COLLEGE FOOTBALL: CRISIS AND REFORM

Character of College Football

College football began as a student-centered activity on the campuses of a few private northeastern colleges. By the turn of the century, however, the game had evolved into a nationwide commercial spectacle, controlled by college and university administrators, and played more for spectator enjoyment and college prestige than player satisfaction. From this transformation came an emphasis upon winning, recruitment of players, abuses of eligibility, intense training schedules, professional coaching, and deliberate violence. The brutality of the game, which often resulted in injury and death, nearly led to football's demise. While some journalists, college presidents, and politicians called for the game's abolition, others such as R. Tait McKenzie, the director of physical education at the University of Pennsylvania, urged reform, recognizing the "training in presence of mind, audacity, courage, and endurance of pain and fatigue" that football provided young men.

Professional Coaches

The rise of football power-houses, such as Harvard, Carlisle, and Michigan, demonstrated how important winning had become to colleges. One factor in the winning calculus was the professional coach, who often received a salary greater than those of the most esteemed professors, despite not being a regular member of the university staff. Coaches, such as Pop Warner of Carlisle, imposed strict discipline and a strenuous training regimen upon their teams. Warner required his players to run five miles each morning, practice three hours in the afternoon, and be in bed by 6:00. Although the players abhorred the regimen, they basked in the adoration lavished upon them by the fans on Saturday afternoons. Harvard, eager to reverse its dismal record against Ivy League rival Yale, hired Percy Haughton as its first professional football coach in 1908. Before Haughton's tenure, Harvard players had received haphazard instruction on the game, as coaches rarely agreed on basic fundamentals. Haughton implemented a chain of command, in which his orders reached the players through a hierarchy of assistants and the team captain. He strictly controlled the team, cursing and physically disciplining those players who refused to abide by the Haughton system. In preparation for each game he emphasized physical conditioning and mastering basic skills, training that enabled Harvard to defeat Yale every year except one from 1908 to 1916.

Recruitment and Eligibility Abuses

Another often abused factor in the development of a winning football program was the recruitment of eligible and academically qualified players. Before joining Michigan in 1901, Fielding Yost coached successful teams at Kansas and Stanford. The star player of his undefeated Kansas squad in 1899 already had played football for five years at West Virginia University. At Stanford, Yost recruited a player with questionable academic credentials who flunked out of the university. "Yost carried him to Michigan," explained the School Review, "where he has become the center of the strong team which is the pride of Michigan." Former Stanford standout Willie Heston, who accompanied Yost to Michigan to play football and attend law school, played football for seven years as a Wolverine, only four of which were as a student. The desire for a successful football program that would surpass those of the Northeast institutions led Michigan faculty to support Yost's recruitment practices, keep his players eligible, and pay him well. In 1906 the Western Conference introduced rules that restricted player eligibility to three years, limited competition to undergraduates, and required coaches to be regular members of the university staff and receive a salary commensurate with their professional rank. In 1908 Michigan withdrew over the enforcement of these rules, which it believed were established by the conference to diminish the university's football prowess.

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

While college football developed into a national spectacle during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professional football was being organized and played on local and regional levels. In Pittsburgh the Allegheny Athletic Association and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club organized professional teams in the early 1890s. In 1892 the Allegheny AA hired Pudge Heffelfinger, a three-time All-American at Yale University, to play against archrival Pittsburgh AC. The Allegheny AA paid him $500 after he scooped up a fumble and ran for a touchdown to win the game. Football teams throughout western Pennsylvania continued to hire former Ivy League All-Americans throughout the 1890s and 1900s. In 1902 the Philadelphia Athletics and the Philadelphia Phil-lies baseball teams organized professional football teams in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, creating what they called the National Football League, which folded after one season.

