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BOWLED OVER

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BIG-TIME COLLEGE FOOTBALL BOWLED OVER

FROM THE SIXTIES TO THE BCS ERA

Michael Oriard

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

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This book was published with the assistance of the Thornton H. Brooks Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. © 2009 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS All rights reserved Designed by Kimberly Bryant Set in Arnhem and The Sans by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oriard, Michael, 1948– Bowled over : big-time college football from the sixties to the BCS era / Michael Oriard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8078-3329-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Football—United States—History. 2. College sports—United States— Marketing. 3. College sports—United States—Management. 4. College athletes—Recruiting—United States. I. Title. GV950.07 2009 796.332—dc22 2009016597 cloth 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

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FOR COLIN & ALAN

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

PART I. FOOTBALL AND THE 1960S

1 From the Sidelines of a Football Revolution

2 College Football in Black and White, Part I: Integrating the Southeastern Conference

3 College Football in Black and White, Part II: Black Protest INTERLUDE. 1973: The NCAA Goes Pro

PART II. LIVING WITH A CONTRADICTION

4 Revenue and Reform

5 Opportunity, Entitlement, and Exploitation

6 Thinking about Reform Notes Index

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Illustrations and Tables

ILLUSTRATIONS

Protesters and antiprotesters at Columbia University, April 1968

Cartoon illustration of “Coach,” Evergreen Review, October 1968

The 1969 and 1971 Notre Dame football teams

Colonel Rebel and Miss Ole Miss, University of Mississippi, 1975

Oregon State linebacker Fred Milton, February 1969

TABLES

1. bcs Football Programs Ranked by Total Football Revenue, 2006–2007

2. Non-BCS Football Programs Ranked by Total Football Revenue, 2006– 2007

3. Football Bowl Subdivision Athletic and Academic Profiles

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Acknowledgments

This is the third book on which I worked with David Perry at the University of North Carolina Press and the one on which we worked the closest. In addition to David’s routine contributions as editor in chief of the press, I am grateful for his good counsel regarding an early draft of my book. Other members of the Unc Press staff—Jay Mazzocchi, Dino Battista, and Gina Mahalek—are becoming like old friends. Thanks to all of them once again for their many and varied contributions.

Phil Thompson, a player from my generation at the University of Kentucky when it integrated its football team, shared his experiences with me in some remarkable e-mails and items from his scrapbooks. I salute him and thank him. At Oregon State University, archivist Karl McCreary located salary information from the 1960s for me, and the former chair of my department, Robert Schwartz, and the successive deans of my college, Kay Schaffer, Larry Roper, and Larry Rodgers, have been uniformly supportive. I am grateful to all.

My greatest debt, as always, is to my wife, Julie, and our two sons, for reasons too numerous to list but which might be reduced to the fact that they keep my priorities straight. I am dedicating this book to our sons, who in different sports and in different ways made their athletic careers as enriching as mine was for me. I salute them for accomplishing this under much more difficult circumstances than I faced.

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BOWLED OVER

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Introduction

This book is a companion to my Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport (2007). They began as a single volume, which was itself a hybrid: an account of football in the 1960s, when I myself played, leading into an exploration of how the game at both the college and professional levels has changed since then. There proved to be too many narratives to develop coherently, though the necessary bisection was not all gain. What has happened in the National Football League (nfl) in recent decades has powerfully affected what used to be known as Division I-A college football (now the Football Bowl Subdivision)—think only of the lure of million-dollar nfl salaries for “student-athletes” and the impact on college coaches’ salaries as pro coaches began making millions. Many nfl players, in turn, are shaped in part by their college experiences—think here of the sense of entitlement that follows some athletes from college to the pros. In fact, one of the fundamental differences in football today from football in my day is the general sense of a continuous path from youth leagues all the way to the nfl. Boys of my generation knew little about the nfl beyond what they figured out from watching the weekly game on Sunday. Boys today know everything about the nfl that SportsCenter and the rest of our 24/7 sports media and entertainment industries show and tell them. Boys of my generation might have dreamed of playing pro football some day. Like-minded boys today might plot a course—through weight rooms, diet supplements, summer camps, personal trainers, recruiting gurus—for getting there.

Seeing the entire American football world as a whole has its advantages, then, but so does a tighter focus on one part of it. This book considers the part of our larger football culture with the longest and richest history, as well as the most profound contradiction at its heart. From the moment that university administrators in the 1890s realized that the new public passion for intercollegiate football provided opportunities for university building, college football has been torn between the competing demands of marketing and educating. Knowing that the contradiction at the heart of big-time college football is more than a century old is useful when the latest “crisis” erupts. That knowledge should also give us pause, however, to wonder why we have failed for so long to resolve the contradiction.

