If you are interested in football Cheap Jerseys , especially in college football, read on to learn some interesting insight into the roots of the game.

In the 1890s college football had already created strong emotions of love and hate. Big-time eastern football had demonstrated that it could draw large crowds, create alumni support, and build an identity that would attract new students. The fact that it had little to do with classical education bothered only the traditionalists on campus and a handful of crotchety purists elsewhere who wrote critically of football in magazines, newspaper articles, and official college reports.

Outward appearances may have changed, but the gridiron problems in that era appear remarkably similar to the present. In the 1890s big-time recruiters and alumni contacts scoured the eastern prep schools for talented juniors and seniors ready to entice them to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Occasionally, unscrupulous alumni convinced students to quit high school before they graduated in order to enroll at an institution with a big-time team. Boosters funneled tuition money to poor but athletically talented boys from the coal fields of Pennsylvania and the industrial towns of the Northeast to preparatory schools in order to prepare them for big-time college athletics. Some of these young men were in their mid-twenties when they finally entered college. Other athletes went from school to school selling their services, phantom players who had no academic ties with the institution.

Big-time alumni football entrepreneurs–the counterpart of today's athletic directors–arranged a schedule of games which began with weak teams and worked up to big money games held in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Gridiron profits supported stadium building NFL Jerseys From China , sumptuous living quarters and training tables for players, as well as Pullman cars for retinues of trainers, massagers, alumni coaches, and other hangers-on who followed the team to the big games. What was left over went to support an array of lesser sports that big-time football had eclipsed.

At the major football schools critics complained that football players became the campus elite, admired by their fellow students and regarded skeptically by many faculty. In the absence of professional football, players basked in the attention of the media, and the names of the gridiron stars appeared regularly in the sports pages of big city newspapers. Even college faculty and presidents had to be properly worshipful of football and its elite because they knew that football advertised their schools and helped to retain the loyalty of alumni. As a result, they often ignored or remained blissfully unaware of scams to admit unqualified students, play athletes who never enrolled, or resort to stratagems to keep weak players eligible.

Though booster organizations did not exist outside of alumni groups, booster alumni and townspeople, student managers NFL Jerseys Wholesale , and even faculty engaged in unethical acts. A Princeton alumnus named Patterson entertained football players and made every effort to entice them to his alma mater. Authorities at Swarthmore lured the huge lineman, Bob (“Tiny&rdquosmile Maxwell, from the University of Chicago and arranged for the president of the college to pass his bills to a prominent alumnus. Professor Woodrow Wilson, a fanatic Princeton enthusiast, shamelessly used football when he spoke to alumni organizations and vigorously opposed football reform in the 1890s and early 1900s. In contrast, Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate, who gloried in the strenuous life and strongly supported Harvard football, turned against football brutality in 1905 and initiated the first efforts in his capacity as president to reform the spirit in which big-time football teams competed.

We know that the prototype for athletic organization began at eastern institutions in the 1880s and 1890s. Yale's Walter Camp, “the father of American football,” became the model for the coach and athletic director. While pursuing a business career, he also acted as Yale's de facto vice president for athletic operations, who dominated the rules committees and ceaselessly publicized the game. From the profits of big games in Boston and New York NFL Jerseys Cheap , Camp created an ample reserve fund that supported lesser sports, afforded lush treatment for athletes, and provided the money that eventually went toward building Yale Bowl, the first of the modern football stadiums. By making Yale into an athletic powerhouse, Camp built the school's reputation, making it second only to Harvard. Because he succeeded so well, Camp became the first big-name foe of sweeping football reforms–and an especially hard-core opponent of the forward pass.

By the turn of century the deaths of players in football led state legislators to introduce laws banning the gridiron game. Players for big-time teams, critics charged, were coached to injure their opponents or “put them out of business.” The nature of the game, with its mass formations and momentum plays, made football less an athletic contest than a collegiate version of warlike combat. Eventually the violence in football led to attempts to reduce its brutality through reforms. New rules put a strong emphasis on better officiating and on less dangerous formations, but they did not necessarily improve the athletic environment.

The deaths and brutality presented an excellent opportunity to root out the worst excesses of the runaway football culture. In the 1890s and early 1900s, responding to public opinion Wholesale Jerseys , professors and presidents spent a great deal of time talking about the overemphasis of intercollegiate athletics–and, in some cases, passing rules at the conference and institutional level to regulate college sports. Why, then, did college presidents and faculty, who had far more authority over their students than their modern counterparts, fail to control the gridiron beast? Put differently, why d.
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