Jon Mark Beilue: When College Football Came of Age

Ingrassia, author of book, part of ESPN documentary on the game

Dr. Brian Ingrassia got a call this spring from an associate of film director Jon Hock in New York. Would he consent to an interview?

Yes, certainly. The plan was to come to Canyon, and interview the West Texas A&M University assistant professor of history on his turf, but the plans got changed. Could Ingrassia fly to New York on their dime?

"It was finals week," Ingrassia said, "and not the best time of the year."

But this was for an ESPN documentary, and Ingrassia would make it work. He flew to New York, was interviewed for two hours on the 29th floor of a Manhattan mid-town apartment, put up in a hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, and returned to campus the next day and didn’t miss a class.

The documentary is one of 11 that ESPN is producing in this 150th year anniversary of college football. This one, "Football Is Us: The College Game," explores the evolution of the sport and chronicles the innovators who moved the game forward and brought the sport out of its brutal beginnings into mainstream acceptance.

Just a little bit of research into sources of college football historians would have brought up Ingrassia, who has been at WT since 2015. In 2012, while teaching at Middle Tennessee State, he authored a book, "The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football."

"I was really interested in higher education and wanted to see how universities related or tried to relate to people outside the university," Ingrassia said. "So what’s a really good way to do that? I settled on sports as a way a university interacts outside the proverbial college walls. Football is what we think of first when we think of intercollegiate sports."

It was to be Ingrassia’s dissertation which veered into a book. The venture was about a decade in the making, from idea to publishing. Research took him to Stanford, to the University of Michigan and other Big 10 schools, to Harvard and Yale, near the birthplace of college football.

"I went into it open-minded," he said. "How did universities, big universities, embrace both research and sports in the late 1800s and early 1900s?"

Hard to believe now, but 125 years ago, universities, especially in the East, were like a closed society. It was separate from the working world, and in a way, somewhat mysterious.

"As I got more into the research, I started to see how universities used athletics as a way to connect with the public at a time when a lot that went on in a university, the public didn’t understand," Ingrassia said.

Ingrassia teaches a course on the Gilded Age, which was the late 19th century in the United States. It wasn’t long after that, with the growth and acceptance of college football that universities begin to sink huge amounts of money into stadiums.

 A chapter in the book details the rise of the mammoth stadiums at a time when the National Football League didn’t exist or was just in its barnstorming infancy. 

By 1920s, college football had taken on life of its own

"When I first started on the book, I didn’t realize how important stadiums were and the role they would play," Ingrassia said. "You take this idea of how a university and its athletics become part of the university and you see it poured into concrete."

Harvard — the preeminent academic university — was the first to build a large football stadium, seating 30,000 in 1903. Not to be outdone, Yale, its rival, opened the Yale Bowl in 1914 with 70,000 seats.

Just after World War I, Big 10 universities got into the act with Ohio State (66,000 in 1922), Illinois (60,000 in 1923) and Michigan (72,000) embracing big-time football.

But the uneasy alliance as football continued to grow on college campuses and spread across the country? Ingrassia said that description in the book title was from the publisher, but it’s fairly accurate as well.

"Some may think that faculty never liked college football, thought it took away from the mission of a university, from day one," he said, "but that’s not true. What I found out early on is that professors liked how football engaged the public with the university.

"In the 1930s and 1940s, you started to see more professors and intellectuals back away from this, that this may be taking over the university and may not be what we want it to be. So there may be that uneasy alliance of how much a university embraces that as a public engagement. Even by the 1920s, it had kind of taken on a life of its own."

Full disclosure: Ingrassia, as of around Labor Day, had not seen the documentary, which debuted in late August and is available on the ESPN app. He was interviewed for two hours in New York, and understands about 75 to 90 seconds of that is in documentary which kicks off the series. Much of his on-camera interview deals with reforms.

Ingrassia is also a knowledgeable source on the reforms in the early 19th century of college football, which was especially brutal and dangerous. Eighteen died in 1905 from the sport in high school and college, alarming the pubic, including President Theodore Roosevelt, a proponent of football.

Rules were implemented to help with safety, none more so than the advent of the forward pass. That made the game more wide open and less of a free-for-all. The NCAA was established in 1906, primarily to govern and reform football.

"There was a movement to abolish football, but a bigger movement to reform it," Ingrassia said. "Most thought it had a benefit of manliness. It was the Flying Wedge, five yards and a cloud of dust, and bludgeon your way down the field.

"The forward pass opened up the game, made it less violent, and now smaller players had a chance to make an impact. And it became easier for fans to follow."

For Ingrassia, who earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois, to be included in a groundbreaking ESPN series of "Football Is Us," has its own satisfaction. His book earned a monograph award from the North American Society of Sports History, but it’s rewarding when others notice.

"It’s nice," he said. "Sometimes in academia, people don’t always listen to what you have to say. So it’s nice for those in New York and Washington to reach out to a historian at WT in Canyon, that maybe they listened to what I had to say. It’s pretty cool."

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for "WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?" If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu.

—WTAMU—