Football and Its Greatest Players by Britannica Educational Publishing

Author:Britannica Educational Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

By the turn of the 21st century, the growing influence of television and professional football had begun to erode the dominance of coaches over the college game. Bobby Bowden of Florida State and Joe Paterno of Penn State—the two winningest football coaches in NCAA Division I history—appeared to be the last of the major college coaches who would enjoy long, highly successful tenures at a single school.

Two major issues, cheating and racial segregation, occupied college football in the decades following World War II. In 1951 an academic cheating scandal at the U.S. Military Academy led to the expulsion of more than 80 cadets, many of them football players, and raised concerns about protecting the integrity of amateur athletics. Subsequently the NCAA gained greater powers to regulate and investigate athletic programs. In 1957 an agreement was reached to allow full scholarships for football players in order to reduce the influence of alumni and team boosters who had been making off-the-record payments to players.

African American players have been a part of the college game since the sport’s beginnings. Early stars included Fritz Pollard of Brown University, Paul Robeson at Rutgers University, and Duke Slater at the University of Iowa. The segregation policies in the South applied to college football as well, and northern schools would typically sit their black players when they faced schools from the South. Black colleges began playing football in the 1890s, and new conferences and rivalries emerged a generation later. After professional baseball’s race barrier was broken by Jackie Robinson in 1947 and professional football and basketball had begun integrating, pressure mounted on college sports to do the same. By the 1950s universities outside of the South began integrating and dropping games against segregated schools from their schedules. It was not until the 1960s that major universities in the South began integrating their teams.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.