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The NCAA | 51 be debated. Who could catch the ball, where could it be thrown from, where could it be caught, and what would be the result if the ball was not caught or touched? The final decision, after much discussion, was that one forward pass could be made from behind the line of scrimmage, if it was thrown at least five yards to either side of the center to an end or a back. A major limiting factor was that if the ball was not touched by a player on either side, the ball went to the opponent at the spot where the ball was thrown. Later rules would make less severe penalties for the forward pass, but the committee wanted to be cautious at first.30 The forward pass and other new legislation intended to eliminate mass plays and unethical physical contact helped convince a number of institutions and a majority of Harvard’s Corporation and Overseers that the new game should be given one more year to prove its worthiness. President Eliot was not convinced and voted with the minority on the Harvard governing boards. Only a few other important colleges were in agreement with Charles Eliot. While Columbia, NYU, Union, Northwestern, California, and Stanford banned football, most colleges looked to the new football ruling body’s reform measures as being satisfactory to continuing the game. While changing football rules was a major reform effort and it brought about the creation of the first national collegiate body for athletics, the NCAA, no other reforms beneficial to higher education came out of the 1905–6 crisis in intercollegiate athletics. The major big-time universities in competitive sports were unwilling to relinquish any of their accumulated power to the lesser schools that originally formed the NCAA. 6 The NCAA A Faculty Debating Society for Amateurism For its first half century, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was principally a debating society for faculty representatives interested in amateur athletics. If the smaller schools that had founded the NCAA in December 1905 could have had their way, it would have been more than a debating society, but if it had been given power to legislate and enforce the legislation, few big-time institutions would have joined the organization. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, the 52 | Chapter 6 triad dominating college athletics throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, refused to join the NCAA in its earliest years, and that was true of many of the larger colleges and universities. While the NCAA would eventually become extremely powerful, with money coming primarily from operating the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, it began as a small group of colleges lacking status, unity, or real power to lead intercollegiate reform. The weakness of the NCAA resulted from the reluctance of prestigious colleges and universities to give up the athletic leadership they had traditionally wielded for a generation and more. Of the institutions that had membership on football’s Old Rules Committee, only Pennsylvania joined the NCAA in the first year. This left Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, the Naval Academy, and Chicago out of the new organization. Columbia, Brown, and every member of the Big Ten except Minnesota refused to join. Not one West Coast institution enrolled in the NCAA, and only a few southern schools—Missouri, North Carolina, and Vanderbilt—became members .1 The less prestigious institutions that joined the NCAA attempted to bring the leading institutions into the fold by assuring that the established football schools would not lose power by joining the group. For instance, the NCAA president, West Point’s Palmer Pierce, wrote to Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson, stating that the NCAA “decided to give the greatest of independence to institutions.”2 This approach eventually appeased the leading institutions that favored athletic autonomy. The principle of institutional autonomy, something Pierce called the Home Rule principle, was agreed to from the first.3 Paradoxically, the objective of the NCAA as stated in the new constitution was “the regulation and supervision of college athletics throughout the United States.” Yet the bylaws would provide for no regulations and thus no national eligibility rules. The bylaws called for “each institution . . . to enact and enforce such measures as may be necessary to prevent violations of the principles of amateur sports.”4 Mandatory eligibility rules were “judged impracticable” by President Palmer Pierce and were left up to each institution.5 A major part of the reasoning by Pierce and the small institutions was that they did...

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