We're Finally On Our Own (May 1970)

Kent State, College Football's 50-Year Revolution, and How a Decade Ends

Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.

I.

In November of 1970, a man named Dave Puddington resigned from his job as the head football coach of a Northeast Ohio university. Perhaps it is not an ideal retention and growth strategy to open one of the first editions of this newsletter with the story of a coach you’ve almost certainly never heard of; but please, bear with me here, because Puddington happened to be the coach at Kent State, which six months earlier, on May 4, became the epicenter of America’s political and cultural and generational divide when four students were shot by national guardsmen while protesting Richard Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia.

Puddington was a congenitally rah-rah guy who had won medals as an airman in Korea. He was, according to those who knew him, utterly devoid of cynicism; when he coached at Washington University at St. Louis, he personally altered the team’s nickname from the Be…