On Nov. 6, 1869 Rutgers and Princeton faced off on College Field in New Brunswick, NJ for a game that would be immortalized as the first intercollegiate football contest ever held. Hearing the hullabaloo after one of the scores an anonymous Rutgers professor waved his umbrella at the participants and shrieked, "You will come to no Christian end!"

Thus, from the very start, football found itself beset by critics in the face of its overwhelming popularity. Of course, the sport and those involved in it certainly did their level best to warrant such complaints as the rapid growth of the game begat a multitude of excesses that continues unceasingly to this very day.

The inherent contradiction of a highly lucrative, semi-professional sport being played by ostensibly amateur participants under the guise of furthering their education has created an unceasing controversy about college football. The discussion about the sport, from its earliest days, has always been as much about the performances on the gridiron as it has been about the scandals perpetrated off of it.

While there are countless books about particular controversies and eras of excess it was not until John Sayle Watterson’s 2000 book, College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, that we were provided a comprehensive examination of the conflicts the sport has grappled with over the whole of its history.

This book looks at everything from the debate over tramp athletes in the late 1800s, the furor over player injuries at the turn of the century, the conflicts about participant subsidies in the 1920s. As television upped the ante

Watterson argues the sport suffered three great upheavals: the clash about player safety that lead to the revision of the rules in the early 1900s, the scandals over subsidies in the 1950s and the lawlessness of programs in the 1980s and 1990s fueled by ever increasing television revenues. All of these, he contends, led to substantial reforms that restructured the entire landscape of the sport.

College Football is an illuminating book for three reasons. First, it provides fantastic detail into a host of episodes in the sports history rarely examined in a comprehensive manner. Second, it shows that game is far more resilient than any of its most vehement critics give it credit for – including Watterson. Thirdly, College Football gives an insight into past episodes of the sport’s history that can sometimes shed new light on current controversies.

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It is a feat that will never be equaled. In 1899 the football team for the University of the South traveled 2,500 miles and played five games in six days. Sewanee not only won every one of the contests, they were not even scored upon.

In fact, the Sewanee team of 1899 was one of the greatest of its era and arguably of all time. The team from central Tennessee won all of their 12 games but one by shutout and outscoring their opponents 322-10.

The accomplishments of this storied Mountain Tigers squad are recounted in Wendell O. Givens' book Ninety-Nine Iron: The Season Sewanee Won Five Games in Six Days. The late Givens, a former editor of The Birmingham News, first published this slim tome in 1992 and it was reissued in 2002.

The book certainly seems like one penned by an editor. It consists of a description of the difficulties in collecting information about the legendary team and the accounts of the game rely heavily on the newspaper reports themselves. Ninety-Nine Iron provides basic narrative context for Sewanee's 1899 season but leaves most of the conclusions about the facts to the reader.

What is fascinating about the account is stepping back from seeing it as a nostalgic tale of an era long past and recognizing it for what it was, the story of a powerhouse football program at the height of its powers. Sewanee football at the turn of the century dominated the southern game and operated like such teams do today -- with an eye on the bottom line.

By the late 1890s, most of the southern college football teams we recognize today had been established but few had developed beyond the most rudimentary degree. Sewanee was the exception. The school's 300 or so students were among the South's most privileged and, as such, exemplified the elite social group that the game first represented. It would not be until after World War I that the game would begin to become an entertainment of the middle-class.

Sewanee practiced a number of tactics that were highly controversial at the time including paying the head coach and offering scholarships to standout players. It's roster was made up of players who hailed from across the region and even beyond the borders of the south.

The incredible week-long train tour was the brainchild of team manager, Luke Lea, whose actual role, Givens notes, was much more akin to an athletic director. As impressive as the story of the epic journey has become, Lea clearly understood the bottom line when he organized it. When he cancelled a contest against intra-state rival Vanderbilt due to a dispute over the share of the gate receipts the next option was a train tour.

