Shaping College Football: The Transformation of an American Sport, 1919-1930

Shaping College Football is the story of the intercollegiate gridiron sport in the years immediately after World War I when the game underwent monumental changes that transformed it into one of America’s fundamental sporting attractions and a commercial entity that would be recognizable to any twenty-first century fan. Raymond Schmidt examines the many factors that were a part of college football’s reshaping in the 1920s as universities became dependent upon the revenue being generated by football, and the sport increasingly became identified as a commercialized, big business activity. Offering the most detailed examination ever undertaken of college football’s
Golden Era,
Schmidt covers issues ranging from the shift of power away from the game’s pioneering schools, through the real evolution of forward passing, to stadium building and the decade-long struggle over the game’s growing overemphasis that culminated in the legendary Carnegie Report of 1929.