Whatever happened to OU-Nebraska?

My last post recalled the Big Eight glory days of the OU-Nebraska rivalry. On November 7^th 2009 the Sooners and Huskers played out a depressing 10-3 Nebraska win which featured a single touchdown, scored on a drive of one yard. The game will not enter the cannon of great and memorable meetings in this storied series. Both the 2009 Huskers and Sooners have had their problems at the quarterback position while fielding first rate defenses. It wasn’t surprising that the game proved a less-than appetizing spectacle of mutual offensive inertia. Naturally every great rivalry series will occasionally provide an underwhelming spectacle. That in itself is not a problem. The sad fact about this game is that Oklahoma will not play in Lincoln again until 2013. Since the inception of the Big XII the OU-Nebraska series has only been played two of every four years. Season ticket holders in Lincoln and Norman only enjoy the opportunity of seeing their erstwhile rival as often as they can vote for who resides in the White House. That, in my opinion, is a travesty.

So what ever happened to the OU-Nebraska game?

During the 1984 off-season the U.S. Supreme Court heard and ruled upon a land mark case launched two years earlier to challenge the NCAA’s centrally negotiated television rights monopoly. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma vs. the NCAA proved to be college football’s Brown vs. Topeka. This decision combined with the growing number of channels available to American television sets via cable to pave the way for the near-saturation point levels of exposure enjoyed by the game today. Most importantly, the decision gave individual schools and conference the rights to control and distribute the revenue their games generated. This revolution turned the historical rationale for conference alignments on their heads. Geographical cohesion, natural rivalries, travel costs, institutional bonds and any number of factors that had created and sustained conferences through the mid-1980s were increasingly marginalized as the golden calf of TV revenue grew larger and demanded ever greater sacrifices.

In 1991 the SEC expanded to 12 teams in order to take advantage of a previously over looked NCAA by-law stating that a conference of twelve teams might form into two divisions and create a football championship game. Conference commissioner Roy Kramer saw an opportunity for a high profile game with unparalleled revenue generating capability. He was exactly correct. The SEC set a decade of conference musical chairs in motion after the 1991 season by extent ending invitations to independent South Carolina and long-time Southwest Conference member Arkansas. An ongoing dispute over the school’s radio broadcast and revenue rights made Arkansas administrators only too eager to bolt. This realignment immediately produced two unintended consequences. Firstly, it showed other schools and conferences the immense financial and publicity value of the two-division, championship game format. Secondly, it rendered the SWC an irrelevant, parochial conference geographically rooted in the local identity and tangled political life of a single state.

From the late 1960s onwards a cycle of cheating involving recruitment violation and payment of players infected the entire SWC. Struggling conference rivals attempted to keep from slipping too far behind the increasingly powerful Longhorns and Aggies. Eventually these unscrupulous practices unraveled the entire league. After the NCAA handed SMU’s football program a one-year suspension for the 1987 season boosters at various schools began a sordid retaliatory process of mutual muckraking that reduced the league to an utterly discredited public family feud. Once Arkansas departed UT chancellor William Cunningham began to explore the possibility of following suit. Despite initial flirtations with the academically alluring Pac 10 and Big 10 the most logical choice was the Big Eight. Conversations began primarily with the athletics director of longtime non-conference rival Oklahoma Donnie Duncan. With the model of the SEC’s lucrative expansion as a guide an agreement emerged by February of 1994 to marry the Big Eight with the four largest and most politically influential Texas universities. ABC’s initial contract with the new Big 12 was worth a base $90 million over five years with an extra $10 million incentive to add a championship game. The league obviously possessed the super-regional appeal that the SWC had long since lost.

Conference realignment, the conference championship format, and an increasing volume of nationally televised games through a growing entourage of cable network partners ushered in a new era for college football. Naturally, and perhaps fittingly, many aspects of the game’s former landscape changed. Conference commissioners and school administrators had to balance the weight of history and tradition with the generally more weighty imperatives of garnering the public interest and athletics revenue necessary to sustain competitive advantages. For the Big XII, the two division format added a championship game and created a juggernaut conference of national consequence. But it also involved a geographical divorce for the old Big Eight. Moving OU and Nebraska to different divisions meant potentially losing an annual series that had provided some of college football’s most memorable games and largest television audience. In the SEC several schools refused to allow realignment to disrupt the history of their most important annual fixtures. In order to maintain the Auburn-Georgia and Alabama-Tennessee rivalries the league created four other annual inter-divisional series. This balance the mathematics of an eight game regular season and maintained the fixtures that created the most local and national interest in the league.

Why did the Big XII decide not to pursue a similar option in order to maintain the OU-Nebraska series? I recently discussed this question with Daily Oklahoman columnist Barry Tramel, an outspoken advocate of restoring the OU-Nebraska series to an annual fixture. According to Tramel the old Big Eight rivalry posed two major problems for the new conference alignment. Firstly, the game had traditionally been scheduled for late November since it almost invariably constituted a de facto conference championship play-off. In that slot the fixture garnered enormous national interest and large TV ratings. The new two-division format generated the distinct possibility Nebraska and OU would meet one another in the conference title game not infrequently. In that case a regular season fixture in November would lose the winner-takes-all relevance that had long made it a national staple.

Secondly, in the mid-1990s little appetite for maintaining the series existed in Norman. The possibility was raised of playing the game as a non-conference fixture on the two years of every four that the schools did not meet in conference play. Nebraska lacks a natural geographic rival and over the long history of Cornhusker football only Oklahoma has provided an annual game against an equally weighted powerhouse. Naturally folks in Lincoln wanted to maintain the annual meeting. But times were hard for OU, which had not won a conference title since 1987. NCAA sanctions and negative publicity resulting from recruiting violations and several high-profile player arrests led to Barry Switzer’s tumultuous and bitter departure in 1988. From 1989 to 1994 Gary Gibbs posted an unimpressive 44-23-2 record with only a single win over each of Nebraska and Texas. 1995 brought the disastrous single season tenure of the fossilized Howard Schnellenberger. John Blake failed to right the ship from 1996 to 1998 with an inglorious 12-22 record. While the 1990s were nothing but unkind to OU Tom Osborne’s Cornhuskers won seven conference and two national championships. Offered an opportunity to drop the Huskers from the schedule two of every four years, Donnie Duncan jumped at the chance. The Big XII replaced OU on Nebraska’s annual November slate with Colorado, the only other team from the old Big Eight that might even attempt to claim anything like national prominence. Suffice to say that this annual rivalry game has thus far failed to match the glory years of the OU-Nebraska series.

Despite his columns appealing to the weight of tradition and the spirit of competition, Tramel does not see any momentum for the idea of restoring the series. Short of adopting Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy’s highly unpopular and wildly unrealistic suggestion of an eleven-game, round-robin conference schedule [which would obviously mean eliminating the lucrative championship game for which the conference was initially created], there is no chance that OU and Nebraska will play annually anytime soon.

Board of Regents vs. NCAA and the explosion of television coverage for college football that followed have, largely speaking, been good for the game. They have certainly been good to fans, who can now see almost every game of any significance nationally televised somewhere on their dial. But no transition between historical eras is ever without cost. The Big XII omelet involved the breaking of several proverbial eggs. The messy divorce of the old SWC has made life very difficult for several of the former member schools not fortunate enough to be taken along to the new Promised Land.