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While conflicting priorities in college football are anything but new, they have reached a level that seems qualitatively different from how it played out even in my own youth in the 1950s and 1960s. College football since then has changed in two ways: suddenly and gradually. Suddenly, in “the ’60s,” that period conveniently dated from November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot down in Dallas, to August 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. The ’60s peaked around 1967–70—the years when Detroit, Newark, south central Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities exploded in race riots, campuses from Columbia to Berkeley exploded in antiwar protests, and Woodstock, New York, exploded in rock music and free love. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, four students at Kent State were killed by National Guardsmen, and hippies became no longer just the kooks in Life magazine but also the kid upstairs in his bedroom with a sweetish odor oozing out from behind a locked door. Football, too, was convulsed in these final years of the decade. Black players called their coaches racist and boycotted practice. White players at the University of Maryland got their coach fired for demeaning them. Demeaning them?! That’s what coaches had always done to motivate their “boys.”

No comparable cataclysm in either college football or American life has occurred since the 1960s, yet the experiences of playing and following the game today are astonishingly different from what they were just a couple of generations ago. The entire history of big-time intercollegiate football since the late nineteenth century has been a tortuous working out of the sport’s fundamental contradiction of being, at one and the same time, a commercial spectacle and an extracurricular activity. But sometime in the late 1980s or 1990s, incremental changes reached a tipping point or crossed a boundary beyond which the contradiction has become unsustainable. While the disruptions of the 1960s, particularly the racial protests on northern campuses, were felt as a genuine revolution, this subsequent economic transformation has not. This second revolution played out in slow motion, but at some point many followers of college football awakened to a realization that the game had changed in basic ways. The simplest measure of this transformation would be the million- dollar salary that became the norm for coaches in top programs in the 1990s, three times as much as just a decade earlier and many, many times the $20,000 or $25,000 salaries of the 1960s.

Obviously, more than inflation was at work here, and the amounts of money now flowing in and out of top programs created a new world. For $25,000, a coach was something like a professor (perhaps a dean) of

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football. For $1 million, he was the impresario of a high-priced commercial entertainment. In college football’s long reign as the dominant form of the sport, from the 1870s into the 1950s, potential revenue was largely restricted to gate receipts. Radio broadcasting rights began paying small dividends in the 1930s; the National Collegiate Athletic Association (ncaa) actively restricted television in the 1950s, fearing the potential impact on attendance. Merchandising and fund-raising (beyond the arrangements between boosters and recruits) were nonexistent throughout the entire period. (For a kid in the 1950s to own a sweatshirt imprinted with “Property of Usc Football,” he had to know someone who knew someone in the University of Southern California football program.) A business plan for athletics amounted to building a large stadium and then selling tickets. The athletic director (or graduate manager of athletics, as he was initially known) was a former coach who got on well with the old boys in the booster club. To oversimplify only slightly, his job was to support his football coach in building a team that could fill the stadium on Saturday afternoons.

Now, those who stage the games are driven by financial concerns to a degree unknown even thirty years ago. As I have attempted in a couple of previous books to understand what football has meant to Americans since we invented our version of the game in the 1870s and 1880s, economics always seemed the backdrop against which the more important stories played out. In recent years, economics have increasingly seemed the story that mattered the most. Generating revenue has been a preoccupation of athletic directors and university presidents since the stadium-building boom of the 1920s, but money was a less powerful driving force when the opportunities for both spending and generating revenue were more restricted.

Criticism of too much commercialism and too little academic emphasis in college football is nearly as old as the game, and so too is public indifference to these perennial “problems.” “Everyone” knew that boosters were subsidizing the swift halfbacks and brawny tackles arriving on campus from farms and mill towns in the 1920s and 1930s (after a few decades of less systematic hiring of the occasional “tramp athlete”). But few cared. Big-time college football has always had its faculty critics, joined by disdainful writers in the intellectual journals—the stereotype of the pointy-headed Great Scold is as enduring as the Big Man on Campus and the Dumb Jock—but the vast football public has been largely indifferent to this criticism so long as it did not hurt the prospects for “my team” on Saturday. The most powerful mass media—first the daily

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newspaper with its bulging sports sections, then radio, then television— have always been more boosterish than critical of big-time football, for the obvious reason that they have depended on enthusiastic fans to be their own readers, listeners, and viewers. Local media have tended to have close relations with the home team, and the major football-playing universities tend to be located in smallish towns, where the local sports editor and beat writers have particularly cozy relationships with the football coach and director of athletics. The national media have faced a different need: appealing to the broadest possible audience. Although Sports Illustrated and espn issue periodic jeremiads against the abuses in college football, those tend to be overwhelmed by the weekly or daily coverage of the big games and top stars. Local or national, the mass media have operated under conditions that inhibit sustained criticism.

