College Football

In this 100-year history of America's popular pastime, John Sayle Watterson shows how college football evolved from a simple game played by college students into the lucrative, semi-professional enterprise it has become today. He covers the infamous Yale-Princeton "fiasco" of 1881, the reforms of 1910, how college football grew in the booming economy of the 1920s, and the revelations of illicit aid to athletes in the 1930s. He also explains how the growth of TV revenue led to college football programmes' unprecedented prosperity. He explores issues of gender and race, from the shocked reactions of spectators to the first female cheerleaders in the 1930s to their successful exploitation by Roone Arledge three decades later.