By comparison to the continued struggles of the football program at once-proud SMU perhaps the downscaling of the OU-Nebraska series is a relatively minor consequence. But anyone who remembers the days when the Big Eight's two great colossus programs perennially crashed into one another at the business end of the AP poll is likely to disagree.

(Sources: SI scorecard, 03/07/94; Dunnavant, 50 year seduction; cfbdatawarehouse.com; Boyles and Guido, USA Today CFB encyclopedia; oral interview with Barry Tramel; Sally Jenkins, SI, Sorry state)

Stanford rolls in the Coliseum

Stanford and Southern Cal can only be called rivals in the strict sense that they have always shared a conference and played one another annually. Decade after decade the on-field disparity between the two schools’ football prowess and aspirations could hardly be greater. Thirty-eight times USC has earned at least a shared conference championship. Stanford has managed only twelve, ten of those coming before 1970. USC holds a lopsided 58-26-3 series lead. Prior to 2009 Stanford had managed to win on consecutive visits to the Coliseum only three times. In contrast the Trojans longest streak without a loss in the series ran to almost two decades. USC defenses have held Stanford scoreless on fifteen occasions – more than one of every six meetings. Stanford has not shut out USC since Hitler invaded Russia. Only five times have Stanford teams breached the 30 point barrier against the Trojans, with one of those coming in a loss. Trojan teams have, over the years, taken Stanford to the woodshed not infrequently.

On 14 November 2009 Jim Harbaugh’s team earned Stanford University a second consecutive series road win vs. USC. The Cardinal beat the pre-season Pac-10 favorites emphatically, laying on a staggering 55-21 beat-down. This represents the series’ most complete win since USC throttled Stanford 54-7 in 1952. The ’09 Cardinal exceeded Stanford's best ever offensive productivity versus Southern Cal by twenty points.

On 9 November 1957 the Stanford Indians rolled into Los Angeles and hung a 35-7 thrashing on USC. That win stood as Stanford’s best over the west coast’s most dominant football power for over half a century. The win would have been as unlikely as ever had the Trojans not been under major Pacific Coast Conference sanctions for flagrant violations of league scholarship rules. The PCC, formed in 1915, had a strong constitution and a powerful commissioner to penalize transgressions. The NCAA had virtually no enforcement power in those days. Each conference set different scholarship, recruitment and eligibility boundaries and enforced them how they saw fit. In the early 1950s the PCC members gave athletics scholarships in the form of grants equal to the cost of tuition. The league allowed up to sixty such scholarships to come directly from regular institutional funds but additional scholarships could be given with money raised specifically for the purpose. Players could also earn money through work programs with remuneration limits set at $2.00 an hour not to exceed a total of $100 per month. Money raised for athletics scholarships came through organized booster club accounts.

Evidence that the University of Oregon athletics department had allowed booster club payments to players exceeding the league's limits forced the resignation of head coach Jim Aiken in 1951. Five years later Oregon officials reported similar payments at rival UCLA. Investigations unraveled a web of scandal inculcating most of the conference members in illegal payment schemes channeled through shady booster which reported only a fraction of their payments. Through the 1956 off-season PCC investigators turned up evidence that the activities of UCLA’s “Young Men of Westwood” organization, UW’s “Greater Washington Advertising Fund,” USC’s “Southern California Educational Foundation” and Cal’s “South Seas Fund” amounted to little more than unrestricted slush funds. Harsh penalties followed for the schools involved, accompanied with ongoing acrimonious protests from California schools which argued that a higher cost of living in Los Angeles and the Bay area necessitated additional aid that inflexible conference rules did not permit. The ill-will created eventually caused the PCC to disintegrate. In 1959 the four California schools and Washington began a new affiliation in the Athletics Association of Western Universities, which lacked any formal enforcement mechanism beyond an institutional honor code and did not require every member to play each of the others. Eventually every former PCC member except Idaho joined the AAWU and formed the Pac-Eight, but the league remained little more than a loose affiliation of mutually distrustful programs until well into the 1970s.

Unsurprisingly, squeaky-clean and academically rigorous Stanford was the only California school in the PCC not Penalized for scholarship rule violations in 1956. USC, Cal and UCLA were banned from accepting bowl bids for several years and lost key players to ineligibility rulings. In 1957 Don Clark returned only 15 of 34 lettermen from his 8-2 team of the previous year. The Trojans’ starting lineup was decimated by the loss of virtually every skill player. If there ever was a year for the Indians to score a big win over their perennially merciless big brother, this was it.

Stanford coach Chuck Taylor was a gentleman and an optimist. He accepted the job in 1951 more because he loved Stanford than from any personal ambitions to coach. Taylor never held another job and coached in Palo Alto only seven seasons. As a player he had been an all-American guard and captained Stanford’s 1941 Rose Bowl team to victory over Nebraska. His first Stanford team as coach started 9-0 before dropping the two games that really mattered – Cal and the Rose Bowl against Illinois. None of Taylor’s subsequent teams enjoyed such success, two 6-3 campaigns constituting his high watermarks thereafter. He later served as athletics director, overseeing another Stanford Rose Bowl trip. Even in the late 1950s Taylor faced the problem of academic eligibility in an intellectually rigorous environment. He could only recruit the players who, like him, truly wanted to be at Stanford. Unlike coaches in Los Angeles, Taylor could not easily replace stars. After the graduation of all-American John Brodie, the school’s record setting passer, Taylor had to return to more conservative game planning. First year starting quarterback Jack Douglas could throw down field if necessary but was best utilized as a runner in a well populated backfield. Taylor told reporters before the season that despite graduating two all-Americans, losses of rare magnitude for any Stanford coach, he felt his team’s offense would be better. He was right. Though Taylor’s team stood at only 4-3 heading in to Los Angeles on 9 November they had plenty of competent runners on the roster and employed end-around and pitch-out runs successfully from a Spread-T formation [not entirely unlike the modern spread-option]. The Indians made yards on most of their conference rivals, especially the ones reeling under league sanctions.

Generally inhospitable

Like Taylor, Don Clark coached his alma mater. He had been a successful but not outstanding guard and had played two years of pro football with the San Francisco 49ers after serving in WWII. Also like Taylor he only ever had one head coaching job. He began as an assistant at Navy in 1950 before moving back to USC to work for Jess Hill in 1952. With controversy swirling around the program in 1957 Hill “moved upstairs” to become USC athletics director. It seems strange that a coach leading a program coming under punishment for scholarship rule violations should be promoted to AD, but university administration firmly believe no wrongs had been committed and that the fault lay with unfair enforcement of misguided league standards. That was all well and good for Hill, but on the field Don Clark was left holding the baby. Clark’s three years as Trojan coach included two of the program’s worst. Losing players to ineligibility rulings and without the lure of a Rose Bowl trip to promise recruits Clark struggled. His first team finished with a pitiful 1-9 record. Little wonder he decided to return to his family business in 1960 and never went back to coaching.

The USC team Stanford faced on the field in the Coliseum in November 1957 was not cut from the usual Trojan cloth. Starting center Ken Antle had played only 44 minutes during the previous season, which was fairly typical. Halfbacks Tony Ortega and Rex Johnson were large enough, but lacked elite speed. The Trojans had won their first game of the season 19-12 the preceding week on the road against equally underwhelming 1-4-1 Washington. No one was surprised when Stanford’s more experienced line and faster backfield ran all over Southern Cal.

