Creating the Big Ten (ePub)

Big Ten football fans pack gridiron cathedrals that hold up to 100,000 spectators. The conference's fourteen member schools share a broadcast network and a 2016 media deal worth $2.64 billion. This cultural and financial colossus grew out of a modest 1895 meeting that focused on football's brutality and encroaching professionalism in the game. Winton U. Solberg explores the relationship between higher education and collegiate football in the Big Ten's first fifty years. This formative era saw debates over eligibility and amateurism roil the sport. In particular, faculty concerned with academics clashed with coaches, university presidents, and others who played to win. Solberg follows the conference's successful early efforts to put the best interests of institutions and athletes first. Yet, as he shows, commercial concerns undid such work after World War I as sports increasingly eclipsed academics. By the 1940s, the Big Ten's impact on American sports was undeniable. It had shaped the development of intercollegiate athletics and college football nationwide while serving as a model for other athletic conferences.|
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One: From Disorder to Order
1. The Beginning of the Big Ten
2. Michigan Withdraws from the Conference
3. The Crisis over Amateurism
4. The Conference and the War
Part Two: From Order to Disorder
5. The Big Ten in the Golden Age of Sports
6. The Commissioner and the Conference
7. The Big Ten Stadiums
8. Red Grange and the Lure of Professional Football
9. The Conference at Work
10. The True Spirit of the University
11. The Carnegie Report
12. The Big Ten Censures Iowa
13. Cross Currents
14. Closing Out Half a Century
Epilogue
Appendix 1: Conference Rules
Appendix 2: Faculty Representatives
Notes
Bibliography
Index|Winton U. Solberg is professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His many books include The University of Illinois, 1894-1904: The Shaping of the University and Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America.