The media played a key role in American universities’ two great missed opportunities in the twentieth century to address college football’s great contradiction. Had the popular press waged a campaign on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation’s report in 1929, it might have generated enough public support to overwhelm boosters and pressure (or free) college administrators to consider genuine reforms. Likewise, when the ncaa went through the throes of reform in the late 1940s and early 1950s, centered around a proposed “Sanity Code,” indifference or opposition in the press again assured that the reformist spasm, weak as it already was, would pass. The Carnegie Report prompted a few universities to de-emphasize their football programs but had no broad impact on “commercialism” and “professionalism,” the terms commonly used for the twin curses on the game. Intermittent scandals and controversies erupted and subsided until the 1950s, when a cheating ring at West Point, slush funds at West Coast universities that eventually shut down the old Pacific Coast Conference, and continuing rancor in the ncaa between rival factions that viewed themselves as honest and the other side as corrupt or hypocritical seemed to demand drastic action. Instead, out of the wrangling in the ncaa came the athletic scholarship, a solution to the long-standing scandal of “professionalism” by making it legal. (The fact that a scholarship for mere athletic prowess, rather than academic achievement or financial need, was considered a violation of university values until this time points to the very different climate in which college football was once played.)

The establishment of the athletic grant-in-aid in 1956 set the stage for the debates at ncaa conventions in the 1960s that culminated, in 1973, in the one-year scholarship, renewable at the coach’s discretion. I will argue that this little-noted and mostly forgotten reinvention of the athletic

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scholarship marks a crucial turning point for big-time college football. The more obviously consequential events were the College Football Association’s successful challenge to the ncaa’s television monopoly in 1984, then the succession of bowl alignments in the 1990s, culminating in the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, which consolidated two distinct economic classes for big-time football programs and widened the gap between them. The one-year scholarship, backed by the mindset that it represents, exposed so-called student-athletes to the mounting pressures of an increasingly commercialized sport while denying them a share in its new bounty.

This slow-motion revolution is the subject of the second half of this book. I will propose that the institution of the one-year scholarship in 1973 was in part a response to the upheavals of the 1960s, the subject of the first half. Here, I present my account of football in the 1960s as a story not about my life in football but about football during my lifetime, from the perspective of one who was there but on the periphery of the events that transformed the game. The beginning and end of the “long ’60s” coincidentally bracketed my own football career. In November 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, I was a sophomore at Gonzaga Prep in Spokane, Washington, putting in my fall afternoons on the B-squad and awaiting my chance to be a varsity player. In early April 1968, when Martin Luther King fell in Memphis, I was a sophomore at Notre Dame, a walk-on scrub who had not suited up for a single game the previous fall but was about to be given the opportunity to become an actual Fighting Irish football player. In May 1970, when college-aged kids in National Guard uniforms gunned down four students at Kent State, I was a senior, soon to graduate, not participating in spring practice and therefore not prodded to weigh protest against football. (My subsequent brief nfl career coincided with the end of the era. In September 1974, a month after Nixon left the White House in disgrace, I left the nfl after four seasons, cut by the Kansas City Chiefs at the end of a strike-torn training camp.)

During my four years at Notre Dame, Southeastern Conference schools at last began integrating their football teams, but they did not complete the process until after I had graduated. As a senior in 1969, I played against Georgia Tech and Tulane, then against Texas in the Cotton Bowl, when their teams were still all white. My senior season marked college football’s centennial but also became a milestone for other reasons, as major racial protests disrupted football programs at Oregon State, Iowa, Wyoming, Indiana, and Washington. I must have had some awareness of these events

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at the time—my memory is regrettably spotty—but they were far removed from my own experience at Notre Dame. The extraordinary national and world events of my college years, which changed me and my entire generation forever, in my own mind at the time had nothing to do with my life on football fields. I suspect that in this I was more typical than not. Participants are not necessarily the best witnesses, let alone interpreters, of the history in which they live. I make no claim to a privileged understanding of the 1960s football revolution that I describe. I simply offer, not my own story, but a personal perspective on the story of that larger football world of which I was a part.