Before a homecoming crowd of over 50,000 the Indians refused to play the part of obliging visitor and put on a workshop in classic 1950s football. Occasional underneath passes to backfield members served primarily to augment the multi-faceted running game. Fullback Chuck Shea, the PCC’s leading rusher, made 77 yards on the ground with a 6 yard touchdown run. Jack Douglas’ passing figures were competent but far from eye-catching. He went 10 of 16 for 85 yards with his most impressive stat, a 12 yard touchdown strike to future Dallas Texan wide receiver Chris Burford, coming after a third quarter USC fumble that allowed the Indians to ice the game.

For most of the afternoon Stanford was methodical, not aggressive. The Indians made 21 first downs to the Trojans’ 15. They opened the scoring with a first quarter 67 yard drive. USC answered immediately, capping a 76 yard, eleven play drive early in the second quarter with a twenty yard strike from quarterback Willie Wood to end Don Voyne, the only passing play of the drive. At that point it looked as though the two teams might trade blows all day, but Stanford dug in and from that point the difference in depth between the two squads showed. The Indians held Wood to only nine completions in twenty-two attempts for a total of ninety-four yards and two interceptions. The Trojans added 168 yards rushing but lost a crucial fumbled inside their own twenty when they could not afford to give up another point.

Seven points in the first quarter and fourteen in both the second and third put the game beyond doubt. Trojan tempers were obviously frayed and late in the final quarter a fracas erupted on the USC sideline that resulted in the ejection of USC’s Walt Gurasich and Stanford’s Don Dawson. No doubt receiving convincing home-field thrashings from perennial underdog Stanford was as much fun for Trojan lettermen in 1957 as it is today. Tempers flared between Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh after the 2009 meeting over the Stanford coach’s decision to try a two-point conversion in order to crack fifty points with the game already beyond reach. No matter how many years pass and how personnel may change, it is unlikely that USC will ever take a home loss to Stanford as anything other than an unusual and highly frustrating occurrence.

Luckily for USC fans they probably won’t have to get used to the feeling. Jim Harbaugh is fielding job offers from all corners and will likely move on at some stage in the not-too-distant future, while battering-ram running back Toby Gerhardt will almost certainly be giving the most articulate interviews in the NFL next fall. The 2009 Cardinal fielded Stanford’s best offense ever – better even than their efforts with John Elway in the backfield. Stanford fans should enjoy it while they can. The 2010 Cardinal will likely be a lot worse and the chances of the university beating USC by thirty again in the next five decades are probably not brilliant.

"How do ya'like them apples, coach?"

"I dislike them very much, coach."

(Sources: PCC, wiki; SI, Brave new AAWU; New York Times; SI, 1957 PCC preview)

Two random items on Georgia Tech

In the earlier part of this decade I lived for two years on the campus of Georgia Tech (though not actually enrolled at the school). During those years I went to quite a few Tech football games. Most people outside of Atlanta don't know as much, but Georgia Tech has a lot of very fun and rather peculiar campus traditions. They are mostly there to keep the students from going insane because life is hard when the only pictures in your text books are diagrams involving Greek letters and squiggly lines and there are approximately three females to share between every seven males.

One of those traditions at football games is that after the third quarter the band always plays the music from the song in this totally awesome-tastic, old-timey Budweiser commercial:



While the band plays the students bob up and down on the alternate beat to the people either side of them. The visual effect is quite impressive, though it's hard to do if you have no rhythm. [Incidentally, the 'no rhythm' demographic accounts for somewhere around 98% of Tech undergraduates not actually in the band, dance squad or football team]. When the band plays the duh-duh-duh-daa the students all chant "Go Georgia Tech, go Georgia Tech, go Georgia Tech, go Georgia Tech... when you say Bud-weis-er, you've said it all."

Thus:



It may sound lame, but it's fun. So much fun that while I was "at" Tech the students would stay until the end of the third period no matter how badly the Jackets were getting licked just to do that song/cheer before heading back to their dorm rooms to meet their online role playing game friends and complain about how badly Chan Gailey's play calling sucked. But no one ever explained to me why the band always did that song. I'm not sure anyone actually knew.

Then today I was listening to the ESPN U college football podcast and Beano Cook, who invariably fills his sentences with random, unprovoked pieces of invaluable information from days of yore, mentioned that back in the late 1960s when the NCAA finally allowed television broadcasters to sell advertising slots to alcohol distributors during college football games they had certain restrictions. Those restrictions included a stipulation that liquor commercials could only appear after the end of the third quarter [obviously to limit the amount of time alcohol advertisers could purchase]. Back in those days the average CFB game only ran around 18-20 commercials, took about 45 minutes less time than today's marathons (unless you count Notre Dame on NBC in which case they took about 8 hours less), and breaks generally only included a single ad. So back in the early 1970s it was likely that the third quarter break in most televised college football games consisted exclusively this awesome Bud commercial, nay, work of art. The GT band started playing the same tune at their own games as an amusing parody during the 1970 season when Bud Carson was their coach. And they never dropped it.

I think this is brilliant and so wonderfully Georgia Tech. Firstly, by the standards of your average football crowd joke, this is at least somewhat clever. Secondly, forty years later they're still doing the same thing even though most GT students have probably neither seen the commercial nor heard of Bud Carson. That's the way they roll in midtown Atlanta: nerdy and old-school.

Speaking of old-school... just how old-school is Paul Johnson? There are so many reasons to love what he's doing at Tech. This is a man who has made his career on the back of an offense that his contemporaries view as antiquated. Now Johnson is so out of style that he's all the way back in vogue as the flavor of the month. You also have to love that his offenses keep rolling up yards even though the other team knows exactly what is coming. But most of all, I just love to see Georgia Tech winning again. This is a school that was a national football power and perennial Notre Dame rival back when every school in the entire South sucked hard core except them, Bama and Tennessee.

Take a look at the box score from GT's recent home upset of the Hokies. One completed pass and an interception in only seven, count 'em VII - SEVEN - attempts passing for 51 yards with a whopping 309 yards rushing and 4 touchdowns. These numbers are so old school you pretty much have to go back to the fall of 1906 to find fans who wouldn't scratch their heads at them.

The forward pass was introduced by the NCAA rules committee after the public outcry following a brutal 1905 season. The rule was envisioned initially as a play that would be run behind the line of scrimmage laterally to remove bodies from the tackle box and prevent deadly scrum collapses. It surprised people when coaches tentatively, and at first infrequently, began to use the rule to advance the ball vertically down the field.

In his 1994 book The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game David Nelson's book attributes the first collegiate forward pass to Bradbury Robinson of St. Louis University on September 5th 1906. Similar passing plays wowed fans across the nation on the rare occasion coaches plucked up the courage to try the move throughout the 1906 season. Most pundits felt the fad would not catch on.

On September 27th the New York Times reported forward passes in the Carlisle-Villanova game the preceding day and commented:

"The passing was more of the character of that familiar in basket ball than that which has hitherto characterized football. Apparently it is the intention of football coaches to try repeatedly these frequent long and risky passes. Well executed they are undoubtedly highly spectacular, but the risk of dropping the ball is so great as to make the practice extremely hazardous and its desirability doubtful."