In the era before radio and television teams made their money through the gate. For a school as relatively remote as Sewanee the only way to capitalize on that was by traveling to bigger venues in urban areas. Sewanee's epic week long road trip was just one example. In 1899 Sewanee also played a game in Montgomery, Alabama and three contests in Atlanta, including a pair of games in three days to start the season as well as the "Southern Championship" to close it.

In Pennsylvania, this same logic had propelled Pop Warner to begin transforming the Carlisle Indian School into a dominant program that functioned almost exclusively as an exhibition team.

So how momentous was Sewanee's accomplishment? Was it a whirlwind tour against teams who would only become powerhouses in later decades or was it truly a odyssey of gridiron endurance against the best the game had to offer?

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I'll say this right out front: you don't want to read A Memorable Season In College Football: A Look Back At 1959 for the quality of the prose. It reads like a bit of an academic piece, a bit dry, a bit book report-y. But it doesn't matter. You want to read this book because 1959 was just so incredibly fascinating. Consider...

LSU 7, Ole Miss 3

In one of just two games between all-time, Top 30 teams, an incredible punt return by Billy Cannon -- one of my favorite plays in college football history -- made the difference. Ole Miss advanced to LSU's goal line multiple times but could never punch the ball in. One day, I will find this game on DVD, and I will pay exorbitantly for it.

As Reid points out, the punt return itself is not without a what-if.

One of Paul Dietzel's rules was for LSU players not to field a punt inside their own fifteen yard line. In the fourth quarter, ahead 3-0, Mississippi's Jake Gibbs punted on third down from Ole Miss territory. The punt traveled 47 yards and bounced once before landing square in the arms of Billy Cannon at the LSU eleven yard line. Cannon returns the punt 89 yards for the winning TD. What if Billy Cannon had not fielded that punt inside the LSU 15? Or, alternately, if even one of the seven Ole Miss players who had a shot at Cannon had tackled him.

Another what-if: as Ole Miss captain Charlie Flowers told me a couple of years ago, that the punt was supposed to angle out of bounds, but it took a funky bounce. Ole Miss did not allow a touchdown drive of more than 10 yards all season (opponents only scored 21 points) -- there is simply no way LSU wins that game if the punt doesn't check up. One of the greatest plays in college football history almost didn't happen; without it, Ole Miss wins the national title (and deserving recognition as one of history's greatest teams), and the story of Syracuse and Ernie Davis is missing a national title ring.

(In a strange twist, 52 years before Alabama did the same, Ole Miss got revenge for this single-digit to single-digit defeat with a 21-0 win in New Orleans during bowl season. Granted, it didn't win them the national title; but considering how good this Ole Miss team was -- best ever, according to my numbers -- it would have probably fair if it did.)

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In 1940, Stanford shocked college football by coming out of nowhere to rip off an undefeated season and claim the national championship. The Indians, as the team was then known, started the season a lightly regarded unit with a has-been coach starting his first year at Palo Alto. Instead, they became known as The Wow Boys and their success changed football forever.

James W. Johnson’s 2006 book on 1940 Stanford team The Wow Boys: A Coach, A Team, And A Turning Point In College Football outlines this miracle season and explains why it was so fundamentally important for the evolution of the game. The Indians remarkable season introduced the modern T-formation to college football and their success launched it on a course to offensive ubiquity.

It’s one of the great rags-to-riches tales of college football. A storied program fallen into mediocrity and a coach whose recent history left a lot to be desired. Clark Shaughnessy's seven-year stint at University of Chicago had resulted in a 17-34-4 record and ended when the school nixed the football program. Hopes weren’t high when he arrived at the Farm.

"I thought, ‘Here comes the undertaker’," recalled Jack Warnecke. ""He killed off football at Chicago and now he’s come to kill off football at Stanford."

Except he didn’t. By the second game of the season they were being called the Wow Boys and by the end of the season they had proven worthy of the moniker. The Indians (as the Cardinal was then known) went undefeated and beat Nebraska in the Rose Bowl 21-13.

Also undefeated Minnesota was chosen as the National Champion but it wasn’t unanimous; 44 of the 109 poll voters chose the Indians as the nation’s best team. Yet Stanford’s success was electrifying enough to ignite interest in the unorthodox offensive attack the Indians employed – the T-formation.

