It's the fourth year of Revolution in college football and the sport is still swinging its sword and pushing forward. But in spite of multiple changes made to the game's culture and governance model, several of what appear to be the most fundamental alterations are actually direct returns to an earlier era.
It has in fact been the sport's overseers changing their perspectives—either because the courts imposed it or due to an organic shift in beliefs—that has allowed the most radical changes to take root. It is the reorientation toward the belief that "amateur athletes" have the right to trade on their abilities in exchange for payments in the private marketplace that indicates the actual dismantling of the old order. The age of the so-called Gentleman Amateur, which rose to pre-eminence in the 1890s during a vastly different era of American history, and somehow clung to college athletics as everything else changed around it, is officially over.
After setting aside the one unprecedented break with the old ways—which is the impending move by the colleges to share television, gate, and merchandise revenues directly with athletes—almost all of what is happening, from the decentralization of the NCAA's power in favor of a conference-centric oversight, to the creative financial compensation for top-tier athletes, is a renaissance of the game's existing genetic material.
While we wait for an announcement on the next prep star's deal with a university affiliated Name, Image, and Likeness collective, or an independent business's move to hire a star football player to represent its brand, we can look back at one of the monster cash earners from the sport's early era and experience a shock of recognition.
HOGAN'S SQUARE DEAL
James J. Hogan was a powerful tackle on Yale's offensive and defensive lines from 1901 through 1904, during the final years of the Bulldogs' nearly four-decade dynasty. During that era the tackle might have been the most crucial position on the team. The forward pass was illegal, which meant the middle-of-the-field ground game was pre-eminent, and linemen could carry the football in the brutally effective massing plays that the top Eastern schools favored for steamrolling their opponents. Hogan was at the center of it for 48 games in New Haven.
For the purposes of a timeline we can start Yale's 37-year conquest in 1872, when the school played its first game, and close it at the Promised Land in 1909, when the Elis won their 26th and penultimate national title. Over the course of those glory strewn autumns the Bulldogs sledgehammered their opposition en route to 24 undefeated seasons, retiring from the field with a final record of 324-17-16, a 91-percent win rate that no program will even challenge over that length of time, no matter how long the game is played.
For many of the prep-academy athletes that competed against Yale at the turn of the century, their square ups at the line of scrimmage with Hogan—who was 25-years-old during his freshman season—might have been their first harrowing experiences with being manhandled. While it was common for football players in that era to be several years older than their classmates—a tendency we see returning to the sport in the 21st century—the circumstances and the extremity around Hogan's situation were rare.
Hogan had been two-years-old when he first stepped onto the wharves at New York City. He had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean with his family, probably stuffed steerage-class, on a ship sailed from County Tipperary, Ireland. Despite spending the preponderance of his childhood working to support the family, Hogan slowly plowed his way through primary school as well, diligently saving money until he could pay his way into Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the country's premier prep schools and a feeder program for the Big Four of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Penn.
Hogan had also managed, in contempt of the grinding poverty he was raised in, to consume enough protein to grow nearly six-feet tall and fill out a powerful 210-pound frame. While 210 pounds is not particularly big today, in 1900 the average male was around 5-feet 7-inches and 150 pounds. It was a thick body for a sport that played two-way iron-man football.
Hogan had built much of his prep-school reputation by shifting into the tackles-back formation, a variation on the massing plays that would be banned from the sport over the next decade, in order to slam through a gap in the line carrying the football. It was this ability that had caught the discerning eye of Walter Camp, the chief executive of the football program at Yale. Camp had modified his own series of tackle-back plays for the Yale offense and could envision Hogan turning them into a weapon of mass destruction for the Bulldogs.
Yale's record during Hogan's four autumns of competition—which included three straight All-American campaigns for himself—was 43-3-2. In 1902 the Bulldogs shared the national championship with a new Western power that had been built at the University of Michigan.
And all of that is what Hogan, who belonged to a small group of star players that were recruited to the Eastern powers, had been paid to do. Hogan's financial package, which he bargained for in an underground marketplace that pitted alumni from the biggest Eastern programs against each other, was particularly lucrative.
