What happened in 1922?

[falafel]

Someone posted a link to a list of all the National Champions. Not surprisingly, the Ivys won them all for several decades. From 1869 to 1900, an Ivy League school won every football national championship. Michigan won it in 1901 and 1902, but then the Ivys took it back but allowed academic heavy weights like Chicago and California to have a turn. Pittsburgh also won a NC in the 1910s, as did Army.

Then, almost out of nowhere, the Ivys (and other academic super schools) dropped off the planet. Illinois, Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, USC, TCU, Texas A&M, and other schools like that took over. Penn, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Princeton never recovered. What happened?

[Mr. Crimson]

Someone posted a link to a list of all the National Champions. Not surprisingly, the Ivys won them all for several decades. From 1869 to 1900, an Ivy League school won every football national championship. Michigan won it in 1901 and 1902, but then the Ivys took it back but allowed academic heavy weights like Chicago and California to have a turn. Pittsburgh also won a NC in the 1910s, as did Army.

Then, almost out of nowhere, the Ivys (and other academic super schools) dropped off the planet. Illinois, Notre Dame, Georgia Tech, USC, TCU, Texas A&M, and other schools like that took over. Penn, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Princeton never recovered. What happened?

This is why I took sports history in college.

Football was a violent nasty sport resulting in several deaths a year. People were quite regularly injured by running into the flying wedge. The professional level was such a joke that the entire sport was nearly banned. The Ivy's along with some other high end educational schools, such as the University of Chicago and Northwestern actually dropped the sport. They brought it back but in deemphasized form after rule changes made it safer.

[Surfah]

Get the BYU Vault book and read all about the early days. People died playing football.

[Fiyero]

Think of it like sex. Everyone was dying, so they invented protection.

[falafel]

So, if I understand everyone's replies, the "what" that happened in 1922 was that the Ivys and the other top tier academic institutions basically dropped the sport, making way for the state schools to start winning. Then, once better rules and protective gear were introduced, it was too late for the Ivys to get back into it, or maybe they had just given up competing.

Is that the consensus?

[Mr. Crimson]

So, if I understand everyone's replies, the "what" that happened in 1922 was that the Ivys and the other top tier academic institutions basically dropped the sport, making way for the state schools to start winning. Then, once better rules and protective gear were introduced, it was too late for the Ivys to get back into it, or maybe they had just given up competing.

Is that the consensus?

Essentially the model changed. The Ivy's used kids from the prep schools in New England, people who could afford to go to those schools. Scholarships weren't involved. By the time the Ivy's got back in, the rise of college football to "bigtime" wasn't something they wanted to be apart of.