Professional football also developed in Ohio during the 1900s. In 1903 the Massillon Tigers defeated the Akron Indians for the Ohio state championship. Massillon, which had signed four former Pittsburgh players to its roster that year, won the state championship in 1904, 1905, and 1906. In 1904 Charles Folley became the first African American professional football player when he joined the Shelby Blues Athletic Club. The Canton Bulldogs formed in 1905, acquiring Willie Heston, the outstanding offensive back from the University of Michigan. Although Canton lost to Massillon in the Ohio state championship in 1905, the Bulldogs handed the Tigers their first loss in three years in 1906. Massillon, however, defeated Canton in the championship later that year. A Massillon newspaper charged Canton coach Blondy Wallace with throwing the 1906 championship game. Canton denied the charges, maintaining that Massillon only wanted to ruin the club's reputation before their final game with Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Although Massillon could not prove that Canton had indeed thrown the game, it so tarnished Canton's name that virtually no one attended the Latrobe game. The scandal ruined professional football in Ohio until the mid 1910s.

Source:

David S. Neft, Richard M. Cohen, and Rick Korch, The Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of Professional Football from 1892 to the Present (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994).

THE PORTAGE LAKERS AND THE
INTERNATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE

In 1903 George L. "Jack" Gibson, a dentist in Houghton, Michigan, organized the International Hockey League, the world's first professional hockey organization. His team, the Portage Lakers, won the league championship from 1904 to 1907. In their first year the Portage Lakers won twenty-four of twenty-six games. Considered to be one of history's greatest hockey teams, the Portage Lakers challenged Stanley Cup winners, the Ottawa Silver Seven in 1905 and the Montreal Wanderers in 1906, to championship series, but both Canadian teams refused to contest the American club from the coal fields of northern Michigan.

Source:

Dan Diamond and Joseph Romain, Hockey Hall of Fame: The Official History of the Game and Its Greatest Stars (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

Brutality

The real crisis in college football was not over the salary of coaches or the eligibility of players but over the violent character of the sport. With the introduction of the line of scrimmage and an emphasis on running to gain a certain number of yards in a limited number of plays in the 1880s, football teams developed mass-momentum offensive formations, which directed a tight assembly of players, protecting a ball carrier, into the heart of the defense. The most effective of these mass-momentum plays was the flying wedge, introduced by Harvard against Yale in 1892, in which two groups of linemen formed a "V" to shield the ball carrier on kickoff returns. Injuries and even death resulted from such plays, since football players wore only the most rudimentary protective gear or none at all. The death of a University of Georgia player in 1897 inspired the Georgia legislature to pass a law banning football, though it was promptly vetoed by the state's governor. In that same year Marquette University dropped the sport because of its lack of "moral scruples." In 1905 The Nation quoted the dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School in condemning football as "a boy-killing, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport."

The Call to Reform

Before the start of the 1905 college football season President Theodore Roosevelt invited select alumni, faculty, and the coaches of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to the White House, "to persuade them to teach men to play football honestly." Although some at the conference wished to completely reform the rules of the game and curb its increasingly commercial character, others, such as Walter Camp of Yale, the architect of American football and chairman of the Intercollegiate Rules Committee, insisted on minor changes that would not disturb the game's status quo. The delegates presented Roosevelt with a resolution promising to "eliminate unnecessary roughness, holding, and foul play." Nevertheless, the 1905 season proved to be as brutal as those which preceded it, as 18 players died and 159 were seriously injured. The death of a Union College player in a game against New York University led Henry B. McCracken, the chancellor of New York University, to organize a series of conferences to initiate fundamental reforms in the conduct of college football. These meetings in December 1905, which excluded Walter Camp and other members of the Intercollegiate Rules Committee whom McCracken held responsible for the current crisis in college football, resulted in the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (IAA ).

