| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. By John Sayle Watterson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xvi, 456 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8018-6428-3.)

Popular histories of college football celebrate the long list of famous teams, coaches, and All-American players and fail to investigate why the sport became so popular and how it maintained its appeal through economic depressions, wars, and a multitude of other socioeconomic events. At times John Sayle Watterson attempts to answer these questions, but he mainly becomes sidetracked into a detailed narrative about the critics of college football and their many failed attempts to reform the sport. In a sense, he offers a mirror image of the popular histories: for example, instead of a portrait or even a discussion of Bernie Bierman, the most successful Big Ten coach of the 1930s, the author presents Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago who ended his school's participation in Big Ten football in the 1930s. Even this portrait is flawed, however: Watterson acknowledges that a unique set of circumstances allowed Hutchins to act and that other university presidents could not attempt similar de-emphasis. Just as Bierman is mostly forgotten, Robert Hutchins is not central to the history of college football, even to the story of its critics; most significant, Watterson fails to explain adequately why Chicago's departure had almost no impact on the popularity and commercial success of Big Ten football. . . .

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