- Also called:
- gridiron football
- Key People:
- Troy Polamalu
- Jalen Hurts
- Jim Langer
- Trevor Lawrence
- Nick Bosa
- Related Topics:
- BCS
- College Football Playoff
- Rose Bowl
- Super Bowl
- Hula Bowl
- On the Web:
- Purdue e-Pubs - Popular Culture and the Rituals of American Football (Nov. 18, 2024)
Together with the racial integration of the game at all levels, the coming of television in the 1950s marked a new era in the development of American football. The 1950s were a boom time for professional football but a bad time for the colleges, yet intercollegiate football, too, emerged from the decade not only intact but on the verge of unprecedented prosperity.
Immediately following World War II, college football experienced a surge in popularity, but attendance declined by the end of the decade and recovered very slowly over the 1950s. Many colleges dropped the game as too expensive, including one-time powers such as Fordham and St. Mary’s. The informally organized Ivy League became a formal organization in 1954, choosing to play a “deemphasized” brand of football. The National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball, created in 1940 by small colleges concerned about the state of amateurism in that sport, became the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) in 1952 and first sponsored a national championship in football in 1956.
The colleges and universities that clung to the big-time game faced a double crisis: the impact of television on gate receipts and the final throes of the ongoing controversy over professionalism. The NCAA named its first executive director, Walter Byers, in 1951 (he continued in that role until 1987) and took on regulatory and enforcement powers for the first time. Regarding television not as the tremendous source of revenue it eventually became but as the most serious threat to gate receipts, the NCAA in 1951 assumed control of broadcasting rights and established severe restrictions on the number of times any team could appear on TV. Under NCAA control, while attendance grew from 20 million in 1961 to 35.8 million in 1981, TV revenues increased from $3 million to $31 million, then doubled in 1982 when the NCAA signed its final contract with the networks.
Divvying up these huge revenues nearly tore the NCAA apart—small schools sought a portion for themselves, while the major football powers resented sharing the income that they generated. The big schools also chafed as NCAA decision making was dominated by the more numerous smaller schools. University and college divisions were created within the NCAA in 1968, with 223 schools in the former and 386 in the latter; then, at a special meeting in 1973, institutions were assigned to Divisions I, II, or III, based essentially on the size and ambitions of the football program. Subsequent conventions fought over the allocation of TV revenues among the divisions, and in 1977 the major football conferences (excluding only the Pacific-8 and the Big Ten), along with the major independents such as Notre Dame, formed the College Football Association (CFA) to challenge the NCAA’s power. Faced with the threat of the CFA, the NCAA at its 1978 convention split Division I into Division I-A (the big-time football schools) and I-AA. (In 2006 the two divisions were renamed the Football Bowl Subdivision [FBS] and the Football Championship Subdivision [FCS], respectively.)
Still unsatisfied by the division of TV revenues under the new arrangement, the CFA attempted to negotiate its own TV contract in 1981. When the NCAA threatened sanctions, the Universities of Georgia and Oklahoma sued the organization for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act; the University of Texas sued separately. By 1984 the plaintiffs had prevailed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the NCAA no longer controlled TV contracts. The CFA itself was undermined in 1990 when Notre Dame broke ranks to sign its own contract with NBC, after which individual conferences began negotiating separate arrangements with the networks.
As a consequence of these varied actions, by the 1990s television revenues were going almost entirely to the big football schools, and major conference realignments—Penn State joining the Big Ten in 1990, the Southeastern Conference expanding to 12 teams in 1992, the Big 8 becoming the Big 12 in 1996 by absorbing four Texas schools from the disbanded Southwest Conference—resulted in large part from consideration of TV markets. Conferences continued to realign in the early 21st century, leading to the creation of “super conferences.”
