Opinion: College football’s struggle is nothing new

Nearly 100 years ago, near the end of 1926, newspaper readers in America were presented with a diatribe, of sorts, by Frank G. Menke, a sports writer syndicated by King Features Syndicate. The subject: How college football had gone from clean competition to big business. He didn’t sugarcoat the state of the game. “The nauseating feature of it all is the hypocrisy still practiced by the colleges in trying to make folks think that collegiate football of today is still a ‘sport’ whereas every bit of evidence proves that it’s nothing other than a gigantic commercialized venture in which colleges use their students to enrich their coffers millions of dollars annually,” he said.