Stagg's University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago

Sport and Society

by Robin Lester

The legendary University of Chicago football program had an unusual beginning, a dazzling middle, and an inglorious conclusion. Its Amos Alonzo Stagg, the most creative and entrepreneurial college coach of his time. A former all-American gridiron star at Yale, Stagg joined an elite academic institution that boasted intellectual notables like John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Albert Michelson. Within fifteen years, the fame of Stagg's football program had eclipsed even Michelson's renown as the first American citizen to win a Nobel Prize.  Robin Lester follows the commercial trail blazed by Stagg and University President William Rainey Harper and the subsequent transformation of college football into a mass entertainment industry that changed campuses and captured the national imagination. Fascinating and detailed,  Stagg's University reveals how the University of Chicago's football industry prefigured today's billion-dollar sport juggernaut and details the life and leadership of one of its foundational personages.

Genres: Sports, Football

344 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

the rare "masterful monograph" that almost nobody read. is there a better book on how big-time athletics came to be in the US at one model college (including loads on amateurism/compensation/etc., the real nitty gritty stuff, that even scholarly accounts often left out in favor of other themes, e.g., masculinity, race, &c.), then died on the vine there four decades later? no, because lester had access to pretty much all the necessary primary sources needed to write this comprehensive (yet wonderfully compact 200-page) treatment of the subject. lester could've easily farted out a mcfarland-style secondary source account of stagg's life and it'd have had about the same readership, yet he didn't. how about that? overperforming AND overdelivering, for no reason save the fact that lester, as a u of c alum, found the subject deeply fascinating (he's not even a prof!). highly recommended

[Stuart Shiffman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting history of college football that reminds sports fans that the fundamentals behind the game have not changed much in 100 years. More than anything college football is about money. That was how it started and that is how it remains today. But it is an interesting read.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Subject matter is extremely interesting. Writing style is brutal.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Case study on the rise and fall of college football at a major university. Here, the great educator William Rainey Harper found that investing in Coach Stagg's football program would be a good way to promote the university, but as Chicago began competing with larger schools like Notre Dame and heavily-funded state schools, president Robert Maynard Hutchins found it more convenient to shut football down entirely. Chicago's glory days also have good gossip and trivia: for example, the book tells the scandalous story of a student who was expelled just after winning the big game, and it sneaks in history about why players wear those numbers on their jerseys.

[Crysta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it for the Chicago history, but wish I had more football knowledge going into it.