Revolution of 1906

In 1906 the IAA and the Intercollegiate Rules Committee agreed to form a single organization. From this organization new rules emerged to reduce the brutality of the game and promote spectator appeal. One was a new rule that gave teams three attempts to gain ten yards, instead of five yards, for a first down. Reformers hoped that the additional yardage requirement would discourage mass-momentum plays for short yardage gains. The rules committee also approved the forward pass but placed restrictions on its use, such as a fifteen-yard penalty for an incomplete pass. These rule changes resulted in an even more conservative style of play. Most teams did not even mount offensive attacks, instead choosing to kick on first down, hoping to take advantage of a mistake by the other team. Scoring came from kicking. Moreover, the brutality of the game was not much abated: in 1909, eight college players lost their lives on the playing field. In 1910 the rules committee limited the offensive line to seven players, allowed the ball to cross the scrimmage line at any point in the air, and eliminated the penalty for an incomplete pass. The death and injury rate did not significantly decrease until the introduction of protective equipment in the 1910s.

Sources:

Guy Maxton Lewis, "The American Intercollegiate Football Spectacle, 1869-1917," dissertation, University of Maryland, 1964;

Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983);

Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big Time College Athletics (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

FOOTBALL, COLLEGE

Rule Changes

College football began its modern period in the 1940s, when the game took on basic qualities that it retains fifty years later. College football was revolutionized by one major rule change—the free-substitution rule—and one major tactical innovation—the refinement of the T-formation to exploit the passing game that stimulated a flood of lesser rule changes.

Free Substitution

The free-substitution rule, which went into effect in 1941, had repercussions far beyond those intended. Before the war eleven men on a football team played the entire game, offense and defense. Only injury was grounds for substituting. The new rule allowed players to substitute for one another at any time, except during the last two minutes of the first half. During the war free substitution was the salvation of college football, allowing weakened teams to continue playing. When the war was over and veteran players returned to college football, coaches used the rule for strategic purposes. They introduced the platoon system, in which players specialized in a single aspect of the game—short-yardage offense, passing offense, corresponding defenses, and special teams.

Platooning

The first attempt at platooning came on 13 October 1945 when the University of Michigan met Army. Underdog Michigan was largely manned by eighteen-year-old freshmen, and the Wolverine staff knew they were in for a long afternoon. To keep the score as close as possible, head coach Fritz Crisler decided to play eleven players offensively and another eleven defensively. Michigan held the West Pointers to a 7-7 tie going into the fourth quarter before losing 28-7, but the value of rotating offensive and defensive players was proven. Soon such specialists had swelled the size of major teams to one hundred or more men, and coaching staffs increased accordingly to as many a ten coaches per team. As a result football became a very expensive sport to play, causing many colleges to rethink whether they could afford to field a team. During the war about 350 colleges abandoned football, led by Robert Hutchins's announcement that the University of Chicago would disband its team. Some schools revived their teams after the war; others gave up intercollegiate competition permanently, in many cases because free substitution had made the game too expensive.

Strategy

During the same time, tacticians were changing the character of the sport from a game in which offensive players sought to overpower the defense with brute strength to a game of finesse, in which the forward pass was used to avoid contact with tacklers. By early 1940 Stanford University coach Clark Shaughnessy had taken the game's oldest offensive alignment, redesigned it, and become the father of the modern T-formation—with grand success. Unlike the double wing, the Rockne shift (named after Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne), and the Meyer spread-and-wing (named after Texas Christian coach Dutch Meyer), which tried to split the defense, Shaughnessy's T-formation used fakes, brush blocks, and shifting linemen to befuddle the defense, Shaughnessy also used a man in motion, a flanker, and a quarterback under center to the formation. This allowed liberal use of the forward pass, mixed with end runs and quick runs up the middle. Prompted by Shaughnessy's success, a revision of the rules in 1945 gave the quarterback more freedom of movement when passing, transforming college football in the 1940s into a wide-open, offense-oriented game that packed fans into the stands. No longer was an incomplete fourth-down pass into the opponent's end zone considered a touchback; now a team in scoring position could chance a touchdown pass without the risk of giving up field position in the event of an incompletion. The penalty for roughing the passer was increased. The most important stimulus to the passing game came in 1945 with the elimination of the rule that the quarterback must be at least five yards behind the line of scrimmage when he passed the ball. It was one of the most significant of all the forward-pass rules, offering pass-oriented quarterbacks the option to run if circumstances warranted.