Scholarships and the student athlete
College football’s other post-World War II crisis, regarding professionalism, reached a flash point in the late 1940s and early 1950s over athletic scholarships. Subsidizing athletes had been common since the 1920s but was not officially sanctioned and was entirely unregulated, controlled more often by alumni than by athletic departments. When the NCAA took on the issue after World War II, the Big Ten and the Pacific Coast Conference lobbied for need-based scholarships which awarded on-campus jobs. The Southeastern and Southwest conferences led the campaign for open athletic scholarships, declaring the job plan merely hypocritical (entailing phony jobs that required no work). The job plan bloc prevailed at the NCAA convention in January 1948, passing what became known as the Sanity Code, but battles at subsequent meetings led to its being rescinded at the 1951 convention, and the now-familiar athletic grant-in-aid was finally adopted in 1957. Also in 1951, most of Army’s football team was dismissed for cheating on exams; and it had been revealed earlier in the year that basketball players at several major universities had accepted money from gamblers to shave points. Out of this morass of scandal, the NCAA emerged stronger than ever, solidifying its standing as the regulatory, investigative, and punitive organization that ruled collegiate sports.
Once the issue of financial support was resolved and the sport fully integrated, the players’ status as student-athletes received sharper scrutiny. The NCAA first tied eligibility for athletic scholarships to academic success in high school in 1965 with its “1.6 rule,” then replaced it with a 2.0 grade-point-average standard in 1973. When the group passed Proposition 48 in 1983, followed by Proposition 16 in 1992, which together set minimal grade-point averages in a high school core curriculum and scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test for scholarships and freshman eligibility, it addressed one continuing controversy while provoking another—its disproportionate impact on African Americans.
The problems and convulsions of the larger society inevitably spilled over into college football. The racial turmoil of the late 1960s led to bitter confrontations between Black players and white coaches at several universities, and drug problems arose periodically, ranging from the abuse of amphetamines in the 1970s to the more dangerous abuse of anabolic steroids in the 1980s. The passage of Title IX forced athletic departments to divert financial resources into sports for women as well as men and made the football team, with its huge number of scholarships but also its unique capacity to generate income, a focal point for debates over gender equity. The commercialization set in motion by television led to institutional partnerships with soft drink and shoe companies, corporate sponsorship of bowl games, and million-dollar contracts for football coaches who were expected to contend for national championships. The competing demands of the sport, as an extracurricular activity for student-athletes and as mass entertainment, remained at the heart of American college football, and it led to growing debates over whether college athletes should paid. In 2021 the NCAA insisted new rules that allowed football players and other athletes to receive gifts from boosters. In addition, they could make endorsement deals and license their likeness or name.
Bowl games and the national championship
Even as bowl games proliferated in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, controversies shadowed them—for their commercialization of the amateur sport and prolonging of the season at the expense of academics—but resistance disappeared when the financial windfall from the televised contests became a major source of revenue for the top teams and conferences. A new controversy emerged in the 1970s, however, regarding the bowls’ inability to produce an unambiguous national champion. A perennial call for a national championship play-off, resisted by defenders of the traditional bowl games, eventually prompted the creation in 1992 of the Bowl Coalition—involving four major bowl games (Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar), five major conferences (excluding the Big Ten and Pac-10), and independent Notre Dame—with the goal of matching the two top-rated teams in a championship game that would rotate among the four bowls. In 1995 the Bowl Coalition was replaced by the Bowl Alliance (involving six conferences, Notre Dame, and only three bowls), but the nonparticipation of the Rose Bowl, Big Ten, and Pac-10 continued to leave the scheme badly flawed. In 1998 the Rose Bowl and its two participating conferences joined the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), which included all the major teams and conferences, with a supposed national championship game now rotating among the Rose, Orange, Sugar, and Fiesta bowls. The matching of the University of Nebraska with Miami in the 2002 Rose Bowl, however, after Nebraska had failed to win its own conference championship, made it clear that the BCS had not resolved the issue and guaranteed that a debate over a play-off along the lines of the NCAA basketball tournament (informally known as March Madness) would continue. That debate came to a head in the 2010s, and a new College Football Playoff system that matched the top four teams in the country as determined by a selection committee was instituted in 2014.