“On the East Coast, football is a cultural experience,” the Alcorn State coaching legend Marino Casem once said. “In the Midwest, it’s a form of cannibalism. On the West Coast, it’s a tourist attraction. And in the South, football is a religion, and Saturday is the holy day.”
Just how and why college athletics—not only football but also basketball, baseball, and other intercollegiate sports—evolved from casual undergraduate recreation into that cultural experience, cannibalistic mayhem, tourist attraction, and secular religion is what Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin, scholars at Mississippi State University and the University of Kentucky, respectively, chronicle in College Sports: A History. It’s a sweeping, stout, illuminating read for this time of year, as ancient-seeming rivalries are clashing and timeworn ceremonies—rubbing Howard’s Rock, rolling Toomer’s Corner, chanting “Hotty Toddy”—are still sanctifying Saturday afternoons in ways we feel they must’ve always done.
They haven’t, of course. Back in 1873, when University of Michigan students challenged Cornell University to a game of football, Cornell’s president telegraphed a starchy harrumph: “I will not permit a group of thirty men to travel four hundred miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.” Contrast that, as Moyen and Thelin do, to a University of Oklahoma president who almost eighty years later told his state legislature that his goal was “to build a university of which our football team can be proud.” Moyen and Thelin provide the play-by-play for how we got from there to there—and by extension to here, meaning our current chaos of transfer-portal pinballing and conference realignment and donor collectives squeezing money into every crack.
College sports is “a larger-than-life story,” they write, “in which past and present are continually connected, renewed, and revisited.” That the past is never past is on constant display. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt gathered college coaches to address the injuries plaguing football; more than a century later, another U.S. president, Barack Obama, was pleading with the NCAA to improve safety protocols. Also in 1905, McClure’s Magazine revealed that Yale star tackle James Hogan had struck a deal to promote American Tobacco Company cigarettes, profiting from his name and likeness. It took the NCAA until 2021 to finally resolve this thorny dilemma when it freed student athletes to monetize their careers with its NIL (name, image, likeness) rules. In 1929, a Carnegie Foundation report accused universities and boosters of subsidizing or flat out paying athletes, thereby corroding the putative amateurism of intercollegiate sports. On that count, the contemporary parallels are too myriad to list. As Mark Twain supposedly said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Moyen and Thelin give women’s sports just and equitable treatment, even though university administrators often didn’t. They’re also incisive on the subject of race. In 1955, they write, Georgia’s governor banned Georgia Tech from playing the University of Pittsburgh in the Sugar Bowl because Pitt’s team included a Black player. In response, more than two thousand students marched through Atlanta to the governor’s mansion, where they burned him in effigy, “defaced a Confederate monument, and demanded that the Yellow Jackets play the game.” The protest marked “the first time in the recent history of the South,” a Black paper noted, “that any sizable segment of white people have uttered a defiance of lily-white policies.” Almost fifteen years later, when a University of Southern California team featuring Black star running back Sam Cunningham beat Bear Bryant’s Alabama, Crimson Tide fans quickly dropped their resistance to integration. (One of Bryant’s assistants later said, “Sam Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King did in twenty years.”) Self-interest rather than social justice spurred the action, the authors note, but an integrated football roster resulted. Progress, like football, can be a game of inches.
“Celebration and controversy have followed intercollegiate athletics from its inception to the present day,” Moyen and Thelin write. Like the rest of us, trying to make sense of the current bedlam in college sports, Moyen and Thelin can only speculate. “It is a fool’s errand,” they note, “for historians to masquerade as futurists.” But, as historians, they’re able to take the long view: “All is not well,” they write, “but all is not lost.”
Plus: New Florida-Set Fiction with Punch
John Brandon’s dark but heartfelt new novel, Penalties of June (McSweeney’s), romps through the “weedy, sun-whipped inland Florida” of the late 1990s. Main character Pratt, just released from a Tampa prison, navigates a sweltering world of crime bosses, drugs, and his own gnawing life questions. Wry observations of Florida’s grit and its salty characters zip the reader along, promising that even earnest moments never veer into gooey sentimentality. For example: Pratt remembers his father casting a line along a bridge and musing, “Some people say the beauty of fishing is in the contemplative quiet. The timelessness of a classic pursuit. The connection with the eternal life-giving waters that enable civilization. Me, I kinda like pulling out a shitload of whoppers till my arms get sore.” —CJ Lotz Diego
Garden & Gun has an affiliate partnership with bookshop.org and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a book.
