New Headline: Yale’s Tackle’s $20 Million Signing Fee Breaks Long-Running $1. 5 Billion NIL Agreement
James Hogan of Yale may have had the first NIL deal - it was a cigarette empire. In the summer of 2021, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 ruling in NCAA v. Alston that shook the foundation of college athletics.
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion didn’t open with a modern quarterback or a viral social media star. It opened with a Yale tackle from 1904. His name was James Hogan, and more than a century before the term “NIL” entered the college football lexicon, he was already living it — in spectacular fashion.
From Irish Steerage to the Ivy League James Joseph Hogan was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1878, in a townland still living under the long shadow of the Great Famine. He arrived in America as a two-year-old, the son of immigrants bound for the brass and woolen mills of Torrington, Connecticut. His childhood was defined by work, not privilege.
He pieced together an education bit by bit, saving enough money to eventually enroll at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire — a school built for the sons of New England’s professional class. He walked in anyway. Older than nearly every student around him, with an Irish accent and a grown man’s frame, Hogan captained the Exeter football team in 1899 and 1900 and dominated the field.
When he arrived at Yale in 1901, he entered a football program unlike anything else in America. Walter Camp’s Factory of Prestige Between 1872 and 1909, Yale won 26 national championships and compiled a record of 324 wins against just 17 losses. The program was less a team than an industry, and the man running it was Walter Camp — halfback turned football architect, the same man who invented the line of scrimmage, the snap from center, the system of downs, and the 11-man team.
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