Shaughnessy’s T-formation proved to be a revolutionary change for the game. It marked a stark divide between the previous era of power offense that gained yardage by sheer mass and the modern game with its premium on speed and skill. But it wasn’t new. Walter Camp reportedly created it in the 1880s but formations such as the single wing and the various box systems had relegated it to obsolescence.

Shaugnessy recognized that attacking the defense directly was playing to its strength. Unless a team had stockpiles of talent, which his didn’t, it wasn’t likely to succeed with consistency. The alternative was to employ an attack that used the entire width of the field to spread the defense out. This opened up opportunities for his speedy backs to make big gains.

"Instead of threatening a segment of ground scarcely wider than from end to end," Shaughnessy wrote of the offense Esquire magazine. "We threaten continually the entire width of the playing field."

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As a cultural force, few things are more uniquely and powerfully American than football. Today the game easily the nation’s preeminent sport and its wild popularity seems impervious to challenge any time soon. So it is a little astonishing to find a dearth of serious examination of why this is the case and what it might suggest about us as a people.

For the most part, the public’s preoccupation with football tends to be confined to the game and its constituent elements themselves. There are occasional opinion pieces pondering how developments in the sport apply to the culture at large, but these tend to see the game as symptomatic of some specific issue (and almost always negatively).

The deeper philosophical question of what the game actually says about the society itself has tended to go unasked.

That changed in 1993 with the publication of Michael Oriard’s book Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. Rather than a history or analysis of the game itself, the book marked the one of the first times the game was looked at from an anthropological standpoint. Oriard asked what the game said about us as a culture, and the answers were somewhat surprising.

The role of the media, Oriard argues, is actually the primary factor in the sport’s emergence as a "popular spectacle," not the game itself. Thus the narratives through which the game was experienced emerged before the public became intimately familiar with the sport. Football was only able to unlock its potent cultural significance through its representation in the media.

The question of football's more profound meaning has been the constant theme in Oriard’s academic career. Today he is the Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State. He also pens a regular column on Washington Post’s football blog, The League.

His interest in football didn't come out of nowhere. In the late 1960s, Oriard was a walk-on center at Notre Dame who snapped the ball to Joe Theisman during their time in South Bend. In 1970 he joined the Kansas City Chiefs, where played for four seasons. He finished his football career with the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

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Almost a century ago college football witnessed one of the most compelling clashes in the history of the sport. On Nov. 9, 1912 the Carlisle Indian School Indians face the Army Black Knights on Collum Field at the US Military Academy at West Point.

Lars Anderson’s 2007 book, Carlisle vs. Army, outlines the transformation of the Indian school squad into a national football powerhouse and its great star Jim Thorpe. At the same time the book sketches the development of the Army Black Knights team, focusing on the fortunes of linebacker Dwight David Eisenhower from Kansas.

At the center of the book is Glenn Scobie Warner, best known by the sobriquet "Pop," who is rightfully hailed as one of the game’s earliest innovators.

Warner’s fertile imagination produced mainstays of the game as the three-point stance, the tackle-eligible pass and the double wing formation. He also was notorious for gadget plays that exploited the rules’ many loopholes.

Yet, his philosophical approach wouldn’t be out of line with many teams today. Rather than rely on brawn and power to carry the day he saw the opportunity for speed and deception as a winning strategy. At Carlisle he stumbled on the perfect athletes to carry out his vision.

Warner led Carlisle on the first cross-country road trips and was the first to employ a media relations team to drum up interest. Reading Carlisle vs. Army it becomes clear that Warner also pioneered many of the sport’s less attractive measures; skyrocketing coaches pay, sketchy recruiting practices and, basically, the creation of the first "football factory" school.

All this would suggest Carlisle vs. Army is a feast for the college football fan. Sadly, no. There are a few problems with the style of the book. First, the author’s addiction to needless descriptive adjectives would bring first-year creative writing class teacher to tears. Second, the amount of speculative narration is simply appalling for a book purporting to be any type of historical account.

