In the introduction of The Rise of Gridiron University, Brian Ingrassia describes the scholars who have worked on researching the early stages of college football and what the different perspectives were in the 1890s and early 1900s. Some of the early opinions early on into the life of college football would vary from person to person. The Scholar Murry Sperber described college sports as a circus that would take away student attention from their higher education. Woodrow Wilson supported college sports and saw it as a way to swallow up the circus of university life. These are a few examples of what people were thinking at the time because mostly during the 1890s college football was an elite sport mainly in the northeast of the United States. Ingrassia describes this early stage of elites in college football as an Ivory Tower and he repeats this analogy across the introduction. His main argument is to focus on the growth of college football as a lucrative sport and how universities have used it to grow their funds.
In the first chapter, Ingrassia discusses the importance of gymnastics and how it was important to build up that physical strength before football was popular. This stood out to me as interesting because I did not really think of gymnastics as being a big deal in America, it makes sense with the way that Ingrassia explains it because he focuses on the ideas of being physically fit and how that was important to the American people, especially with the antebellum south in the early 1800s.
In the second chapter, Ingrassia goes over the growth in popularity of college football and how people were now starting to pay to come to these games. He also discusses some of the initial rules and how this would affect the change of the game in how it was going to be played in the coming years. Something I find really interesting is how even at the beginning of college football the ideas of making it safer to play and putting rules into place that make the game less dangerous. That is so interesting because looking at today’s game they are still trying to minimize the risk at play and that begs the question, can football ever be a safe game?
