When reading Brian M. Ingrassia’s book The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football, I was struck at the amount of detail presented on the early origins of football. I thought it was interesting how the author presents the adoption of football in its early days in the late nineteenth century as not a sure-fire thing due to concerns over its brutality and commercialism. For example, he points out how figures such as David Starr Jordan were influential in getting Californian colleges to adopt New Zealand style rugby instead of American football due to complaints about football’s immorality. I thought it was useful to include the philosophical debates that occurred in America during the nineteenth century surrounding sports with old-fashioned Whig educators despising sports, decrying them as “animalistic”, contrasted with the more progressive view at the time that exercise through sports curbed moral impurity. In the novel, I felt the overarching theme was the dichotomy of universities becoming ever more academically isolated from the American public through their research practices, while at the same time, becoming greater staples in American culture through their adoption of football and other public spectator sports. This dichotomy however, also brought challenges to the universities such as illicit gambling and football becoming a greater fixture and expenditure of university resources.
I think that Ingrassia is focusing his work squarely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how football transformed from a disorganized mess into a sport with a standardized ruleset. From the second chapter onward, I think he will discuss the social implications of football, its symbolism, and the process of making the sport more palatable for a mass audience. An upcoming fixture of the novel might be the battle over the creation of football into a part of the American cultural space, similar to baseball during this time. A glaring question that I have currently is that of the cultural and social dissemination of football. At a regional level, football began in New England Universities such as Harvard and Rutgers yet eventually they spread to the South and Pacific Coast with no real context towards this transformation. I also wonder when the author will discuss the subsequent growth of football and adoption by the masses of the sport from its private college originators towards the more public state universities and colleges.
