As part of the NCAA Centennial celebration in 2006, The NCAA News is publishing features on each of the Top 25 Defining Moments in NCAA history. In this issue: the founding of the NCAA.

For a list of all 25 moments and events selected, see the January 2 issue of The NCAA News.

There is no disputing that football led to the formation of the NCAA in 1906, though there is some residual debate about just who threw the final flag on the sport that had become so violent that it threatened the lives of those who played.

In October 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War, invited representatives from Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University to the White House, where he suggested that the game either be reformed or removed. But those three schools did not immediately react. Rather, it was a month later, on the day a New York University player was killed in a game, that NYU Chancellor Henry M. MacCracken began a more effective effort to accomplish Roosevelt’s charge.

Ironically, Harvard President Charles Eliot was MacCracken’s first contact, but Eliot declined his colleague’s urging to call a meeting of peers to address the football problem. Known then as “the Big Three,” the schools Roosevelt challenged had their own ideas about reforming the game. Thus, MacCracken himself made a clarion call that attracted representatives from 13 colleges and universities, who scheduled a subsequent meeting that they vowed would include a larger audience.

On December 28, 1905, members from 64 schools — none of which represented the Big Three — gathered and elected their own rules committee. When that group made another attempt to connect with the Big Three, the latter once again paused, but Roosevelt intervened and suggested a joint committee that became known as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States. Four years later, the name was changed to the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

But there was another player in the formation of the NCAA, one that nurtured all of college sports — not just football — into becoming one of the most popular enterprises on the planet, and certainly unique.

That player was higher education itself.

Several researchers and writers have chronicled the origins of the NCAA through football, but few have gone beyond the surface to explore all of sport’s curious connection with college. In his NCAA Centennial book “In the Arena: The NCAA’s First Century,” University of Nevada, Reno, President Emeritus Joeseph N. Crowley does both. His findings about the NCAA’s founding are familiar: Roosevelt may have quarterbacked the early Association across the goal line, but MacCracken put the organization in scoring position.

But Crowley probes further. “How had American higher education gotten itself into this predicament (with football)?” Crowley asks. “Why in this country, unlike elsewhere in the world, had universities developed such a close association with intercollegiate sport that provided entertainment and spectacle on a grand scale while seemingly having little relationship to the noble purposes of the academy?”

In many ways, Crowley said, that question has been raised in various forms throughout the Association’s 100 years, and probably will be for many more years to come.

As early as the 1860s, when the first versions of intercollegiate football began being played, there had been a proclivity for students to play games. “Intercollegiate competition seemed a natural outgrowth of these activities,” Crowley says. “The role of alumni in supporting, financing and even administering college teams helped cement the tie between institutions and their athletics programs.”

Crowley writes that competition among schools was common in Britain, but the American version took the bond between college and sport to a new level.

“The decades after the Civil War came to be regarded as the first Golden Age of American higher education,” Crowley said. “The classical curriculum imported from Britain in the 17th century was under siege in those years. The curriculum was rigid, made up of required courses, and the route to an undergraduate degree at most colleges was largely the same for all students. Apart from medicine and law, education in the professions — business, engineering, agriculture, journalism and the rest — had been relatively rare. These curricula were being added.”

In addition to American higher education becoming more versatile, it also became more available. Black colleges were being established, as were colleges for women. Land grant schools were being organized in every state. “The American college, now with many more programs to offer, was turning into a university,” Crowley writes. “The old British model endured, of course, but it gave up a lot of ground. Borrowing ingredients from other countries and inventing some of its own, the fundamentally democratic American model of higher education took root during this time.

“The country was not geared just toward educating gentlemen anymore. We were building a system that ultimately would be open, in one venue or another, to anyone who wanted to come through the door.”

Sports were a natural outgrowth of that expansion, Crowley said, and amateurism — rooted in the British and Greek ideals of early competition — remained as integral to the enterprise. That unique bond is what the NCAA is entering its second century trying to protect and nurture.

“In America, the amateur ideal provided an anchor, a tie to the past, perhaps a symbol of continuity,” Crowley states. “That ideal would need to change and stretch as higher education became a major vehicle of democratization, with college sports playing a key role. The continuing challenge for American colleges and universities ... was to preserve the fundamental principle and ethical essence of amateurism, while applying it in a thriving democratic environment. That, too, would be the NCAA’s constant challenge.”

Thus, while football provided the impetus for the Association’s founding, the American model of higher education gave college sports the infrastructure for the NCAA’s mission of integrating sport with the higher ideals of learning.

It’s a mission that defines the Association and makes the founding of the NCAA a logical member of the “Top 25 Defining Moments” club. It also contributes — in one way or another — to the subsequent 24.

Coming in the January 30 issue: Former Marymount University (Virginia) basketball player Corrine Carson exemplifies the character of NCAA student-athletes by returning to competition after a liver transplant.