by: S.M. Oliva
In 1874, students from Harvard University and Canada’s McGill University played a two-game football series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first game was played under Harvard’s Association Football rules, what we know today as soccer. The second game was played by McGill’s rules, a variant of rugby. The McGill rules proved so popular with the Harvard players they adopted and taught them to other eastern schools. The next year, Harvard played Tufts University in what was likely the first game of “American football.”
By 1876, students from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia had formed the Intercollegiate Football Association to develop and maintain common playing rules. Among the IFA’s first leaders was Walter Camp, a Yale student-player credited with developing many of the familiar rules of American football, including the set play from scrimmage, the down-and-distance system, and limiting each team to 11 players on the field. Camp also embodied the notion of “amateurism”; although he remained active in coaching and promoting football throughout his life, he became a businessman and eschewed playing or coaching football for money.
Camp and his allies fervently believed that college football should remain under student and alumni control. He resisted early efforts by the Yale administration and faculty to regulate – or abolish – football. Most university presidents, in fact, hated the game. One notable exception was William Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago. Harper saw football as an excellent means of promoting his newly formed school, and he hired the first paid coach in football history, Yale alumnus Amos Alonzo Stagg. Chicago’s early success under Stagg spurred the creation of the first athletic conference in 1895, the Western Conference, which survives today as the Big Ten.
Although football quickly grew in popularity, the violence of the still-developing game caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905 – a year that reported 18 football-related deaths – Roosevelt convened a summit with Camp and Ivy League representatives to discuss possible changes to the sport. Later that year, 60 colleges met in New York to form an alternative to the student-led IFA – a group known today as the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Amateurism and Federalization
The IFA quickly dissolved itself into the NCAA, giving it a monopoly on football regulation. In its first few decades, the NCAA merely continued the IFA’s role as a playing rules committee. But now that the university presidents, not the players and alumni, were in charge, the NCAA slowly morphed into a grander bureaucratic entity based on the concept of preserving “amateurism” at all costs.
The first NCAA Constitution banned “proselytizing” – the recruiting of, or offering financial incentives for, any student to enroll at a school based on athletic ability. The NCAA viewed any compensation related to a player’s athletic ability unacceptable. This yielded over time to reality; eventually, the NCAA allowed schools to offer athletic scholarships, but even today the strict ban on outside income related to athletic ability remains.
Amateurism itself is a class-based concept. In Walter Camp’s day, an amateur was merely a generalist who didn’t specialize in a particular sport or hobby.
Reposted from LewRockwell.com