In those days what we call now the athletic scholarship did not exist, the so-called Full Ride would not come to fruition until 1956, but Hogan had his tuition, books, and board covered. He was procured also a suite at Vanderbilt Hall, the school's luxury dorm, which was reserved generally for the heirs of fortunes made during the Gilded Age, or those with the fabled Blue Blood running through their veins. The fact that Hogan was billeted at the best hall on campus is proof of how much his services meant to both Yale's alumni and its football program.
On top of the early version of the full ride, plus the extra benefits that came with the on-campus suite—an educational add on that would not be legal until 2021 with the U.S. Supreme Court's Alston decision—Hogan was issued $100 cash from a slush fund kept by Camp. The cash would be worth around $3,300 in purchasing power today, while in Hogan's time a dozen eggs sold for around $.14 cents and ground beef went for about $.07 a pound.
But Camp, anticipating that the petty cash would become depleted, provided Hogan with a franchise on the score cards sold at Yale's baseball games. The cards generated a lucrative passive income that kept Hogan's pockets heavy with coin throughout the spring and summer. All Hogan had to do was hire a few of the townie kids from the streets of New Haven to sell them on his behalf. Over the course of a season at the ballpark tens of thousands of cards were pushed onto fans and the haul, minus a few bucks for the lads, was brought back to Hogan.
Camp, who had authored most of the sport's essential rules, and built Yale's program to win with them, was as active in the game's black market as he was prominent in the legitimate quarters that the newspapers covered every day. But while the anti-amateur hysteria of that era forced Camp and his athletes to conceal their otherwise legitimate arrangements, the shift in perspective that is happening today would have allowed them to operate in the open without any fear of retribution or ridicule.
Yale's alumni and boosters, the equivalent of today's NIL collectives, put the final shine on Hogan's deal when they made him an agent of the American Tobacco Company. The ATC, a corporation founded twenty-years earlier in Durham, North Carolina by a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, bought up almost all of its competition to become the largest cigarette manufactory in the world.
As an (undeclared) agent of the company Hogan was entitled to a commission on every pack of ATC cigarettes sold within the city limits. This provision came at a time when smoking was as socially acceptable as drinking a bottle of branded water is today. Whenever the boys down at Mory's bar, or at the members-only clubs that ringed campus, called for the cigarette girls, Hogan was in for a taste. The ATC bagman delivered the rake directly to his luxury suite.
In his final campaign the 28-year-old Hogan, who was three years older than his head coach, captained the Bulldogs to a 10-1 record, with wins over both Harvard and Princeton, as a valedictory. For his immense contributions to the program the Yale Athletic Association, which was the school's unofficial athletic department and run by the ubiquitous Camp, sent the big tackle on a two week, expenses-paid holiday to Cuba as a way of saying thanks.
While all of Hogan's arrangements could be made openly in 2024—with the exception of the cigarette deal, which would touch off a round of moralizing chatter—it was the discovery of the Cuban holiday inside of the Athletic Association's cooked books that caused a scandal for Camp and college football.
CAMP'S SLUSH FUND SHOCKS THE CLUELESS
From the time Camp competed at Yale, which ran from 1876 through 1881, and on through the 1909 season, when his mastery over the sport was in decline, Yale was dominant against both Harvard and Princeton, its primary rivals. Alongside the Bulldogs, the Crimson and the Tigers comprised the diamond-tier of the sport during its first rocket shot to mass popularity, and the winner of that series was for many years crowned the national champion.
Against Harvard, the Bulldogs had run up an incredible 20-3-4 record, with multiple routs counted amongst the victories. Princeton had been the only real program to consistently stand up to Yale during her dynasty years, but even the Tigers finished with an 8-19-7 record against the Yalies in what were often championship games played in front of huge crowds at the Polo Grounds New York City.
Yale's outstanding record in the Big Games brought ecstasy to its alumni, students, and fans, and as a consequence they did not ask many questions regarding how it had come together so well for them. Camp was clever in the way he disguised the extent of his continued involvement with Yale's program. From the outside Yale looked the model of an amateur operation, with graduate coaches—often the previous year's captain—returning to run the program for a season at a time. That strategy allowed Yale to proclaim it was protecting college football from professional coaching, which was considered at that time a disease lethal to any amateur endeavor.