I am interested in the personal actors in that story, particularly those who were age nineteen or twenty or twenty-one like I was but whose college football experience was so different from mine. But in line with my previous explorations of the media’s role in shaping our football culture, I am more interested in these events as public dramas, staged and scripted by local newspapers and the national media. Football has functioned as a kind of public theater since it was first discovered by the mass-circulation newspapers in New York in the 1880s. Whether or not fans have thought about spectator sports on these terms, they have experienced them in this way. Some dramas are generic to all sporting contests: the Home Team repulsing the Enemy, the various plots for different types of heroes. Others are specific to certain sports: the dual between pitcher and batter, so utterly different from the helmet-rattling collision in football. Others still are dictated by specific circumstances either within or outside the sport; the uproar over steroids in Major League Baseball and the accusations of rape against lacrosse players at Duke come to mind as recent examples. The racial dramas in college football in the 1960s fall in this last category. How newspapers covered (or did not cover) these events created the public drama.

While the two parts of the narrative that follows address different topics, there are important links between them. One is the relationship between coaches and athletes, and their relative positions in the evolving world of big-time college football. A more fundamental one is the central importance of race. The 1960s saw the end of college football’s era of segregation. In the succeeding era of full integration, as black athletes became dominant on the field but lagged behind in the classroom, the key issues facing the ncaa and its member institutions have been racial at their core, though rarely acknowledged as such. (I follow Harry Edwards and others in understanding that African American athletes face more directly and intensely what all athletes face.) As I have noted, I will also explore

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the strong possibility that the institution of the one-year scholarship in 1973—which transformed “student-athletes” into “athlete-students”—was a response to the racial upheavals of the late 1960s.

I bring a personal perspective not just to the events from my own playing days but also to the developments in college football since I graduated. My bedrock experience that has shaped my outlook is easily described: at Notre Dame in the late 1960s, I not only received the best education that my university offered but also enjoyed a full college experience while playing big-time football at the highest level. Since 1976 I have been an English professor at a Pac-10 university, observing college football’s most recent struggles with its fundamental contradiction more or less from the inside; and for the past several years, I have been writing about the cultural history of American football. Expressed personally, my fundamental concern regarding college football today is that my 1960s experience may not even be available to “student-athletes” in our more fully commercialized, higher-pressure football world. At the same time, an athletic scholarship today buys exactly what it bought during my college years. Tuition, board, and housing cost more in real dollars, but they have the same value. Or perhaps less: with less opportunity to receive a real education, athletes today might be taking a cut in real benefits.

Or not. Determining how well big-time college football serves the athletes today is one of two crucial challenges facing the institutions that sponsor it. The other is to determine how well it serves the institutions themselves.

Saturday’s spectacles provide Americans with a unique social and cultural experience. A college football game at Michigan or Alabama (like a basketball game at Indiana or Duke), with its bands and cheerleaders, its pregame tailgating, and its postgame partying, is something like a folk festival or a weekly Mardi Gras, providing a sense of community, meaningful ritual, and sheer pleasure for millions of Americans each weekend in the fall.1 Following the local team, or connecting from afar as alumni, provides passionate involvement in something that deeply matters yet ultimately does not (and so is “safe”) and creates a sense of community whose social benefit is hard to measure but nonetheless is real and powerful. But can universities afford to keep providing that social benefit, and can they provide it without exploiting those who do the actual providing—the young men on the field? Those are the urgent questions of the moment.

Fewer than two dozen athletic departments break even in any given

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year; as few as a half dozen have done so in each of the last several years. But this superelite depends on the rest, on all of the programs that struggle with annual deficits. A superconference comprised only of the very top programs would have a passionate following only in its schools’ own states and among their alumni. Although the Big East is conspicuously the weakest Bowl Championship Series (bcs) conference on the field, the other five conferences need it in order to have fully national representation. Without the weaker teams within bcs conferences, the perennially stronger teams would have no one to be perennially stronger than. The superelite even need the non-bcs conferences, if only to throw up a Cinderella challenger each year and provide one of the narratives of which football fans never weary. The superelite need the rest, but whether the rest can afford their role is increasingly uncertain.