The Penalty Flag

The 1940s were notable for one other important innovation. For several years it had been obvious that the referees needed a way to indicate a penalty without stopping play. Officials blowing whistles and horns to signal penalties caused confusion and often did not accomplish their purpose. On 16 October 1941, during a game between Oklahoma City and Youngs town State, Coach Dwight "Dike" Beede of Youngstown State talked the officials into using a red-and-white cloth flag loaded with drapery weights to indicate a penalty. The experiment worked, and the penalty flag was born.

Powerhouse Teams

The early years of the decade were dominated by a handful of teams. In the Big Ten Conference Minnesota, led by running backs George Franck and Bruce Smith, went undefeated in 1940 and 1941 and was ranked number one in the nation both years by the Associated Press. The revised T-formation was tailor-made for Minnesota's starting backfield. Early in the season their win over seventh-ranked Nebraska served notice of the potential of the new style of play. On 16 November 1940, a week after Minnesota replaced Cornell as the top team in the country, Dartmouth snapped Cornell's eighteen-game winning streak when, with only two seconds left in the game, the referee lost track of the action and Dartmouth scored on fifth down to win 7-3. That same day Georgetown's unbeaten streak of twenty-three games ended at the hands of Boston College. In 1941 Minnesota once again finished 8-0 in a year memorable for trick plays, innovative formations, and the running of their Heisman Trophy winner Bruce Smith. Oregon State defeated Duke in the Rose Bowl, which was moved from Pasadena, California, to Durham, North Carolina, because large gatherings were prohibited on the West Coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The War Years

As the wartime need for fighting men depleted the ranks of football, several new powers emerged. In 1942 coach Paul Brown brought Ohio State to dominance with a 9-1 record. His teams were fast and always in excellent physical shape, providing Ohio State with a fourth-quarter advantage in the days before platoons. Their only loss was to Wisconsin after twenty-one players became ill on the way to the game. The other highlight of the year was the running of Frank Sinkwich of Georgia, the prototype of the modern tailback. That year he was the first player to accumulate more than 2,000 yards in total offense, with 2,187 total yards. Sinkwich led the 11-1 Georgia Bulldogs to their first Southeastern Conference title and won the Heisman Trophy. By 1943 almost two hundred colleges had discontinued football. Gasoline rationing and transportation restrictions curtailed travel, and many teams simply played nearby schools.

Army

Many of the nation's best eligible athletes were at West Point in 1944, and the Army team was bolstered by their presence. That year they averaged 56 points per game, a modern record, and rushed for an average 298.6 yards per game. While other teams struggled to field a team, Army coach Earl Blaik had so many players on his squad he used two separate teams. Glenn Davis and Felix "Doc" Blanchard started making football history that year as the finest one-two offensive punch in college football. Known as Mr. Outside (Davis) and Mr. Inside (Blanchard), the pair led Army to 9-0 records in 1944 and 1945 and a 9-0-1 record in 1946. Blanchard took home the Heisman Trophy in 1945, the first player to win as a junior, and Davis was the winner in 1946.

Notre Dame

With the war at an end and the soldiers back on campus, the high point of the 1946 season was the grudge match between Notre Dame and Army. Notre Dame wanted to avenge the humiliating defeats of the last two years, and Army needed to prove it was capable of winning against teams not weakened by war. The hard-fought game, which ended 0-0, included one of the finest collections of college talent ever assembled on a football field. The two squads included fourteen future or current ail-American players and ten future Hall of Famers. At season's end Notre Dame was by a narrow margin named national champion by the Associated Press. By 1947 and 1948 Notre Dame and Michigan were the teams to beat. Both went undefeated each year, with Notre Dame repeating as national champion in 1947 and Michigan taking the honors and the Rose Bowl in 1948. During the 1947 season only Northwestern was able to score more than once against the Irish of Notre Dame. Michigan, on the other hand, was stocked with war veterans, now seniors, who used a modern-day two-platoon system. The decade ended with Notre Dame still on top, going undefeated again, even though thirteen players had graduated the previous year. The Notre Dame attack produced an average of 434.8 yards per game to lead the nation. Two-time ail-American Leon Hart of Notre Dame won the Heisman Trophy and the Maxwell Award as the player of the year. That same year Oklahoma, led by their young coach Bud Wilkinson, moved into the spotlight with an 11-0 season. During his seventeen-year career Wilkinson fashioned a 145-29-4 record.