This is no doubt similar to the kind of reception Tech's 51 yard completion must have received in the stands at Bobby Dodd Stadium on Saturday. Concerned Tech alumni must have turned to one another and said:

"Golly-gosh darn it, friend. What the jimminy is that coach Johnson fellow playing at, having that poor Nesbitt chap attempt one of those risky, new-fangled forward passes!"

And quite right they are, too. When you can lay 309 yards on a VT rushing defense that had averaged only 95 ypg allowed against teams not named Alabama, why pass? GT clearly doesn't need to. So in the age of five-wide out, run-and-shoot, air-raid madness: crack open a nice cool Bud, Paul Johnson. You've bloody well earned it!

Seeya...

(Sources: wiki, forward pass; David Nelson, Anatomy of a game)

Book review - Fifty Year Seduction

Following on from my post about recent scheduling trends, I want to consider the question of revenue. The gears of my mind started turning recently after noticing one comment responding to a column by Senator Orin Hatch. The comment asked what business the Mountain West had telling the Big XII etc. what to do with ‘their money’?

This notion got me thinking about the question of revenue. Where does college football revenue come from, who generates it, how is it shared and why? Most importantly for this blog - how did we get there?

In all the BCS controversy over the last half-year the whole national championship game discussion has been a red herring. The BCS is primarily a revenue sharing system. The #1 vs. #2 title game is the lipstick on the revenue sharing pig.

I have not found any source as informative on all these questions as Keith Dunnavant’s book The Fifty Year Seduction: How Television Manipulated College Football, from the Birth of the Modern NCAA to the Creation of the BCS. I consider it to be required reading for any informed football fan. It is a meticulously researched and fabulously detailed eye-opener.

Dunnavant takes the story back to the NCAA's growth from a tiny organization with a handful of employees. He shows how completely dependent it originally was on football revenue. The annual TV contract, run as an absolute monopoly, was negotiated centrally and sold to the highest bidder. The money was shared equally among division one schools. Only one game a week was televised. Fans had no choice and the most popular programs had no independent access to TV rights and coverage.

As college football grew in scale this relationship began to tear. The first major change came with the division 1 spilt in 1978. But the more prominent football powers were still not satisfied. Some, like Notre Dame with their long established national radio following, chafed under the system. They felt that they could generate far more alone, trading on their own mystique and appeal, than by relying on collective bargaining power to drive up prices.

After years of discontent and discussion, the landmark 1984 Supreme Court ruling Board of Regents vs. NCAA smashed the monopoly. The enormous slate of televised football we have today is the result. But initially, the glut of available products depressed the market. For over a decade reduced prices and starving athletic departments fought to recover the golden goose they had seemingly slaughtered with the monopoly. Dunnavant locates the creation of the BCS within this process, showing how worried and hurting schools with massive football-driven athletics departments replaced one monopoly with another.

My summary cannot possibly do Dunnavant’s work justice. He goes into detail as to how ABC created modern TV football coverage. He reveals intricate human stories as to how deals were cut, and why. Most importantly, he writes with nuance, intelligence and impartiality. No doubt many readers would take the insightful detail in the book and view the story differently than I do. The bottom line is, this is an invaluably informative work. However the reader feels about TV revenue, the NCAA and the BCS, this is a must read.

Scheduling

There has recently been a lot of chatter regarding scheduling. It is an increasing trend for supposed power-house programs to line up less-than tantalizing non-conference slates of all home fixtures against multifarious current and former 1-AA sacrificial lambs. A recent rant by Jay Christensen (a.k.a the Wiz of Odds) on the In The Bleachers podcast got me wondering exactly how recent this trend is.

In 1978, NCAA football's top division split into 1-A and 1-AA. Big-time football schools felt shackled by their long-standing marriage to an equal number of much smaller programs. Each school possessed one vote in all matters, regardless of revenue or scale of operations. Big-time football schools felt that they needed different rules and organization for the very different requirements of high-revenue big-time ball. Many of the smaller colleges saw the split as an attempt by the big boys to starve their programs to death.

But how far was the 1978 split truly a divorce? Exactly how often did these big fish and their minnow bed fellows play against one another?

All the data for this post is taken from a survey of the game's major powers in the modern era. I define that as schools with more than one AP national championship since 1950. Those schools are Oklahoma, Texas, Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, Penn State, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, LSU, Florida State*, Miami, Nebraska and Michigan (who I included because they're Michigan, even though their 1997 championship is amazingly their only AP crown since 1950. They just kept finding ways to lose the Rose Bowl when it really mattered).

I looked for the number of games these teams played against schools which have spent more than a decade of the modern era below college football's top division. That includes schools who began in division 1 but moved down sometime after 1978, as well as schools who have risen to division 1-A from a lower level. It also includes several now discontinued programs such as Wichita State, Pacific etc. who went straight from the top division into non-existence.

The following graph indicates the number of games played between top-tier programs and smaller schools when both teams were technically competing at the same level. For example, Alabama vs. Wichita State in 1979 - WSU continued as a 1-A school until dropping football in 1986; Texas vs. UNT in 1992 - North Texas only moved up to 1-A in 1982; and Miami vs. Florida International in 2007 - FIU moved up to 1-A in 2005 and only began football in 2002.

I dropped the 1950s from this graph because the results were skewed by the fact that the three Florida schools did not really grow into major powers until after that decade. After the 1950s no decade contained a total of more than 22 games between the major programs and these smaller opponents. Until this one...

Not a pretty sight.

A more recent trend has been for division 1-A schools to play current 1-AA members. After 1978 such games did not count towards the necessary win total for bowl eligibility. That rule changed in 1998 after an NCAA amendment was proposed by the Big XII and adopted.

That this rule should come from the Big XII is interesting. Neither Oklahoma nor Texas had ever played a game with a team then competing in a lower division. With the exception of a few games against the South Dakota schools in the early 60s and one fixture with Middle Tennessee in 1993 (MTSU moved to 1-A in 1999) neither had Nebraska. Obviously some Big XII powers hoped to clear the way for some serious resume padding. And the giants of the SEC were only too happy to vote for the move.

From the divisional split in 1978 to the adoption of the bowl eligibility measure in 1998 no single season contained more than two games between major powers and a team then competing in 1-AA ball. More than half of those years contain none at all. Then this happened...

Inexcusable cowardice.

Seven games in one season between schools with more than one national championship and programs with twenty less scholarships competing a division below. If that doesn't make you change the channel, either your alma mater is involved or you've dozed off.

For more context, the following graph shows games between the major powers and schools then competing in a lower division by decade.

Not for the feint of heart.

The other regrettable recent trend is the number of big programs refusing to sign home-and-home series for non-conference games. This is tied to the declining value of the average September fare because obviously better opponents will only sign contracts to play return fixtures. So now we have Notre Dame, the historic giant of the game known for its many inter-sectional rivalries against other big boys, playing one-and-done home fixtures against Nevada - a school which only moved to 1-A ball in 1992.

I wondered how far back the trend of playing an unbalanced home slate went. I counted every season the big boys played six or more home games in a ten games season, or seven or more in an eleven or twelve game season since 1950. The figures were skewed somewhat by the fact that Michigan has apparently played more home fixtures than away since the dawn of time, and Florida and Tennessee are almost as travel shy. By comparison Texas, Notre Dame, USC and Oklahoma played a combined four seasons with a home-away imbalance prior to 1999!

