Book Pick: The Opening Kickoff, by Dave Revsine

Subtitled 'The tumultuous birth of a football nation', The Opening Kickoff chronicles the 25 year period from 1890 to 1915, when college football evolved from an almost collegial club sport to the emerging football nation that endlessly obsesses us a hundred years later. In 1890, it was college ball which began to captivate the nation. The football universe was located in the east at Ivy League Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Rutge...rs.

The 1890 game was a fierce, brutal spectacle of frequent kicking, and pile driving runs using formations such as the flying wedge that racked up a dozen or so deaths and countless crippling injuries yearly. Once football started generating fan and alumni revenues, colleges poured resources into the sport and threw educational values aside. Many of the good players were ghost students or simply pay-to-play ringers. As the deaths and the fakery issues mounted, schools debated both cancelling football programs or demanding wholesale reformation. In 1905, eighteen deaths prompted President Roosevelt to drag Ivy League school presidents to the White House for a session with the Bully Pulpit, which resulted in some safety and educational reforms.
  
The Midwest educational powerhouses Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Chicago scrambled to cash in on the largess being reaped by their Ivy League role models. Interestingly, University of Chicago, which abolished football in 1939, was arguably the most flagrant violator of the educational mission. Founder John D. Rockefeller lusted to compete with the revered Eastern schools in football as well as education, so he arranged for legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg to be hired even before the U of C opened; and the Maroons played their first game just a week later. Stagg was relentless in cashing in financially; scheduling 44 of his first 47 games at home to gobble up gate receipts. Wisconsin, among other schools refused to play against Chicago for a time as a result.

By 1915, the ball was reduced in size to facilitate the forward pass, flying wedge type running plays were banned and safer equipment was mandated. The game essentially adopted the form still present today. But a hundred years later we still see relentless recruiting and payment scandals, players who major in basket weaving, and programs that turn a blind eye to scandalous behavior such as occurred at Penn State, to keep the billion dollar college football gravy train on track.