My digital public history project this semester was to create an online archive of the covers of college football programs throughout the years. When I began work on a project for this semester I had initially planned to create an online hall of fame for the university because the digital hall of fame that the university has, I thought, is lacking in some areas of information on different athletes. I found out very quickly that the information was just simply not in the special collections. This caused me to have to change tracks. One thing that I found plenty of when looking for athlete information was old college football programs. This was something that had always peaked my interest because the older programs always had some type of cartoon image that dealt with the individual game they were playing, and not different athletes like the newer programs.
When I found all of the different programs I began to question why the programs had changed to be images of athletes on the cover. An answer hit me when I was watching FS1 and Jason Whitlock went on a short rant about college football athletes being exploited the entire time they are in college in order for the universities to make more money. He specifically talked about the marketing of college athletes who are not allowed to make any profit off of themselves. That is when the idea hit me that the universities are marketing the athletes in an attempt to sell more programs. The universities are exploiting these athletes on the cover of the different programs because the athletes are not allowed to make any money off of the covers or off of anything that bears their image.
After deciding on this angle, I had a hard time finding different pieces to use in my project. Part of my problem at first was the approach that I was taking when talking to different people about getting pieces. This issue was specific to universities. I have a friend that worked with the SID at Arkansas State University, and I convinced him to run my project by his former boss in an attempt to find programs. The response I received was less than ideal. I understand why. My project came off as accusing he and his colleagues of exploiting young athletes for monetary gain. Needless to say I never heard back from the SID at Arkansas State. I ran into the same issue with University of Louisville, Arizona State University, and the lovely University of Louisiana- Lafayette. I have friends working with the athletics departments at Louisville and Arizona State. I never heard back from these institutions so I had to change my approach to sound less combative and accusatory. The new approach worked, and I was permitted to use the digitized programs from the University of Tennessee. I was also granted access to programs from a couple of individuals’ collections.
Once I had the pieces, the site was simple enough to construct. I elected to use a simple format because the individuals that might be looking at college football programs online would not care to use a very fancy and hard to use site. I separated the programs into collections based on the decade they were printed in. I began with the 1920s because there was very little from the years before 1920 available. I then ran the range of the project all the way up to this year because it is the most recent programs available. I also had all of the programs thrown together in the items page as a separate way of viewing them if someone would rather look through a less organized view of the programs for whatever reason. I made the site searchable by school name, team nickname/mascot, year, and current conference. I did this to make it easier for someone to find a specific team or year that interests them.
This project should be able to help anyone that views it better understand the changing marketing strategy of college football. The NCAA was already sued for using the likeness of athletes in video games (NCAAF) without compensating the athletes. Under their own rules, the NCAA could not allow the athletes to be paid for their image being used, so they decided instead to stop making the video game. Looking at my site might make people, like myself, question how that was unacceptable but programs can be sold with the athletes picture on the cover without the athlete being compensated.