Since then...

"Oh no, we can't travel. What about our precious revenue?"

Apparently, we are now told, home revenue is so vital that big football schools cannot possibly play less than seven, usually eight home games. This is clearly nonsense. For one thing, a decent one-and-done opponent will now run you over $1 million. That's what Clemson is paying TCU this September. Even your local UT. Chattanooga will claim around $750,000 for the eight touchdowns they guarantee your future Heisman winning QB Sam Bradford. Furthermore, how did all these schools ever make ends meet before this decade on only six home games?

What has happened to college football in the last decade?

For one thing, the 2002 move to the 12 game schedule has been a total joke. People love college ball because its amatuerism encapsulates the very essense of competition for its own sake. The 12th game has universally been used to add a cheap win to the record and fill athletic department coffers through $85 bleacher tickets for a 58-0 win over East Podunk State U. Whenever anyone talks about playoffs to improve the game ADs and Presidents complain about "too many games," yet they added an extra one already this decade for no competitive reason whatsoever. How about dropping the 12th games as part of post-season reform? Are there any greedy coaches and administrators brave enough for that?

I see two main issues that require reform. Firstly, the rule allowing one win per season against a 1-A opponent to count towards bowl eligibility should be scrapped. It's an indefensible joke. If 12 games is too many, play 11. If you need the revenue, then man up and actually play someone. There's no need to offend your fans and waste precious transmitter space that could be better spent on Saturday afternoon made-for-TV movies.

The Wiz of Odds goes as far as to suggest that teams playing a 1-A opponent should be disqualified from the national title game. That seems fair to me. This season's favorite is the Mighty Gators. Is it really necessary for Tim "second coming" Tebow and pals to beat the living snot out of Charleston Southern? Why not just stay home and have a nap instead? Oh yeah, revenue...

Secondly, the problem is the BCS. Defenders of our current nightmare system claim it is a better way to determine a genuine national champion than the previous regime. I actually disagree. Sure, the BCS guarantees a #1 vs. #2 matchup, but those teams won't necessarily actually be the first and second best. Generally they are just the two undefeated or one-loss schools from the fancied conferences.

The AP poll actually does several things the current BCS formula does not. For one thing, it recognizes the value of a quality loss. Look back over the records of former AP national champions. You'll find the 1975 Sooners with a 3-23 loss to Kansas, the 1966 Irish and their famous "tie one for the gipper" game with Michigan State, 1977 Notre Dame who lost 13-20 AT Mississippi (will ND ever go to Oxford again?), the 1978 Crimson Tide who lost at home to USC, the 1967 Trojans who lost a game at Oregon State, the 1970 Huskers who tied a game 20-20 with USC...

The BCS format elevates the golden record of 13-0 above everything else, so that beating up on Florida Atlantic is a better bet than testing your manhood against Southern Cal. Here are a few random samples of the non-conference slates played by previous AP national champions.

1978 Crimson Tide: Nebraska and USC at home, Washington and Missouri away.

1963 Longhorns: Navy and OU in Dallas, Tulane and Oklahoma State at home.

1975 Sooners: Oregon and Pitt at home, Miami away and Texas in Dallas.

1993 Seminoles: ND and Kansas away, Florida and Miami home.

According to all the pundits this year's champion will likely come from among Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Penn State or USC. Leaving aside the ever fearless Trojans, the non-conference offering of this pack consists of Idaho State, Tulsa, BYU, Miami, Louisiana Monroe, UTEP, Wyoming, Central Florida, Charleston Southern, Troy, Florida International, FSU, Akron, Syracuse, Temple and Eastern Illinois.

There are a few good games in that list. Oklahoma playing BYU and Miami is certainly a cut above the rest. But shame on Penn State who made a late dash to sign TCU but were turned down because they refused a home-and-home. And on Texas and Wisconsin who flirted with each other but chickened out.

So this September, while you're flicking through the dial looking for something other than a ten touchdown home romp to watch, think about this. Before 1998 the average schedule of a major college football power consisted of all home-and-home series against equally weighted division 1 programs. Unless you cheer for Florida or Tennessee, you might never have seen your alma mater play a significantly smaller program in your life before the last ten years.

When you're at home watching Nebraska opening at home with Florida Atlantic, think back to better days, when Bud Wilkinson's Sooners volunteered for losses against Frank Leahey's Fighting Irish, or John McKay's Trojans butted heads with the Bear's Tide because they could.

And if you don't like what we have now, thank the BCS and your local athletic director's general lack of guts.

*(FSU only started football in 1947 and their first 15 years are not representative of what the program is now. Their schedules before 1965 totally skewed my data so I omitted them).

(Sources: national champions; John Underwood, NCAA spilt decisions; NCAA.org; cfbdatawarehouse.com; appollarchive.com. All graphs by Prolate Spheroid)

The fall of 1905 (Presidential intervention part 2)

In the fall of 1905 College football faced a grave crisis that spilled over from decades of unchecked aggression. Ugly hits after plays, targeted attacks on key players and out-of-control body piles created public outcry. A New York Times article on October 15th 1905 stated: “For the last five years there has been more or less agitation for rule changes in football to accomplish the reducing of the liability to injury.” Finally, that fall, a perfect storm of public and political interest coincided with the game’s most violent, and regrettable year ever. The crisis culminated in lasting reform that created the modern game of football and established the lasting structure of the collegiate game.

Public interest in reform did not begin in 1905. During the game’s early decades through the late nineteenth century college football was regulated by the Intercollegiate Football Association’s rules committee, chaired by the venerable Walter Camp. The game’s original powers, the Ivy League establishment, ted the body. By the twentieth century, as the game was expanding both geographically and socially, the elitism of this limited access tarnished the committee’s reputation and effectiveness. Glorified gentlemen’s agreements maintained a universal style and system of play. Individual schools and not the IFA arranged and directed referees. The committee faced criticism from parties who viewed it as exclusionary – such as upstart Western
Walter Camp as a Yale player Conference (Big 10) who lobbied through the late 1890s for their man Amos Stagg to be admitted – as well as those who viewed the game as wantonly violent.

Many University Presidents, Boards of Advisors, and alumni groups feared the game’s disreputable elements rendered it unsustainable. They also looked in dismay on the distracting influence of football in collegiate life, its disproportional popularity, and the corrupting impact of the gate revenues it generated. At most schools game-day takings were handled by the athletic club’s graduate director with little oversight. Money often found its way to players or simply disappeared. The game also lacked any mechanisms for regulating eligibility and amateurism. Players routinely transferred, even during the season. There were no limits on the length of a man’s eligibility. A series of muckraking articles in McClure’s Magazine ran in the summer of 1905 highlighting the problem of creeping professionalism. They caused a public sensation. The author, Henry Needham, highlighted one athlete at Pennsylvania State College who performed well against Ivy League giant Penn on a Saturday and was practicing with the Quakers as a member of their squad by Monday.