The first three chapters of this book, comprising Part I, describe the politicizing of football in the 1960s and the two-part racial revolution of that era, set against my sheltered experience at Notre Dame. Following a brief interlude—in which I lay out the case for seeing the one-year scholarship as a belated response to the political and racial turmoil in athletic departments of the late 1960s—Part II then considers the world of big-time college football as it was remade first by ncaa legislation in the early 1970s and then by the radically uneven distribution of financial resources in the 1980s and 1990s. Chapters 4 and 5 explore college football’s fundamental contradiction as it has played out in the ncaa’s dual agenda of achieving academic reforms while relentlessly chasing revenues, then tease out the impact of this dual agenda on the athletes in its fostering of both entitlement and exploitation. Chapter 6 considers the possibilities for reform. Instead of offering yet one more set of proposals to be ignored, I suggest that we refocus the conversation. From any reasonably objective perspective, the case for reform seems overwhelming. For a football coach to make several times as much as the university president is obviously crazy. For the nonprofit extracurricular activity of a few dozen students to generate as much as $60 million in revenue is obviously crazy. And expecting the athletes who generate those millions to put in full-time hours, at the equivalent of minimum wage, and also be full-time students like everyone else in their classes is obviously crazy.

Yet if big-time college football is so obviously crazy, why does it survive in our temples of higher learning, overseen by college presidents who are some of the smartest people in the country? The answer is equally obvious: because the sport historically has served vital functions in American higher education, and it is not at all obvious that it no longer

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does so. That’s the crux of the issue. It is not possible to think in any meaningful way about reforming college football without thinking also about the nature and needs of the institutions whose football might need reforming.

For me, the second half of this book is no less personal than the first because writing it has meant wrestling with a subject about which I have felt profoundly ambivalent as a beneficiary of a system that seems to fail too many others. Some readers will dimly remember the revolutions of the 1960s, but for many it will be a surprise to realize how recently these events played out. The tale of distorted priorities, on the other hand, is likely so familiar that it might seem not worth belaboring yet again. I have tried to offer a new way to think about it. These are obviously not the only stories that could be told about college football since the 1960s.2 They are the stories that most interest me, and I can only hope that they will interest readers, too.

A final note on sources. Getting reliable data on either football finances or athletes’ academic performance used to be immensely difficult, if not impossible. Beginning in 1970, the ncaa every few years published the results from surveys of institutional revenues and expenses for athletics, but responses were voluntary, there was little consistency in the reporting, and the organization published only aggregate data. Investigative journalists for major daily newspapers periodically gathered the available information on coaches’ salaries, bowl revenues, television-rights fees, or some other aspect of college football finances, but their data were always partial and never wholly reliable.

In the 1990s, when Congress began requiring annual financial reports to document compliance with Title IX, a wealth of data became suddenly available (for each year since 1995). Even here, because accounting procedures varied—including institutional or state support (tuition waivers, student fees, or direct allocations) in football revenue or counting it separately, while treating or not treating indirect costs, capital expenses, and debt service as football expenses—a clear understanding of football finances did not necessarily emerge. However flawed, data for each ncaa institution at least was now available (posted on the U.S. Department of Education’s website).

Around the same time, Congress began requiring the publication of graduation rates, which the ncaa later revised with its own Graduation Success Rate (gsr) to account for transfers. (Under federal guidelines, an athlete in good academic standing who transferred to another school and

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even graduated from that school would count against his original university’s graduation rate. gsrs tend to be about ten percentage points higher than federal graduation rates.) Here, too, the accompanying ncaa press releases always reported aggregate rather than individual institutional data—for all of Division I-A, for example—but as with the Department of Education’s data on revenues and expenses, a little digging into the ncaa’s website could find the figures for individual institutions. Both the federal graduation rate and the ncaa’s gsr compared athletes to students overall (who were overwhelmingly not on full scholarship, increasingly had to work in order to afford their tuition, and often left school for financial reasons). Whether or not such comparisons were appropriate, at least the data were now available.

Finally, the ncaa itself, under the leadership of Myles Brand since 2003, has begun publishing various kinds of financial data on its website for the sake of transparency and to encourage institutional responsibility. In this spirit, the organization in 2008 began reporting revenues and expenses in a new way, still in aggregate form rather than for individual institutions but avowedly with consistent accounting methods that made the data more meaningful and reliable. (Several athletics officials immediately challenged the consistency of even this improved method.) In short, there are now mountains of data on both the financial and academic dimensions of big-time football that were not available even two decades ago. (With a December 2008 deadline for my final draft—and minor revisions possible until mid-March—the figures used are the most current ones available as of those dates.)