Blacks' Bowls

In 1941 the first annual Steel Bowl in Birmingham, Alabama, pitted midwestern champion Wilberforce against Morris Brown of Atlanta in a contest to determine the national black college title. Wilberforce scored first, but after that it was all Morris Brown, which decisively claimed the win, 19-3. The following year, for the first time in the history of black college football, the top team in the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association met the champion of the Southeastern Intercollegiate Athletic Association in a postseason game. Morris Brown's unbeaten and untied team was pitted against North Carolina College in the Peach Blossom Classic in Columbus, Georgia. In the third quarter of that game, played on 6 December, Morris Brown mounted a sustained drive to score and eventually win both the game, 7-6, and the national Negro college championship. On the train trip home the North Carolina College team was told that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Thirteen of the thirty-three-man squad were eligible for the draft.

Sources:

Ocania Chalk, Black College Sport (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976);

Dave Newhouse, Heisman: After the Glory (Saint Louis: Sporting News, 1985);

Tom Perrin, Football: A College History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1987).

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

A Saturday Tradition Returns

By middecade, college football fans were filling campus stadiums in record numbers. With the end of the Vietnam War and the onset of an economic recession, football—along with fraternities and sororities—regained popularity among students seeking a return to the traditional collegiate lifestyle. The millions who sat in the bleachers on Saturday afternoons or watched on television had much to root for. During the 1970s college football stood for innovation and high scoring—and many of the garnet new fans were indeed former Sunday armchair quarterbacks who had grown bored with stodgy, defense-minded NFL teams and their two-back offenses and who were looking to the campuses for an alternative brand of football.

Power Backs

The college game, which throve on trickery and deceit, featured four-back offenses and aerial attacks led by such great passing quarterbacks as Art Schlichter of Ohio State, Joe Theismann of Notre Dame, and Jim Plunkett of Stanford. The decade also saw some of college football's greatest running backs. In the West, Southern California's Anthony Davis, Charles White, and Ricky Bell followed in the wake of 1960s Southern California superstar O. J. Simpson. Big Eight speedsters Johnny Rodgers of Nebraska and Billy Sims of Oklahoma provided the excitement in the school's option backfields. Earl Campbell of Texas gained considerable fame—and a Heisman Trophy—with an up-the-middle power style of ball carrying. And Tony Dorsett of Pittsburgh set fifteen collegiate rushing records in leading the Panthers to the college national title in 1976. Pitt became the first team from the East to win the number one ranking since the 1959 Syracuse squad. The Pitt Panthers' national title signaled the revitalization of East Coast football as a power to be reckoned with.

The Big Vine

Teams that had dominated college football during the previous decade, however, remained on top during the 1970s. West Coast leader Southern California, the top Big Ten schools Michigan and Ohio State, Big Eight powerhouses Nebraska and Oklahoma, Southwest Conference perennial leader Texas, fabled coach Paul ("Bear") Bryant's Southeastern Conference power Alabama, and legendary programs at Penn State and Notre Dame all regularly occupied spots in the top rankings. A 16 September 1979 article in The New York Times argued that these schools, "the Gang of Nine," had had an alarmingly disproportionate number of appearances in the rankings—and television was to blame. "The Big Nine had 136 coast-to-coast [television] appearances," declared The New York Times, "or approximately 48 percent of the total." Whether networks covering collegiate football, such as ABC, were justified in concentrating their attentions on a handful of schools is debatable, but the popularity of the Big Nine was undeniable.

