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

Cloth $29.95    |   978-0-8156-0886-8    |    2007

A thorough examination of the sport’s "Golden Era," a time when factors both on and off the field combined to transform the game.

Description
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 over-emphasis that culminated in the legendary Carnegie Report of 1929.

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Author
Raymond Schmidt is the author of Two-eyed League: The Illinois-Iowa of 1890–1892 and Football’s Stars of Summer. He lives in Ventura, Ca.

7 x 10, 328 pages