Prior to the fall of 1905 reformers were already wondering how to prevent a popular but brutal game from eclipsing and disrupting American education. When the season began young men started suffering brutal and even injuries early and often. Prominent university administrators began seriously considering abolition of the game. It is a commonly rehearsed error that Roosevelt threatened to abolish the game in the absence of reform. He neither wanted that outcome nor possessed such power. In fact, by December several colleges were dropping the game without compulsion. Few administrators actually wanted to see football abolished. Even fewer wanted to leave the rules unchanged. But for every problem there existed dozens of proposed solutions and no adequate regulatory authority existed to enforce any one of them. The rules committee seemed an out-dated, ineffective tool of the eastern establishment.

The most famous and highly publicized injury of 1905 did not lead to a fatality. Robert “Tiny” Maxwell took a vicious beating during the Penn-Swarthmore game at Franklin Field on October 7th. Photos of his bloodied face shocked the nation. Stories that the pictures shocked President Roosevelt into action are certainly apocryphal as he had already organized a meeting with representatives of “the Big bloothree” colleges before the event. But such adverse press did add to public pressure. At 250lb and standing 6’4” tall, Maxwell was a giant among men. He played for two years at Chicago for Amos Stagg before transferring to Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia, where he acquired the sardonic nickname ‘Tiny’. The stand-out guard’s line play led Swarthore to a 7-1 record in 1905. Penn accounted for the only loss by singling out Maxwell for late hits and illegal contact to the face.

Not long after the game Swarthmore President John Swain stated publically that he supported President Roosevelt’s pressure for reform and that: “Swarthmore College stands for clean and manly sport, shorn of all unnecessary roughness. . . . [We] will cooperate with others to secured clean college athletics.”However, the college dropped football in 1908 under pressure from a wealthy alum who demanded the move as a condition of an endowment. Clearly powerful and influential people were sick of football. Had enough colleges agreed the game might have lost critical mass.

At the White House on October 9th Roosevelt entertained Dr. D. H. Nichols and football coach William Reid of Harvard, Arthur Hildebrand and John Fine of Princeton, and Walter Camp and John Owsley of Yale. Alongside Stagg, who was not present, these men made up the IFA rules committee. Roosevelt had no power to enforce any change. He set precedent simply by showing Presidential interest in such a matter. But in 1905 TR was in a unique position to act. The trend-setting President possessed almost limitless political capital. The New York Times summarized his Midas touch by reporting: “After settling the war in the Far East . . . President Roosevelt today took up another question of vital interest to the American people. He started a campaign for reform in football.” The reformist commander-in-chief would earn the Nobel Peace Prize that year, but to many Americans the act of lending his copious political influence to the pressure for regulation and reform in college football deserves more lasting notoriety.

The same day of TR’s meeting with the big three, Howard C. Montgomery died during practice at
Hampton-Sydney College, Virginia. Disgust at such loss of life added to suspicions of football’s disproportionate and educationally disruptive popularity. That same week, faculty members at Columbia expelled football captain Tom Thorpe for allowing his athletic obsession to undermine his grades. A week later a statement in the Harvard Bulletin from an alumni group demanded substantial reform of the game and quoted Dr. William White, a notable surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania, as saying: “the human body is not fitted to endure the game as it is played in American colleges.” In the wake of the Maxwell scandal White and U Penn emerged as leading advocates of reform.

Among the big three Harvard aligned most eagerly with upstart colleges beyond the Ivy League, especially after biased officials blatantly ignored extremely rough play from the Bulldogs in the 1905 Harvard-Yale game. Harvard men were suspicious of Walter Camp’s strangle-hold over the game’s rules. In three decades of college football Harvard had beaten Yale on only 3 occasions. Yale’s nce and on the field and influence in the rules committee seemed more than coincidental.

By 1905 Harvard men were ready to break the solidarity among the game’s established powers.
Reformers looked to create a more open style of play on the field and to more effectively enforce the rules. In November, several weeks before the Yale game, William Reid informed Harvard graduates that sweeping reforms were required to “put a higher premium on skill, make weight and strength of less value, and produce a more scientific and interesting sport.” He also advocated “the rigorous imposition of severe penalties.” Public statements from Roosevelt continued to support those goals. He particularly advocated “simplicity and uniformity in the eligibility rules.”

The month ended on a low note when William Moore, the right halfback of Union College died under a pile of bodies against NYU that required policemen to untangle. On the same day William Carter of Columbia was hospitalized in a game against Pennsylvania with a severe spinal injury. U Penn emerged in the early post-season as the leading voice for reform. A circular letter to all major athletics colleges invited representatives to a meeting in Philadelphia to discuss reform. U Penn officials suggested rules prohibiting players from representing more than one college in their career and the imposition of 25-yard penalties for violent hits. Several days later a public letter from a Professor Hollis at Harvard called for a definition of professionalism and the prohibition on monetary compensation.

The crisis of public confidence had reached fever pitch. A Chicago Tribune survey of university administrators published on November 26th reported Professor Shalter Matthews of the Chicago Divinity School as saying: “Football to-day is a social obsession – a boy-killing, education prostituting, gladiatorial sport. I do not know what should take its place, but the new game should not require the services of a physician.”

President Schurman of Cornell was less pessimistic. He believed that university Presidents possessed the power to reform the game and stated: “All that is needed is action.”

President Wheeler of California, Berkeley summated succinctly: “Football must be made over, or go.”

President Hopkins of Williams College captured perfectly the game’s internal conflict in publically supporting reform but warning that “taking all the struggle and peril out of [football] would just spoil it.”

Hopkins’ view represented the majority. Few favored outright abolition. When change finally came, the process moved quickly with revolutionary consequence. On November 27th Columbia President Francis S. Bangs joined NYU president Henry McCracken in threatening permanent abolition. He condemned the existing rules committee, stating: “I would not trust [them] to reform the game. . . A new committee should be appointed whose members have a direct personal responsibility to a higher authority.”

Columbia administrators perceived such dire immediacy that a committee of faculty announced two days later that the college would drop football. Professor Herbert Lord called the game an “obsession, which has become a hindrance to the great mass of students, and proved itself harmful to academic standing and human life.”

Even in whimsical postcards, vicious face injuries were assumed

Columbia became the first school to publically commit to abolishing the game as it then existed and others seemed to feel equally strongly. Even still, support for the game remained overwhelming. Students at Columbia turned out in droves to publically protest the euthanizing of their team. A New York Times editorial on December 5th stated: “College Presidents who think football too bad for further tolerance are extremely few.” It was in this climate that the FIA rules committee met at the Philadelphia home of George McFadden, the chair of U Penn’s football committee, on December 10th.

The committee debated several possibly rule changes. Walter Camp’s suggested Panacea was to increase the yardage required for fresh downs from five to ten. John Bell of U Penn hoped to weaken the ends of the line of scrimmage to encourage end running and prevent the ly body piles caused in central “mass plays”. He specifically suggested legalizing forward passes completed behind the line of scrimmage. Initially the forward pass was designed to open the field horizontally with back-field passes to the sidelines in order to get runners into the open. Bell had no idea how far his suggestion would eventually go to open play up and over the full hundred yards. More than any other rule change the forward pass defines the difference between American football and the early forms of Rugby from which it grew.

L. M. Dennis of Cornell suggested requiring all offensive players to remain behind the ball prior to kick-off. Stagg advocated 15 and 25 yard penalties for intentional fouls. The committee also considered suggestions for instituting a ‘neutral zone’ to separate the teams at the line. We can hardly imagine the game today without these rules and it is unfortunate that it took so many lives lost to bring them about.

