This article about the University of Chicago football is so interesting. Let me know if you hit a paywall and I’ll see if I can paste it.
That was a quite detailed piece and largely sympathetic to the eccentric history of the College in respect of football. A good picture is painted, with many examples, of the typical Chicago athlete - for whom playing the game itself is the real interest, not the adulation of crowds. The piece does not touch on the question of whether the abolition of football was a disaster in terms of impoverishing the culture of the College, eroding the support of alumni, and generally causing the University of Chicago to drop out of the public mind - to have led to a one-dimensional student experience focused entirely on academics from the bad effects of which the College is just beginning to recover.
Those who loved that experience and believe it made the College unique will not subscribe to that narrative, of course, but it does provoke an interesting thought-experiment: What would the history of the College have been over the past eight decades if instead of abolishing football in 1939 the University had gone all-in to become competitive in it a la the Big Ten schools that Chicago had once dominated. One shudders to think.