The article in The New York Times nevertheless did point out the indisputable fact that for most of the 139 major college football teams during the 1970s the distribution of television revenues—approximately $250,000 per television appearance during the late 1970s—greatly influenced recruiting patterns and helped determine the success of teams and their conferences. As costs for funding football programs rose dramatically (one study during the mid 1970s reported that it cost approximately three hundred dollars just to suit up one college football player), many schools discontinued football altogether, while others adopted an eleven-game season. With teams and conferences becoming increasingly dependent on television revenue, traditional postseason bowl matchups took on new importance. Even the ultratraditional Big Ten, which in the past had never allowed more than one of its teams to enter a postseason game, began to let its runner-up teams participate in bowls in search of additional television revenues for the conference.

Violations

Because of television, big-time college football became a big-money game, and as the stakes increased so did the temptation to cheat. The Oklahoma Sooners, for instance—once considered a model NCAA football program—received probation and were prohibited from making television appearances for having forged a high-school transcript. By the end of the decade nearly one hundred athletes at about two dozen schools had been implicated in transcript scandals. In 1976 the once-high-riding Spartans of Michigan State received what were at the time some of the stiffest penalties for recruiting violations ever meted out by the NCAA. The three-year probation, the loss of eligibility by twenty-seven members of the team, and the firing of one assistant coach soon led to the resignation of head coach Denny Stolz. Sportswriters and social critics across the country were decrying the disturbing trends in college-football recruiting and had begun to question, as did one end-of-the-decade Sports Illustrated editorial, whether "there are enough quality athletes to be found who can fill arenas and stadiums and also are capable of making the grade in the classroom. Without cheating, that is." Questionable recruiting practices, of course, were not relegated to the transcript forgers. As one southwestern coach explained it in the 26 January 1976 issue of The New York Times, he liked to recruit high-school players from New York because "we send them across the border into Mexico to shack up for a few days. Every one of those kids signs on the dotted line when he gets back."

Rule Bending

For many athletic directors overseeing big-time athletic programs, aggressive recruiting practices had in the words of Michigan athletic director Don Canham, become a "necessary evil." Rule bending among overzealous recruiters, however, was not the only consequence of college teams scrambling for glory, as well as for television and gate receipts. Athletic directors and university presidents became increasingly tolerant of the poor behavior displayed by some coaches—as long as those coaches continued to win. In 1971 ABC cameras captured Ohio State's ill-tempered and militaristic head coach Woody Hayes ripping up sideline markers in a fit of rage. When asked for his response to the episode, Canham said he would buy the opposing coach all the sideline markers he could possibly rip up, adding "When Ohio State comes to Michigan, who do you think our fans come to see—the players? No sir, they come to see Woody Hayes. He's worth an extra 30,000 tickets. The men take their children down to the field and point him out. I've seen it."

Reform

Through most of the 1970s Hayes continued to build upon his reputation for being abusive toward game officials, sportswriters, and even his own players; but his winning record and cultish following insulated him from job-threatening criticism. After the Buckeyes' appearance against Clemson in the 1978 Gator Bowl, however, Ohio State officials were forced to act. During that game Clemson's Charlie Bauman had intercepted a pass and run out of bounds along the Ohio State side-lines. In college football's most infamous televised scene, a frustrated and angered Hayes punched Bauman. Hayes lost his job as a result. Arizona State's Frank Kush was similarly forced to resign as head coach when it was reported that he had hit one of his own players during practice. The forced resignations indicated that college football was coming to an end of a coaching trend identified by a Vince Lombardian emphasis on unquestioned discipline and loyalty and further shaped by an intense pressure to succeed. Issues of liability in an already-violent game became prominent in the thinking of university officials; and as recruiting wars intensified, players were being treated like prizes not to be mishandled. For better or worse, college athletes therefore began to have more of a voice in how they were to be coached—and in how their programs should be run.