NCAA President Charlie Baker recently sent a letter to the organization's Division I member schools recommending the creation of a new NCAA tier in which schools pay athletes for representing their college or university. This is not the first time someone has made such a suggestion.
The 1920s and 1930s saw player payment schemes proposed by many parties, driven by tremendous changes in college football. Massive stadiums rose across the nation and, once built, needed to be filled. The latest technology, radio, became a commercial offering with money to be made by those on the radio side and schools, as some sold the right to sponsor and broadcast games to the highest bidder. In addition, players like Red Grange left the college playing fields and immediately cashed in, earning previously unheard-of sums for playing football.
Adding these factors atop existing school and state pride exerted more pressure on coaches and administrators to attract talented players, train them properly, and win. The "seamy underbelly" of college sports surfaced once again as alumni and others induced high schoolers to enroll at one school or another, while others provided benefits for remaining in school. The 1929 Carnegie Foundation report documented many of these faults, showing that college athletics was an increasingly commercialized enterprise filled with contradictions.

Like today, the 1920s and 1930s heard numerous calls to eliminate the hypocrisy by acknowledging that many schools financed their athletic departments and facilities on the backs of football players, who, in theory or practice, received nothing of economic value by playing along. (Formal athletic scholarships did not arrive until the mid-1930s.)
Bill Tilden, who dominated international tennis as an amateur and professional, argued that commercializing college football brought the evils of professionalism without benefiting the players.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Football Archaeology to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.