I N T RODUC T I O N9by the New York Times in 1931 found that not a single college had changed its practices to adhere to the NCAA codes.21 Voices of reform grew more outspoken in the thirties. Hollywood movies from the Marx Brothers�Horse Feathers to Saturday Heroes and Hero for a Day mocked the duplicity of college sports.22 Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, wrote in 1931: ollege is not a great athletic association and social club, in which provision is made, merely incidentally, for intellectual activity on the part of the physically and socially un. College is an association of scholars in which provision is made for the development of traits and powers which must be cultivated, in addition to those which are purely intellectual, if one is to become a well-balanced and useful member of any community.�3 Without meaningful reform in the system, the University of Chicago dropped its football team in 1939. Ironically, what seemed to be a deliberate repudiation of brutality and irrationality was transformed into what many believe to be the quintessence of the samehe stadium locker rooms at the University of Chicago swiftly were converted into secret laboratories for the federally funded Manhattan Project, dedicated to developing the atom bomb. The Depression affected ticket sales at college football contests in a predictable fashion, but colleges continued to compete against each other in their efforts to recruit top high school players. The scarcity of players led to still more abuses during World War II as well as to the relaxation of player substitution rules and the introduction of twoplatoon football.24 By war end it seemed to some that transgressions of the amateur code had reached unconscionable proportions. Stanley Woodward, the sports editor for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote in November 1946: hen it comes to chicanery, double-dealing, and undercover work behind the scenes, big-time college football is in a class by itself. . . . Should the Carnegie Foundation launch an investigation of college football right now, the mild breaches of etiquette uncovered [in the 1920s] . . . would assume a remote innocence which would only cause snickers among the post-war pirates of 1946.�5 The payrolls of several college teams reached $100,000 and the coach at Oklahoma State estimated that its rival Oklahoma spent over $200,000 a year on players (approximately $1.8 million in 1998 dollars).26 The conjuncture of falling revenues and rising costs, along with a sharp rise of gambling on college contests, led the NCAA to grow increasingly concerned about the absence of an effective enforcement mechanism to uphold its principles of amateurism. While the search for an enforcement mechanism was postponed by World War II, it resumed in July 1946 when the NCAA convened a
