CHICAGO — The University of Chicago, well known for Saul Bellow, Milton Friedman and its links to 85 Nobel Prizes, was once famous sea to shining sea for football. It boasted a legendary coach, a Heisman Trophy winner and a national championship.

Then, in 1939, it did something extraordinary. It gave up the game to save its soul.

“In many colleges, it is possible for a boy to win 12 letters without learning how to write one,” Robert Maynard Hutchins, the university’s president, had written acidly of sports in The Saturday Evening Post. He particularly disparaged football, deriding as myth the idea that the game produced men of good character or instilled a sense of fair play. Indeed, for a college to be a success on the field, he said, it must be something of a scoundrel beyond it.

Seventy-two years later, what Hutchins called the “infernal nuisance” of college football is troubling more university administrators than ever. Ohio State, Miami, Southern California, North Carolina and on and on: it is as if global warming were affecting the number of big-name colleges in hot water.

And yet Chicago is quietly back on the field. Instead of euthanizing the game, Hutchins merely put it in a coma. In 1969, football returned as a varsity sport, oddly enough during the Vietnam War era when many rebellious students were comparing blocking and tackling to bombing and strafing.