Perhaps the most significant development came the day after the meeting when E. M. Seeley of the YMCA training school offered to host a training program for officials in order to improve standards of rule enforcement. This conceptual seed grew into centralized control over refereeing crews. Today the game would hardly function without conference and NCAA oversight of umpires.

Despite conservations in Philadelphia vocal reformers outside the Ivy League continued to doubt that the establishment could act effectively to save the game and the lives of those who played it. On December 20th, a week before a scheduled conference of athletics colleges in New York, McCracken called the rules committee “high and mighty potentates.” He complained of institutional exclusion and elitism, complaining that committee members were “elected I know not how.”

The 62 delegates who gathered from across the nation at the Murray Hill Hotel on December 28th addressed that very point. The meeting took just nine hours to agree on suggested reforms and elect a new rule committee which more fully represented the changing face of the game. H. L. Williams of Minnesota, J. T. Less of Nebraska, F. H. Curtis of Texas showed a shift both westward and towards public universities.
The meeting established a new body for oversight of both refereeing standards and rules of eligibility. The Inter Collegiate Athletics Association of the United States would change its name in 1910 to the National Collegiate Athletics Association. The body’s first act was to demand unification of the old and new rule committees and threaten independent action if the old guard refused.

On January 12th the two committees met at the Netherland Hotel in New York. William Reid announced at the meeting that the Harvard football committee had instructed him to join the new body unilaterally if necessary. Three days later the Harvard board of overseers announced that the university would drop football until satisfactory new rules were established. The board cut the Crimson’s off-season football camp short and sent the players home. This move had less to do with genuine taste for abolition than it did breaking Yale’s nce of the game. It succeeded spectacularly. Reid became secretary of the amalgamated committee. This position gave him the agenda-setting and editorial powers that Camp had long enjoyed.

A few days later President Hadley of Yale gave his annual alumni dinner address and showed his institution’s lack of enthusiasm for the reforming vandals who were wrestling control of the game from the Connecticut school. He stated: “In the 30 years we have played Rugby football at Yale there has been no , and to the best of my knowledge, no grave case of permanent injury.” He believed the situation required little more than college-level commitment to clean play. Regarding rule changes he only said: “we are happy to leave the work to Mr. Camp.” Obviously most other university presidents felt more strongly.

A week later on January 20th the annual conference of the Western Conference passed a stark and brief resolution declaring: “The game of football, as currently played, is hereby abolished in collegiate and inter-collegiate contests in conference colleges.” The conference adopted rules dramatically reducing the number of games played per year, giving faculty overseers control of gate receipts, and limiting varsity eligibility to three years. From those rules would grow intercollegiate athletics departments and NCAA regulation of eligibility. The conference which would supersede the Ivy League as the game’s power house for the ensuing half-century committed explicitly to new rules.

Only one week later the amalgamate rules committee ratified rule changes that radically changed the game. This proved a water shed. For thirty years college football had revolved around private, east coast schools and been ted by Yale – the game’s first great dynasty. The crisis of 1905 broke the ranks of the Ivy League establishment and introduced a broader influence in the game for rising football powers beyond the eastern private schools. It also created a central body that would enforce a universal version of the game and effectively cut the umbilical chord that still existed between the college game and English Rugby Football.

Officially college football is dated to the 1869 Rutgers-Princeton contest [although that meeting was actually a form of what would become Association Football]. The real birth date of the college game, at which it became truly and definitively American, is December 28th 1905. This was also the first time that upstarts forced an unresponsive establishment to admit them into their old-boys club and share the proverbial pie.

Here’s hoping the powers of misrule that control the BCS cartel face a similar day of destiny very soon.

(Sources: Richard Pagano, Robert Maxwell; New York Times; Chicago Tribune; John Sayle Watterson, College Football)

Theodore Roosevelt and football (presidential interference part 1)

During the 1905 college football season the loosely regulated violent tactics of the era caused eighteen fatalities; that in a day when varsity squads generally numbered below forty and only a hundred or so colleges played. Football evolved slowly from the same roots as both rugby and soccer. In the early days every team used its own variations on the basic rules. By the later nineteenth century college football possessed a rules committee, presided over by the venerable Walter Camp. But the body met only occasionally and had no full-time staff or punitive power. Effectively, it only acted to prohibit the most flagrantly violent abuses [such as the notorious flying wedge formation] long after public outcry necessitated action.

Excessive violence and brutal tactics caused major injuries and damaged the reputation of the game. Even the Harvard-Yale rivalry, the sport’s premier event, suffered as a result of this harmful publicity. University administrations enforced a two-year hiatus after a disgustingly vicious spectacle in 1894. Through the 1905 season, as young men died unnecessarily on a weekly basis, college Presidents grew sympathetic toward public and press appeals for institutions of higher learning to drop football.

Fortunately for posterity President Theodore Roosevelt saw the great value and national importance of college football and acted to save the game. On October 9th, two days after the highly publicized brutal beating of Robert “Tiny” Maxwell in the Penn-Swarthmore game, Roosevelt hosted a meeting at the White House between the Presidents of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. The public impetus this meeting gave the cause of reform grew in the following months. After the season, rule changes proposed by the University of Pennsylvania led to larger meetings between the representatives of more colleges in New York. In February 1906 colleges replaced the antiquated rule committee with a new body - the Intercollegiate Athletics Association of the United States (renamed the NCAA in 1910).

This move established a regulatory body to enforce the spirit of amateurism, maintain safety, and promote gentlemanly conduct. For all its ills, American college athletics would likely never have achieved such prominent, lasting, cohesive, and structured success without the NCAA. That organization might never have come into being without the leadership and applied political capital of a President who saw a popular and valuable national sport stranded in controversy and crying out for reform.

The larger-than-life President had been a voracious reader from early childhood. As an adult he routinely read three or four books a day, often amazing guests by taking a new book to bed in an evening and citing lengthy passages from memory at breakfast. Roosevelt mastered the art of taxidermy at the age of nine. He published his first book [a guide to bird species of the Adirondacks] as a Harvard sophomore. His second book, The Naval War of 1812, written his senior year, has only been surpassed as an authority on the subject once in over a century. In all, Roosevelt wrote eighteen books. His letters are filled with references to ancient classics such as Plutarch, Herodotus, or the Greek tragedies.

But for all Roosevelt’s prolific genius, biographers invariably trace the turning point in his life to the genesis of his interest in bodily exercise. As a boy Roosevelt was an awkward, skinny asthmatic and often slept propped up on a large pillow to aid his feeble lungs. His father worried that physical weakness would prevent his intellectually vivacious young son from fulfilling his potential. He challenged twelve year old Theodore in an exchange recorded in his mother’s diary:

“Theodore, you have the mind but not the body, and without the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”

Theodore, who worshipped his father, replied with the indomitable resolve that set him apart from his peers his whole life:

“I’ll make my body.”

A life of physical exertion began that moment. The young Roosevelt started to spend his free time lifting weights. He competed against his cousins in every conceivable event. He developed a love of the outdoors. As an undergraduate Roosevelt spent long periods of his university breaks hiking in the wilds of northern Maine with a famed local woodsman named Bill Sewall. The hardy New Englander initially saw in TR “a thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart.”