Page after page you are told exactly what the characters are thinking and their every action is outlined in bizarre imagery. And there is an incessant hammering of the theme that becomes downright irritating after awhile. A single example:

"The matchup (against Army) was so rich in symbolism – the Indians, wards of the state, playing against the young men who would one day rule that state – that it was hard for the Carlisle players to concentrate."

Really? Citation please.

After awhile, the reader begins to really doubt any of these claims can be reasonably attributed to the actually people and events being described. As compelling as I found the story, finishing the book was a real chore.

The 1912 Carlisle Indian School team.
Photo: Cumberland County Historical Society.

Which is a shame. There’s a lot of potential here both in terms of reporting and writing but perhaps Anderson would have been better served by a more stringent editor and making the story a long magazine piece. His instincts about the 1912 contest are certainly dead on. It was a matchup dripping in irony and fateful coincidence that begs to be told.

The game offered a contest between a team of Native Americans versus a squad representing the institution that led their people bloodily into captivity less than a generation prior. One sideline boasted one of the most talented players ever to grace the gridiron but who was shackled by a perplexing lack of motivation. The other side of the field had a young man whose determination allowed him to reach beyond his limited athletic skills.

Thorpe was one of the biggest celebrities in the country at the time due to his dominating performance in the 1912 Olympic Games but went on to obscurity after scandal swallowed his fame. Eisenhower went on to be one of them most important men of the 20th century and the contest became a footnote in the story of his career.

Anderson only briefly touches on the controversies that eventually shuttered the school. In 1914 a detailed congressional investigation uncovered evidence of systematic abuse of the students and extensive financial mismanagement. The football squad was essentially a traveling road show with the intention of bringing in as much money as possible. Those findings and the inability to reform the school led it to be shut down in 1918.

As much as college football has evolved in its almost century-and-a-half existence, the sport’s development has shown a remarkable amount of consistency. And where Carlisle vs. Army succeeds is painting a portrait of a sport from a century ago and demonstrating how close the issues surrounding it are to the modern game. Where it falls short is illustrating where the failures of that era cans serve as lessons for today.

The index of titles reviewed in this series is now available on the Football Study Hall Facebook page.

National Signing Day, according to acclaimed football writer Bruce Feldman, has pretty much become a secular holiday in those parts of the country dominated by devotion to college football. It boasts a Christmas-like anticipation in waiting for athletes to finally declaring the teams they will play for that is matched by the Halloween-esque delight in the misfortune on the part of ones foes who are passed over. It’s fun but not necessarily for all.

Recruiting and its excesses have been a hallmark of the sport from its earliest days. The use of ringers, subsidies and outright payment of athletes to compete in the amateur sport were as much cause for scandal in the 1890s as the 1990s. And enterprising journalists have consistently chronicled those excesses throughout the history of the sport.

What has changed in the past decade is the emergence and explosive growth in the industry catering to the needs of teams pursuing the premier players (and the fanbases that follow them).

It was into this fast-changing landscape that Feldman ventured in 2006 to get a look at the inner workings of a program that had hitched its wagon to the hope of securing blue-chip talent - the University of Mississippi Rebels. The result was his book Meat Market.

The tome is a worthy addition to the long tradition of expository journalism examining the questionable practices associated with recruiting in college football. And, since the industry of recruiting and the stakes involved has only grown since Meat Market's appearance on bookshelves in 2007, it is a more valuable read today than ever.

In the early 2000’s, Ed Orgeron’s was a coach on the rise due to his key role in developing talent for Pete Carroll’s powerful USC teams. Ole Miss tapped him as head coach in 2005 after recognizing a need to attract on-field talent as the key to returning the football program to the Southeastern Conference’s elite. The next year Feldman followed Orgeron and his staff during the critical months leading up to the 2007 National Signing Day.

The one drawback of the book is that sometimes the tale is overshadowed by Orgeron’s larger-than-life personality. It's sometimes difficult to focus on the details of the team's recruiting campaign due to the torrent of colorful anecdotes concerning the bombastic caffeine-fueled Cajun. That's unfortunate since it gives the proceedings something of a comic air even though the subject of Meat Market makes it something that needs to be pondered in complete seriousness.

