The competition didn’t end once students were accepted. Starting in the 1920s, they had to contend with Terman’s new grading system, which ranked them on a curve of comparative rather than absolute achievement. But the bionomists also needed an athletic substitute for combat, and Jordan believed that he found one in football. “[H]e felt football’s combination of physicality and cooperation fit in with the spirit he wanted to see thrive at Stanford,” writes California historian Kevin Starr of Jordan.

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Stanford was literally like the ivy league version of the hitler youth.

Of course this should come as no surprise given the history of Leland Stanford and the Stanford family.

More valuable than any single horse, any thousand horses, were the insights into natural efficiency the farm developed. The “13 million horses × $100” calculation is the kind of disruption math that twenty-first-century start-ups use to persuade venture capitalists to sink millions into protean projects, but Leland only had to convince himself it was worth his money, which he seems to have had no problem doing. Bringing industrial techniques, goals, and capital to the production of animals, Stanford’s farm was the prototype for what the scholar Phillip Thurtle calls the laboratories of speed, with their limitless resources, firm-style employment bureaucracies, (pseudo)scientific breeding methods, and focus on a single product.11 This was not an animal farm in any classic sense; it was an experimental engine factory, churning out high-performance horse flesh by the ton. Since they sold horses for their genetics—the blood more valuable than the muscle—the Palo Alto Stock Farm was really in the business of intellectual property