The University of Nebraska Press is a treasure trove of terrific books about sports and sports history, and a new issue about the early days of pro football by Washington Times sports columnist Dan Daly looks to be a real treat.

In the “National Forgotten League: Entertaining Stories and Observations from Pro Football’s First Fifty Years,” Daly comments that “it’s amazed me how little literary attention has been paid to pro football’s early days.”

In the days before the creation of NFL Films, and the arrival of Pete Rozelle and the television age, there was virtually no literature to speak of. Daly, a co-author of “The Pro Football Chronicle,” points to the lack of newspaper coverage. By the time the NFL was created in obscurity the early 1920s, baseball and college football already had enjoyed decades of flattering prose by some of the best stylists in sportswriting and beyond.

As George Halas once observed: “The history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word a la baseball.”

This 424-page volume is Daly’s effort to rectify that, after two decades of painstaking research, including the discovery of hard-to-find newspaper articles and other materials on tucked-away microfilm reels: “Up to now, the game’s early days have been a silent movie. I’m trying to turn them into a talkie.”

Daly breaks down what he calls his “scrapbook” by decades, and ends promptly at 1969, and not just because that year winds up his 50-year survey:

“At that point, in my mind, the party was over. Pro football will never be as fascinating as it was from the ’20s to the ’60s. It’s all about maintaining success now, protecting everyone’s investment. And that breeds conservatism. The league moves so slowly these days that it took thirty-six years to fix the obviously flawed overtime rules (for the playoffs, at least). If the AFL were still around, prodding the NFL into being better, the correction would have come much sooner.”

An excerpt published on ESPN.com in October recounts the NFL saga of one Steve Belichick, who started the 1941 season as the equipment manager for the Detroit Lions and wound up starring as a fullback. And later became the father of you know who.

The death of Alex Karras on Wednesday, just weeks after that of NFL Films impresario Steve Sabol, has those nostalgiac for the days of pro football’s past reflecting even more deeply on the state of the game as it is now.

ESPN.com’s Jeff MacGregor continues his exploration of the nature of football while remembering the legacy of Karras, known better to younger generations of Americans as a “Monday Night Football” analyst, Mongo from “Blazing Saddles” movie fame and a television personality. At least his ferocious persona as a Detroit Lions’ defensive lineman — a good one, but not a truly great one — was nothing but authentic, during a time when that was all that mattered:

“The NFL has long since been streamlined and sanitized. The game itself is faster and bigger and stronger and more brutal than ever, but the aesthetic now is sleek and frictionless, corporate, artificial, no sleeves on the jerseys or mud on the fields. Somehow there’s more of it amounting to less and less. I understand this has as much to do with me growing old as it does with the game or the league.

“But as a matter of ticket sales and public relations, the NFL tries now to hide its violence. This is dishonest. Football is the last Great Circus and the last of our epic American fables.”

MacGregor gently takes issue with Kansas City Chiefs’ lineman Eric Winston’s insistence last week that football players aren’t gladiators, in the true Roman sense. Winston was irate, and understandably so, that his team’s fans cheered as struggling quarterback Matt Cassel was carted off the field on Sunday.

With the constant news of concussions and on-field violence all around them, Winston and his fellow football professionals are stuck in an increasingly hysterical morality play in which their own humanity is an afterthought. The most popular spectator sport in America is becoming a crucible in which vast sums of money, enormous television ratings, bounty-hunting, concern over medical ethics and an aversion to acknowledging the sport’s undeniably violent roots are making it difficult to have an honest discussion about what’s at stake, and what can be done.

While Karras and his generation of players accepted the game as it was, they anguished about the consequences in their later years.

George Plimpton’s 1966 book, “Paper Lion” later became a film in which Karras played himself, and launched his acting career. Though Plimpton’s Walter Mitty-like experience with an NFL team was the core of the story, what also couldn’t be denied was the brutal toll the game took even on its most rock-ribbed participants.

Karras, who was 77, had been diagnosed with dementia brought about by head injuries sustained during his playing days. The cause of death was kidney failure.

Tim Stevens of the Raleigh News & Observer pens a solid history of the absence of a North Carolina girls high school basketball state tournament until 1972, just before the passage of Title IX.

This ban was cemented by actions over time from the male-dominated state high school athletic association, state school board association and finally the legislature in the early 1950s. But the main impetus behind relegating females to intramurals and “play days” came from the female leaders of the “physical education movement” as early as the mid-1930s:

“Rather than playing on athletic teams, girls were encouraged to participate in dance, etiquette classes and play days. Girls were encouraged to participate in less competitive activities, such as cheerleading. Boys basketball tournaments, including the NCHSAA’s championships, recognized girls by selecting tournament queens.”

The story then quotes a women’s sports advocate calling out all the usual social bugaboos for these restrictions — fears that athletic women would develop big muscles, be seen as unattractive to men, and generally be unladylike.  (When I was a kid, and before I even knew what they were, I heard things like “You’ll hurt your ovaries!” )

The exceptions were in rural areas and in the African-American community, where the realities of farm work and physical labor created different notions of proper activities for females.

I’m fortunate I was born at a time when I could shrug off those warnings and play anyway. (My ovaries are just fine.) I’m truly sorry that women profiled in this story, including Jennie Pegram, now 79, didn’t have the advantages female athletes have today. She’s in my mother’s generation, and this is a needed reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that different attitudes prevailed.

As I wrote in my women’s sports series last spring, the beliefs of women physical educators weren’t limited only to what they thought the limits of women’s physical abilities might be. They also wanted absolute control over how females exerted themselves for other philosophical reasons, and they especially didn’t want men to govern these activities.

There has been a strong anti-competitive line running through organized sports for females for more than a century. This line didn’t hit a wall until the AIAW-NCAA rift in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when women’s college sports were beginning to flourish and the issue was about pure power.

That all-male governing bodies kept girls and women out of the game for decades is not news. The fact that the philosophical justification for many of these decisions came from educated, professional women trained to teach females about the benefits of athletic competition but who were reluctant to do so continues to fly under the radar.