Stagg's University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago

Sport and Society

by Robin Lester

When the University of Chicago opened in 1892, nine former college or seminary presidents were on its staff, as were recognized leaders of several academic disciplines, among them John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Albert Michelson. President William Rainey Harper's faculty also included Amos Alonzo Stagg, associate professor of physical culture and coach of the football team.
For this first case study of college football by a social historian, Robin Lester has brought life to the story of a university football program that had an unusual beginning, a glorious middle, and a unique and inglorious conclusion.
The nation's first tenured coach and the most creative and entrepreneurial of all college coaches from the 1890s to the 1920s, Stagg headed a program marked by creation of the letterman's club and by the dominant use of the forward pass, of jersey numbers, and of the collegiate modern T formation.
As plainly as Stagg and Harper built a football program of national repute, the new sports industry on campus proved capable of changing or ignoring academic assumptions and standards. The logical commercial trail established by Harper and Stagg helped change football into a mass entertainment industry on American campuses, but football at Chicago did not follow its own logical development.

Genres: Sports, Football

301 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

the rare "masterful monograph" that almost nobody read. is there a better book on how big-time athletics came to be in the US at one model college (including loads on amateurism/compensation/etc., the real nitty gritty stuff, that even scholarly accounts often left out in favor of other themes, e.g., masculinity, race, &c.), then died on the vine there four decades later? no, because lester had access to pretty much all the necessary primary sources needed to write this comprehensive (yet wonderfully compact 200-page) treatment of the subject. lester could've easily farted out a mcfarland-style secondary source account of stagg's life and it'd have had about the same readership, yet he didn't. how about that? overperforming AND overdelivering, for no reason save the fact that lester, as a u of c alum, found the subject deeply fascinating (he's not even a prof!). highly recommended

[Stuart Shiffman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting history of college football that reminds sports fans that the fundamentals behind the game have not changed much in 100 years. More than anything college football is about money. That was how it started and that is how it remains today. But it is an interesting read.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Subject matter is extremely interesting. Writing style is brutal.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Case study on the rise and fall of college football at a major university. Here, the great educator William Rainey Harper found that investing in Coach Stagg's football program would be a good way to promote the university, but as Chicago began competing with larger schools like Notre Dame and heavily-funded state schools, president Robert Maynard Hutchins found it more convenient to shut football down entirely. Chicago's glory days also have good gossip and trivia: for example, the book tells the scandalous story of a student who was expelled just after winning the big game, and it sneaks in history about why players wear those numbers on their jerseys.

[Crysta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it for the Chicago history, but wish I had more football knowledge going into it.