The trouble with football,” University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote in December 1938, “is the money that is in it, and every code of amateurism ever written has failed for this reason.” Athleticism, Hutchins argued, was “carried on for the monetary profit of the colleges and the entertainment of the public,” contributed nothing to the “development of the mind,” and deserved no place in an institution of higher learning. The following year, Hutchins withdrew Chicago from the Big Ten Conference, and he soon thereafter disbanded the school’s storied football program altogether.

Hutchins’s critique was probably rooted more in an elitist hostility towards mass culture than a concern about the fairness of such a profitable enterprise resting on the unpaid and unprotected backs of “amateurs.” But he wasn’t entirely silent about the latter. Hutchins lamented the lasting physical toll the sport took on individuals well after their playing days were over. Nearly one in five football players suffered “serious injuries” during their short careers, he noted — lifelong conditions that entitled them to no compensation.

“The cheers that rock the stadium,” he poignantly observed, “have a rapid depreciation rate.”