That quibbling reservation aside, Orgeron’s Ole Miss turns out to be an ideal subject for Feldman's examination of the recruiting process precisely because the program lacks the deep pockets of many schools it competes against. To make up the difference Orgeron's plan is to expend more effort than anyone else and Meat Market outlines in gruesome detail how the Rebels attempted to do just that. And, in the end, fell short.

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The sheer number of transformations that have occurred to the game of football over the last 141 years makes it seem an alien contest when held in comparison to the modern version. Even worse, our perception of the early era of football is marred as much by its bungled recounting as it is by the sheer distance of time.

A superb antidote to those difficulties can be found in the works of New York Times sportswriter Allison Danzig, particularly his 1972 book Oh, How They Played The Game: The Early Days of Football And The Heroes Who Made It Great.

Danzig, who wrote for the Times from 1923 to 1968, was a renowned for his coverage of tennis but became a key chronicler of football with, is epic and encyclopedic effort in 1956 The History of American Football: Its Great Teams Players And Coaches. Yet the sheer volume of data in that work makes it rough sledding for the casual reader.

Oh, How they Played the Game is a much different enterprise. Danzig cherry picks the history of the sport looking to highlight the key coaches, players and contests that defined it during its first half-century or so.

The hobgoblin of histories of the sport is almost inevitably the author of the tome itself. The urge to embellish the events at hand is almost inevitably matched by the temptation to fill the prose with excessive stylistic touches. More than a few compelling narratives about the early days of the sport have floundered in these literary waters but Danzig’s navigation is straight and true.

The success of Oh, How They Played The Game is almost wholly due to the inspired approach Danzig takes to writing the book – he stands almost completely aside. Instead, he has culled the interviews, stories and recollections of the actual participants and observers of the events in question. Through shrewd editing the narrative that emerges is that told by the subjects of the work itself.

The recollections of Walter Camp, Amos Alonzo Stagg and John Heisman are juxtaposed with chapters on epic games such as the 1913 Army vs. Notre Dame contest credited with popularizing the forward pass, the oft-forgotten inaugural Rose Bowl contest between Michigan and Stanford in 1902 and Centre College’s dramatic upset of Harvard in 1921.

The book also looks at the point-a-minute squads under Fielding Yost at Michigan, the "four horsemen" coached by Knute Rockne at Notre Dame and "Pop" Warner’s teams at Carlisle Indian School that boasted the great Jim Thorpe.

Knute Rockne rolls to a touchdown against Army in 1913.

The greatest upshot of Danzig’s approach is that it never succumbs to the type of fandom for one squad or another that is achingly distasteful for anyone who isn’t among that particular group.

If Knute Rockne wants to discuss why he felt an affinity for Notre Dame, I can live with that. But if the author also wants to beat me over the head with it as well, I’ve got better things to do with my time. Like read more books by Allison Danzig.

Where Oh, How They Played the Game does its greatest service to the modern reader is introducing in great detail lesser known players and coaches from these eras.

While names like Jim Thorpe and Red Grange carry a certain familiarity today there’s often just a limited understanding of what their achievements on the gridiron actually encompassed. And players like Frank Hinkey, Adolph Schultz and Hamilton Fish are almost completely forgotten outside of the fanbase of the schools they played for.

Even more revealing are the playing days and early coaching efforts of coaches who went on to become legends of their own including men like USC’s Howard Jones, Vanderbilt’s Dan McGugin and Alabama’s Frank Thomas. The coaching trees of the men on the sidelines today that we trace with such detail can be traced back through these legendary leaders to the originators of the sport.

The one gripe I have about the book is that it finds space for a chapter on Tennessee's General Neyland but has nothing on Wallace Wade or Frank Thomas. But that's partisan nitpicking and I know it.

For any real aficionado of football Oh, How They Played The Game is a superb book to read. It makes it possible to actually step back and look at the early game on its own terms. And once that’s been accomplished, the ways it applies to the modern game stand out in bold relief.

The index of titles reviewed in this series is now available on the Football Study Hall Facebook page.