Introduction

Wolfpack Coming onto Field for Football Game, 1930

Intercollegiate athletics emerged in America by the late nineteenth century.  During this time, teams were loosely managed by students and volunteer faculty members.  By the 1880s, newspaper coverage of college sporting events initially sparked the transition to bureaucratization and commercialization of these programs.  The popularity of college football increased in the early 1920s, but by the end of the decade calls for reform and the accompanying economic decline of the Great Depression limited the growth of intercollegiate athletics.  Nonetheless, by the mid-1930s, college football was again flourishing, reigniting issues of professionalization versus amateurism.

During the 1936 football season at North Carolina State College, questions surfaced over the functions and meanings of intercollegiate sports when the football coach, Hunk Anderson, failed to produce a winning season.  Dr. Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina system, interrogated Anderson’s position as a football coach and moral leader.  At this time, Graham also decided to question the Athletic Director, Dr. Ray Sermon, concerning his treatment of athletic funds and scholarship money to determine if Sermon followed Southern Conference rules.  While Anderson’s contract was not extended and Sermon managed to keep his job, the questions surrounding money transactions signify larger national debates in the late 1930s over amateurism and winning, scholarship aid, recruiting, and money and gifts for coaches and players. 

NC State’s controversy illustrates a school trying to decide the value it wants to place on college football, which included determing the level of the program’s professionalization and national recognition.  The following sections will reveal how one man, President Frank Graham, attempted to inhibit this transition and argue for a return to academically centered sports.  The reactions of alumni like David Clark portray the desire for NC State’s football program to transition to big time corporate sport.