Do you think they could have imagined how big the NFL, NBA and college sports would have grown? Sure Naismith was Kansas' first head coach but he never got to the point where college basketball was much more than a YMCA league on steroids.

Naismith died in 1939 and Warner died in 1954. I don't think either one of them could have envisioned the huge economic impact of sports on American life and media in the present-day.

Pop Warner coached some pretty big games back in his day, especially for Carlisle Indian School. I think he probably had an inkling of how big football could be. But honestly, how on earth could any of them reasonably know how big sports are today. They could never even have imagined the technology we have today, the amount of people in our country, or simply how greed runs sports.

So although I believe both of them understood how much people loved their respective sports, there is simply no way they could know how big they have become.

Naismith is the only coach in KU history to have a losing record. He's also famous for having told Phog Allen "You don't coach basketball, Forrest; you play it.". While I think he knew how beloved it had become at KU, I think he'd be surprised at just how big college hoops has become.

The Golden Age of Sports ran from 1919-1930 and college football was one of the kings then. Warner was coaching at Pittsburgh and Stanford. He would have had the better inkling than Naismith.

(12-09-2015 03:19 PM)_C2_ Wrote:  Do you think they could have imagined how big the NFL, NBA and college sports would have grown? Sure Naismith was Kansas' first head coach but he never got to the point where college basketball was much more than a YMCA league on steroids.

I remember when I was a boy back in the 50's, an Ole Miss head basketball coach stepped down and received a raise when he took a football assistant coach position at the same school.

"Head basketball coach" was not a full-time position at the University of Florida until the 1960s. Before then, that job was done by (typically) an assistant football coach who needed some extra income.

As recently as 1963, the head coach at Auburn (Joel Eaves) was expected to serve as the chief scout for Auburn's football opponents. Eaves had been the hoops coach since 1949 and had some real success. But you get one guess which job was considered more important in the eyes of the Athletic Admin. on the Plains.

Pay-for-play was huge deal in the 30s - the Ivies stood out because they refused to pay. In 1936 the AD at Cornell wrote, "there has been a strong drift among the eight or ten universities of the East which see a good deal of one another in sport toward a closer bond of confidence and cooperation and toward the formation of a common front against the threat of a breakdown in the ideals of amateur sport in the interests of supposed expediency."

By the 40s gambling was a huge part of college sports - an investigation in 1951 revealed that from 1947 - 1951, at least 86 college basketball games were fixed.

I think that anyone paying attention in the 30s could see the way it was going.