This is a little afield from my normal NYT extracts, but for other purposes I have been scouring old documents for issues concerning college athletics. During the process, I came across this article in the Jan. 19, 1905 issue of Life Magazine:

FOOTBALL IS INDISPENSABLE

We have four embarrassing national possessions - the Monroe Doctrine, the Tariff, the Philippines and the Game of Football. They are all very troublesome, but of none of them can we let go. There is continual grumbling about football, but what does it avail so long as football brings in the money on which nearly all the other forms of college athletics subsist? Football is the hard-working rich uncle of all the little impecunious athletics, the milk-can for all the infant athletic industries. It has got to work for gate-money, or there will be destitution in the college athletic family - no sweaters, medals and photographs for the earnest workers, no new grounds for the scrub and minor teams, no paid coaches for anybody, no anything but mere play, except, perhaps, for the baseball teams, whose opportunities are such that they can earn their own money. Let us stop thinking so much about football as a game, and think of it more as a laborious form of benefaction, even though we realize that the great danger of benefactions is the chance of pauperizing folks, or industries, that could struggle along on their own legs if they had to, and would be better off if they did.

Except for the Philippines issue, this article could be reprinted in today's Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, or Sporting News, and have the same accuracy as it did 101 years ago.

It is interesting that over the past one hundred years only r two more sports have begun to carry their own weight in terms of revenues approaching costs: men's basketball and, to a lesser extent, women's basketball.

Amateur sports are generally of lower quality than professional sports, and the lack of revenue generation by, say golf and swimming, suggests to me that those sports are indeed remaining amateur. The sports that generate the most revenue on campus are also those that are closest to professional-quality play.