕏-Twitter) tweet from October 30th sums it up nicely: "Inter-league play and the expanded playoffs have ruined the World Series. These afterthought teams playing each other feel like a Tuesday night in June."
The popular press figured "we" needed the innovations of interleague and expanded playoffs and several hokey rule changes that came about this season to make the game "better" or something like that. The game was fine. It is fine.
Their narrative about the game is shameful. Unserious.
The corporate media are now rights-holders to the same sports they "report" upon. To say there is a conflict of interest is an understatement.
I don't know if things can or will be changed, but I will continue to discuss ways to move forward on The Brian D. O'Leary Show and our regular newsletter.
In the words of Santiago in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea:
“But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
Whether our sports and our culture are destroyed, they won't be defeated.
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As always,
Brian