Choosing the Game

James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xxxvi + 447 pp. Notes, index, and appendixes. $23.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

John Sayle Watterson. College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xiv + 456 pp. Notes, index, bibliography, illustrations, and appendixes. $34.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

The news was hardly . . . well, news. A three-and-a-half year study of intercollegiate athletics concluded, dryly: "Apparently the ethical bearing of intercollegiate football contests and their scholastic aspects are of secondary importance to the winning of victories and financial success." (I can almost hear Captain Renault in Casablanca: "I am shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here.") Even in 1929, when the Carnegie Report issued their findings, only a desire for ironic affect caused any arched eyebrows. For Americans who had followed the exploits of the teams of Knute Rockne, Robert Zuppke, "Pop" Warner, Dana X. Bible, Fielding Yost, and the other successful coaches of the era, the notion that victory was the name of the game and financial profit the desired byproduct was taken for granted. What's the big deal, wondered a student journalist for the Daily Northwestern. Every student knew that college sports were not "simon-pure." Football, many people argued, had always been a bit seedy, it had been that way since coaches at Yale and Harvard had begun to recruit tramp athletes to help them win The Game. Rockne's methods were no different than Walter Camp's, only a tad more scientific and systematic.

One of the more interesting—and over-looked—findings of the Carnegie Report was that corruption was not simply the domain of the high-profile, big-money programs. Smaller schools such as Bucknell and Oglethorpe and future Ivy League institutions such as Brown and Columbia were just as guilty as Michigan, Ohio State, Purdue, Southern California, and the other gridiron powers. Altogether the Carnegie investigators examined 130 schools, and if a few—such as Bates, Bowdoin, and Brigham Young—were clean, far more evinced a willingness to do what it took to win.

The Carnegie Report was good for a few headlines, and it contributed to several universities re-evaluating their athletic programs, but the level of true reform did not reach much further than sanctimonious platitudes, a sort of general whine by college and university presidents that they were shocked, shocked to find such practices on the campuses of so many fine American institutions of higher education, and that they certainly would take a hard, cold look at their own athletic programs. It was as if the Carnegie Report were a boulder that created no ripples when it was tossed into a still lake. During the next seventy years, other bodies issued similar reports. The President's Report for the American Council on Education (1952), George Hanford's American Council on Education study (1974), and the Knight Foundation Commission study (1991) have all suggested that intercollegiate athletics are badly flawed. They all applaud the notion of the "student-athlete" and the "coach-teacher" and cheer the idea that varsity sports are a vital part of the college experience, but they question the hyper-materialism, excessive emphasis on winning, and constant violations of recruiting rules. And like the Carnegie Report, they have all suffered the same fate: aimed at university presidents and athletic departments, they landed on the desks of journalists and television executives, where they became fodder for exposès and documentaries.

As John Sayle Watterson argues in College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, sensational reports, angry finger-pointing, and earnest hand-wringing are as much a part of college football as the off-tackle slant and the forward pass; in fact, even more so since abuses have a longer and richer history than the passing game. He provides a necessary overview of college football played at the highest level, illustrating in case after case that the game has demonstrated an ability...