Sewall quickly came to see that Roosevelt’s emotional and spiritual heart was considerable, more than compensating for lack of natural skill. Sewall also praised the great ease with which the young New York Brahmin spoke to the rough, unschooled men of the Maine wilderness.

Gregariousness and natural charm fueled TR’s political success. He maintained an enormous list of personal correspondents, including the French founder of the modern Olympic Games Pierre de Coubertin. One exchange of letters between the two men in 1903 discussed the importance of exercise for public health and education. Roosevelt especially advocated rigorous exercise for boys. He sensitively and wisely condemned the practice of forcing boys into any sports they disliked as harmful to mental development. The purpose was to build up men, not break them down. Nor was the purpose to triumph for the sake of it and make an idol of success at games.

Roosevelt acknowledged to de Coubertin:

“I was never a champion at anything… I have met English officers to whom polo, racing, football and baseball were far more absorbing than their professional duties. In such case athleticism becomes a mere harmful disease.”

Despite such strong reservations, Roosevelt saw physical exercise as the great test of a man, as well as a great leveler. Competition formed and made a man, causing him to face adversity. Roosevelt felt these realities as a boxer at Harvard where he reached the 133lb class championship bout as a junior in 1879. Fighting without his glasses, Roosevelt compensated for poor eyesight with sheer tenacity and desire. Despite facing a much stronger man and receiving a broken nose, Roosevelt willfully refused to concede and went the full distance.

TR did not need the accolades of championships. He believed that physical development served the greater purpose of fitting a man for his real work. He once wrote to his son Theodore Jr., then a junior at Groton Academy:


“In my regiment probably nine-tenths of the men were better horsemen than I was, and probably two-thirds were better shots. But nobody else could command them as I could.”

He wrote these words to affirm his son’s decision to play football, despite a size disadvantage and a recent injury. Roosevelt viewed necessary injuries as positive hardship that would form character. If, on the other hand, football threatened to produce personal bitterness of any form, the president instructed his son to abstain. The central point was to see Ted Jr. master a challenge and not to be mastered:

“I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. I do not believe in them if they degenerate to the sole end of ones existence.”

TR never played football but enthusiastically followed Harvard’s fledgling team as an undergraduate in the late 1870s. Later he continued to follow Harvard’s progress, always believing that winning was important, but less so than virtue and character. After team captain, Norman Winslow Cabot followed a tradition of removing the player’s letter ‘H’ from their jerseys after the Yale loss in 1897 Roosevelt wrote to correct the man’s perspective:

“Our men had done well; not quite as well as we had hoped, but still well; and I think it as great a mistake to show undue sensitivity in defeat as it is to be indifferent about it.”

Somehow the snobbish New York society man and socially Progressive democracy advocate in Roosevelt mixed evenly. But with regard to sports, the democrat always shone more brightly. A 1906 letter to fellow Harvardian Owen Wister, who despite growing up in Pennsylvanian heavily romanticized the south in his writing, challenged him firmly:

“I do not know a white man in the south who is a good a man as Booker Washington today. You say you would not like to take orders from a Negro yourself. If you had played football at Harvard anytime in the last fifteen years you would have had to. And you would not have minded in the least, for during that time Lewis has been a field captain and a coach.”

Roosevelt referred to William H. Lewis, the first ever black college football player who made the Walter-Camp All-America list as a Harvard center in 1892. Lewis went on to a remarkable career as a football coach, writer, lawyer and civil rights activist in an era when opportunities for black Americans were severely limited. Roosevelt took pride in the fact that Lewis was a Harvard man. He praised a game that placed men on a level field, demanding mutual respect. Decades ahead of his time, TR perceived the power of inclusion football possessed as a symbol and tool in bringing down destructive racial barriers.

Roosevelt’s profoundly balanced view of athletics celebrated competition and castigated idleness, but he viewed a life of public leadership as far more important. Athletic prowess was to him a means to an end. He used his body always as his father had directed him, to carry his incredible mind. The indomitable combination of TR’s body and mind enjoyed such unceasing success that he learned to expect progress and triumph in every situation. Believing that self-discipline, resolve, and personal virtue could solve any problem he emerged as an ardent reformer. TR never threw babies out with bathwater.

When TR considered football in 1905 he saw a violent and often over-emphasized game. He also saw an integral link to American identity. Its rugged nature and intricate connection to America’s most iconic colleges made football too precious to lose. TR had already worked to restore the Army-Navy rivalry in 1899. The Secretaries of War and Navy had forbidden the academies to play road games after a very public and embarrassing near duel between a Rear-Admiral and a Brigadier-General in 1893. The five year break remains the longest in series history. As Assistant Navy Secretary TR urged Secretary of War Russell Alexander Alger to allow the rivalry to be restored. Thanks significantly to him the annual fixture resumed and quickly became the most vivid symbol of college football’s uniquely American character.

Understandably, Roosevelt felt aggrieved as the spiraling violence of 1905 far surpassed the necessary roughness he approved and led many college administrations to consider dropping football. He feared that a perfectly redeemable national treasure might be lost unnecessarily. TR publically resisted those Presidents who leaned towards the easy option of abolition and praised those with the foresight and courage to approach reform. In the fall of 1906 praised a speech by Yale President Arthur Twinning Hadley which condemned “the growth of luxury in the American colleges.” Hadley’s contention that lives without challenge and adversity produce self-entitled, weak-willed, useless citizens resonated with TR.

In an address to the Harvard student Union in February 1907 he extolled the value of “the athletic spirit” as profoundly formative and “essentially democratic.” Roosevelt warned:

“Our chief interest should not lie in the great champions in sports. On the contrary, our concern should be most of all to widen the base to encourage in every way healthy rivalry which shall give to the largest number of students the chance to partake.”

(One wonders what venomous ire President Roosevelt – a great supporter of the Anti-Trust Act - would have poured upon the exclusionary, anti-democratic practices of the BCS cartel?)

TR warned Harvard students of the potentially dire consequences colleges risked if they dropped football:

“We cannot afford to turn out college men who shrink from physical effort or from a little pain. In any republic courage is a prime necessity for the average citizen if he is to be a good citizen.”

Today the NCAA’s highest honor is the Theodore Roosevelt award, recognizing men and women who compete in college athletics before going on to become nationally recognized leaders in significant non-athletic fields. Past winners include four US Presidents.

Coaches often cite the character forming qualities of football. At times these articles of faith become cliché and can even be used to justify a nexus of greed, obsession, and uncivil conduct that is anything but beneficial. But we cannot surrender our most cherished and outstanding game to those who lack scruples, character, or courage. Regardless of its potential abuses and its penchant for over-emphasis, college football can and should teach good qualities to players and fans alike – loyalty, perseverance, endurance, collective identity, collegiate spirit, educational zeal… These make our game great.

When we see corrupt, cowardly, greedy men who spurn inclusion and shy away from genuine competition hijacking a national treasure we should join President Roosevelt in his unflinching response and cry “Reform!”

(Sources: Wiki, William Lewis; Philly Army-Navy site; Scott McQuilkin and Ron Smith, Flying Wedge, Journal of Sports History; Wiki, TR award; Edmund Morris, Rise of TR; Roosevelt, Strenuous Life; Letters and speeches of TR)