History

The College Football Hall of Fame has a rather tangled, if not checkered, history.

It began in 1947, when a group of Syracuse businessmen formed the National Football Foundation to promote the college sport in general, with establishing a hall of fame as one of its primary purposes.

In a 1949 poll of college coaches, athletic directors, and sportswriters, Rutgers University was chosen as the site for the hall, because the first college football game (actually a soccer match) was played there in 1869.

When the first induction, of 52 players and coaches, was held in 1951, the hall of fame existed only on paper - and it stayed on paper for more than 25 years.

Arthur Evans, who had spearheaded the effort from the beginning, died shortly after that induction, and his successor, George E. Little, became seriously ill after taking over.

As a result, the foundation was in disarray until it was reorganized in 1953 under the leadership of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey and sportswriter Grantland Rice.

Ambitious plans were made to construct a building and the foundation entered into an informal agreement with Rutgers, which set aside some land for the hall of fame.

However, fund-raising efforts fell well short of goals. Finally, in 1976, the owners of the Kings Island Amusement Park near Cincinnati offered $5 million for a hall of fame building on their property.

The new hall of fame formally opened in August of 1978, but attendance was disappointing through the years, and it shut down in 1994.

The present hall of fame reopened in 1995 in South Bend, Indiana, near the campus of Notre Dame University. The National Football Foundation has separate offices in Morristown, New Jersey.

A 12-member panel comprising media representatives, athletic directors, and conference and bowl officials votes annually on nominees. To be eligible, a nominated player must have been chosen to a major All-America team and must be ten years out of college. A coach has to be retired for three years.

In 1996, a separate small-college category of inductees was created for players and coaches from NCAA Divisions I-AA, II, and III.

NOTE: In the lists below, the column labeled "Career" shows the first and last years that a player played or a coach coached at the college level. That doesn't necessarily represent a continuous period. The column labeled "Ind." shows the year that the person was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

A player may be listed more than once if he played two or more positions in college. Only three people, Bobby Dodd, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and Bowden Wyatt, have been inducted twice, as coaches and players.

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