But Yale's entire program was orchestrated by Camp, who was a rough equivalent to chief strategist, coach, team president, general manager, and treasury officer all rolled into one. In his civilian life Camp had worked his way up the corporate structure at the New Haven Clock Company, starting as a regular employee on a course toward chief executive officer and eventually chairman of the board of directors.
Camp ran Yale's program and, in many ways—from his post as secretary of the rules committee—college football itself, with the same standard of executive ability and intelligence that he ran his company. Camp organized Yale's yearly calendar, its recruiting and its fundraising, and met with graduate coaches throughout the year, coaching them on how to coach the fundamentals while installing his tinkered-with offensive and defensive systems.
Camp made it his mission to keep Yale football as the first among equals for as long as he could, and he built the program to run as near to a self-perpetuating machine as possible. It was not that Yale and Camp were doing things that other programs were not—payments and extra benefits were omnipresent in college football at the turn of the century—but they were doing it better because Camp was smarter.
Few of the men who ran the serious programs lived in denial of how the game-behind-the-game had to be played, and they went at it aggressively. This left the faculties and the administrators at the colleges, who frequently did live in denial of how the system operated, to preach the importance of a purified amateurism reigning over the sport.
The public messaging from the schools was that players were legitimate students who had come to school in the regular way. They played football because they loved competition for its own sake. And recruiting students to campus because of their athletic abilities was strictly forbidden. It was the universities' infatuation with the vision of an amateur utopia that caused habitual dishonesty to infest the sport like termites in the woodwork.
When Clarence Deming, a muckraking journalist, published evidence of a massive slush fund at Yale in the January, 1906 issue of the New York Evening Post, a shockwave ran through the more naive quarters of the sport. The powerful and publicly self-righteous Camp, who regularly opined on the importance of amateurism to the spirit of college football, was exposed for the first time in an embarrassing scandal.
It is likely that some zealous reformer, either within the program or as a consequence of a successful espionage operation, went to the media with detailed intelligence on Yale's system. Deming reported that the Yale Financial Union, an athletic holding company established by Camp in 1892, had amassed more than $100,000 in cash—somewhere around $3 million dollars today—from which to operate the program and to "acquire athletic material."
A significant part of the fund had been built up by an $8 yearly fee on students, a charge that would become institutionalized at universities across the country in the middle of the 20th century. While the athletics fee was technically a donation, the football-heavy culture in New Haven likely made it feel compulsory. While the students loved the program, there was something oily about an adult CEO like Camp soliciting cash from the undergraduates to use in a black marketplace. It also was flagrantly against both the rules and spirit of honorable amateurism that the colleges promoted.
Hogan's Cuban holiday was discovered under a "MISC. EXPENSES" heading, while Camp's salary, previously undisclosed, was listed under "MAINT. OF FIELD." Camp had been represented publicly as an unpaid advisor to the program. It was assumed that his zeal for the program had kept the furnace glowing through the winter months. Further expenses filed under "MISC." indicated that Yale paid a regular stable of tutors to keep her athletes in good standing, which suggested that some were not fully qualified students out for the autumn exercise.
The reform elements within the media and colleges made the revelations into a scandal. They called it the scourge of commercialism, professionalism, and overemphasis that was destroying college football and American morality alongside it. Had Camp been running a lesser program he likely would have been ostracized from the sport, but Yale's president, Arthur Twining Hadley, was the rare Northeastern academic who understood the value of football and appreciated its place at his campus.
Camp and Yale both moved on from the scandal, though Camp's pristine reputation was besmirched and his clout within the sport pitched into a decline. Within the year Camp was ousted from his oversight position on the rules committee after a Machiavellian coup, led by Harvard and a group of reformer schools, hit home. Camp's preeminence as football's most important law giver would pass into history, but he would be christened The Father of American Football in recompense, and it is a title that has stuck with him ever since.
Hogan, who was an excellent student as well as an athlete, went on to earn his law degree from Columbia University in 1908. He was on his way to a distinguished professional career when in 1910 he died suddenly of Bright's Disease, an acute kidney pathology, at age 33. In honor of his physical dominance on the field, and his fame as a three-time All American at the turn of the century, Hogan would be enshrined in the inaugural class of the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.
And so it stands that even as college football appears to be crashing forward into a new world, it is in fact being borne back into the past, but this time with a different perspective on the rights of the amateur athlete. What was once done secretly and in shame may now be done openly and with honor.
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