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No new post this week, but here’s something I originally wrote for The Athletic’s college football history series, about the sport’s evolution in the 1970s, that feels relevant on a few levels fifty years later.
Thank you all for reading, sharing and subscribing to this odd little experiment as it steadily grows. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I hope you are, too.
I.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1973, Richard Nixon switched on the television at Camp David to watch Michigan play Ohio State. This was not the first time Nixon had turned to college football as a diversion from the nation’s fractious politics, but at the tail end of a week in which he had famously declared himself “not a crook” and then been stung by the public revelation of an 18-minute gap in one of the White House tapes discussing the Watergate break-in, bearing witness to a more concentrated form of belligerence between rivals must have served as a welcome distraction.
Heading into that weekend, the top seven teams in the national polls were undefeated. Then the Ohio State-Michigan game ended in a 10-10 tie. The Buckeyes were chosen by Big Ten athletic directors to play in the Rose Bowl, a decision that appeared to surprise even Ohio State’s irascible coach, Woody Hayes; meanwhile, Michigan coach Bo Schembechler fell into a fit of apoplexy that he never really got over. A few weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Notre Dame defeated Alabama by a point in a Sugar Bowl that drew one of the largest television audiences in the history of the sport. It was a game so big that ABC decided to truck in Howard Cosell for the occasion, and he got to help call a finish that somehow managed to live up to the hype.
In the end, five major-college teams — Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, and Oklahoma (which was on probation for recruiting violations) — finished undefeated, with Notre Dame eking out the AP national championship. All of those schools were already national powerhouses, with the possible exception of Penn State, which was in the midst of becoming one.
In a way, that 1973 season was a peak example of college football’s glorious and unpredictable chaos, a thorny iteration of the sport’s perpetual argument that happened to be laced with big-name programs. But it was also a moment of tremendous angst. As the country wrestled with issues about the limits of and the abuse of power, so, too, did a sport that felt increasingly top-heavy and ever fearful about how its future would play out.
II.
Amid the sour aftermath of the 1960s, a new wave of concern about college football was born: In a country weighed down with deficits and fighting runaway inflation, some asked, why should major universities be spending staggering amounts of money on football? Memoirs by former players like Dave Meggyesy and Gary Shaw questioned the authoritarian methods of their coaches at Syracuse and Texas, respectively. Tuition had risen to the point that it was no longer easy for even major colleges to fund what were often rosters replete with up to 200 scholarship athletes.
And so, once again, the sport was forced to reassess itself. In 1972, as major colleges engaged in a scholarship arms race, freshmen became eligible to play on the varsity; the next year, scholarships were limited to 105 per school. One year after the last of the Southeastern Conference’s football programs fully integrated, schools were permitted to offer year-to-year scholarships, which essentially shifted power back to coaches, allowing them to cut athletes they considered to be dead weight. That same year, the NCAA revised its admissions standards to allow any athlete with a 2.0 high school grade-point average a scholarship; this opened the door to college for athletes who may have attended poor or underperforming high schools, while at the same time essentially encouraging major schools to exploit those same athletes in order to keep them eligible.
“Blue-chip athletes, regardless of their academic preparation, could be admitted with scholarships,” wrote author Michael Oriard. “With freshmen now eligible, they immediately faced the pressures of a 10-game (and later 11-, 12- and 13-game) varsity schedule; and with one-year scholarships, their primary responsibility was to please their coaches, not their professors.”
All of this retroactively appears like a way for big-time programs to gain control of both their players and their own circumstances. By then, direct confrontations between college coaches and black players had largely disappeared from the headlines. But a 1974 New York Times series referred to recruiting as a “slave market” that reflected the decade’s win-at-all-cost values. And NCAA executive director Walter Byers would later admit that problems surrounding the increasing recruitment of black athletes “was a sensitive issue that we preferred not to discuss in public.”
At the same time, television had elevated the biggest college football programs to new heights. The elite programs also wanted to be competitive with the NFL, which had begun to dominate television with the advent of “Monday Night Football.” The top college teams now viewed themselves as a separate bloc that wanted little to do with their smaller counterparts. In 1973, driven by that pressure, the NCAA voted to separate into three divisions, with the largest schools — now known as Division I — granted at least some of the autonomy they’d been seeking. Five years later, football’s Division I was further divided into I-A an I-AA.
“The major college teams of the early 1970s wanted more TV appearances,” wrote author John Sayle Watterson. A 1956 Big Ten committee, Watterson wrote, had prophesied that future negotiations would “lock the major teams’ hold on the media” — while also predicting that “the distinction between college and professional sports would become virtually indistinguishable.”
Wrote Watterson of the 1970s: “It was still distinguishable but barely so.”
And so college football entered the age of the giants.
III.
In 1971, after Nebraska and Oklahoma engaged in yet another iteration of College Football’s Game of the Century, the Cornhuskers, under coach Bob Devaney, won their second consecutive national championship. From there, USC won a pair of titles in 1972 and 1974, with Notre Dame defeating Alabama to win the AP title in 1973. Oklahoma won titles in 1974 and ’75, Notre Dame won again in 1977, and Alabama won a pair of titles in 1978 and 1979. (The only exception to this blue-blood trend was Pitt, which went 12-0 in 1976 before coach Johnny Majors departed for Tennessee.)
It was a spectacular era with dominant teams and strikingly brilliant running backs from Earl Campbell to Archie Griffin, but all of that success was also a reflection of college football’s inherent structural problems. This was a game built on the utopian myth of amateurism, but increasingly, that myth had begun to crumble beneath the weight at the top of the pyramid. The best teams kept wanting more.
The fights over television money dragged on: The formation of the College Football Association in 1977 — which led to a legal fight that dragged on well into the cable-TV era of the 1980s — was a way for major colleges to wrestle control of television rights from the NCAA, which had traditionally limited games on TV to maximize attendance. “As never before in the history of college football,” Watterson wrote, “ ‘gate receipts and glory’ would become paramount in the policies of big-time football schools.”
Was it still possible, then, for a college to field a major football team without sacrificing its soul? This was the central question the sport wrestled with in the 1970s, in the wake of Watergate and in the midst of what one prominent football coach dubbed a “fragmented, disillusioned and oftentimes confused society.” That coach? It was Joe Paterno, who delivered those words during a commencement speech in the summer of 1973; the winter before, he’d turned down a million-dollar contract to coach for the New England Patriots and remained at Penn State.
It was a moment that elevated Paterno, for a time, into something like the conscience of college football. Yet the sport would keep growing on into the 1980s and beyond; it had become far too big for anyone to contain, let alone Paterno himself. This had long been college football’s inherent paradox: Every time it grew more popular and more widespread and more lucrative, it became that much more susceptible to the ugly compromises that stood at its soul.
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Haven’t even read it yet but I love the title. An earworm for the day.