My Group Two would be comprised of the 136 present teams in Division One, less the 36 superpowers. It would contain many famous universities that wished to remain in conferences, play major schedules with teams of their own caliber, and distribute scholarships to athletes of promise but not skilled enough to be hired by schools in Group One. This group, which would comprise the lower two-thirds of all the present conferences plus some of the better independents, forms the heart of my proposal, and it is essential that it establish sensible rules which will be adopted by all competitors and enforced rigorously by a paid staff of supervisors and investigators. I had better not list the teams I would nominate for Group Two, lest they have aspirations to Group One, but they would form the solid backbone of the system.
Since this group would encompass many of the greatest schools in America, it might well be that some blue-chip athletes qualified for Group One would prefer to enroll at the best schools in Group Two, where they could not only play before large audiences but get an education too. Therefore, the essential requirement of this group would be that it give scholarships only for need, that it make no under-the-table payments, and that its athletes be expected to graduate. Concessions would be made as to ensuring a boy’s progress toward a degree, as I shall outline in a moment, but none insofar as academic achievement was concerned.
The reader undoubtedly has grasped that this group would operate pretty much as intercollegiate competition now does, with the powerhouses moved upstairs. Since our present system is riddled with contradiction and corruption, why should we expect some new version of it to be any better? Frankly, I am not confident that our schools can find the intelligence to administer the program I visualize; it may be that we have been so contaminated by the past three or four decades that deescalation to a sensible program is impossible. In basketball particularly, Group Two might quickly be invaded by operators who were buying students, falsifying transcripts, and running semi-professional teams of the same old type. To be number one in a conference whose three top teams had moved into Group One would still be enticing, and to gain this honor, coaches would still wheel and deal. On the other hand, I have met so many splendid men and women in college athletics, leaders of such wisdom and charity, I retain a hope that they might gain ascendancy and run a sensible program, especially if competition with the powerhouses of Group One were eliminated. But the danger would still be basketball, where obtaining only one great player could still mean a championship.
Group Three would consist of those schools that wish to provide a full schedule of two-platoon intercollegiate football, but without the burden of athletic scholarships, overstaffed coaching departments and heavy stadium expense. Admission would be charged for their games.
Group Four would consist of all remaining schools that wish to provide football as recreation for their students, but not the expensive two-platoon kind. No admission would be charged to their games.
It is important, I have always believed, for teams in Groups Three and Four to play against outside competitors. Therefore, I am strongly in favor of regularly scheduled intercollegiate contests, and I am not much impressed by the various informal and club teams I have watched. I think there is a positive good, both emotional and mental, in traveling to a foreign field and engaging in a game against strangers, and I would hate to see this advantage of intercollegiate sport lost, for it is educative, challenging, exciting and productive of lifelong friendships.
HOW AMERICA’S 695 COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES MIGHT DIVIDE THEMSELVES INTO THE FOUR GROUPS
The number of schools in Group One for football may be too low; I have seen studies which claim that as many as 124 schools are playing big-time football, and perhaps that many aspire to do so, but I doubt if they make it. However, since any school with the money, the coaching and the recruiting can insert itself into the big time if it wants to, there could be up to a hundred schools in this category. My preference would be to restrict membership to the thirty-six proved powers.
Many of the benefits available in this four-tier plan will depend upon sensible but minor changes. In Groups One and Two no paid player or player on a scholarship should be allowed to take more than one academic course during the season when his sport is being emphasized. The testimony of former players is overwhelming that no young man can go all-out for a serious football or basketball team and carry a full load of studies; therefore, a realistic solution would be to limit the professional to one course, which would keep him in touch with the academic community in a way that permitted some success. To require him to take three or four serious courses, as is attempted now, is ridiculous; worse, it is damaging, since it corrupts the academic process at the same time it initiates the player into a sense of academic failure. Alabama’s Bear Bryant has had some salty things to say on this problem:
I used to go along with the idea that football players on scholarship were ‘student-athletes,’ which is what the NCAA calls them. Meaning a student first, an athlete second. We were kidding ourselves, trying to make it more palatable to the academicians. We don’t have to say that and we shouldn’t. At the level we play, the boy is really an athlete first and a student second.
Should the paid athlete wish to avoid course work altogether, he would be free to do so, but the great majority would want to be studying something and they should be encouraged. In this system, the paid athlete could graduate from college at the end of five years. If he attended summer school and took an extra course in the semesters when he was not competing in athletics, he could still graduate in four years. We must also consider the case of the occasional genius who could play big-time football and pass his regular four courses at the same time; there are not many such and some kind of exception might have to be made for them, but in general the one-course rule would prove both sensible and practical.
How can we best protect the right of the young semi-professional athlete to gain an education, assuming he wants one? Any scholarship in any group ought to remain viable for five years. Let the athlete devote his fall to football, or his winter to basketball, without regard to piling up credits toward a degree. But when his eligibility is over, let him enjoy a fifth year of study, tuition and board free, to complete his degree. This rule should be initiated right now, regardless of whether the four-group plan is adopted or not. To use an athlete for four years and then chuck him aside with no degree is contemptible.
Now, if the young man turns out to be a superior athlete, and if at the end of his college eligibility he is drafted into professional ranks, his leaving college with an unfinished degree is his decision and the college drops any responsibility at that time. But even so, I would like to see a system whereby the professional is always encouraged to return to his college, either in the off-season or after his professional career has ended, and pick up his missing credits. Therefore, tuition should remain free for a period of fourteen years after departure from college; I choose this length of time to cover the longest typical professional career, and I believe many athletes would avail themselves of the opportunity thus to finish their education. (Once they join the professionals, they pay for their own room and board; only the tuition remains free.)
I now come to a crucial provision, and to comprehend it the reader must consider two main types of professional sports. Baseball and hockey matured in years before the sports were well established in colleges, which meant that the professionals could not depend upon colleges to train the young men they would require in the future. Professional baseball and hockey had to develop well-regulated and costly minor leagues in which aspirants could learn their trade, and it was the cultivation of these minor leagues that enabled the two sports to flourish.
Professional football and basketball, on the other hand, did not mature until long after colleges had developed highly skilled teams. When professional leagues did materialize, they could depend upon the colleges to provide them with an assured supply of trained young men eager to play for pay. Professional football
and basketball were thus excused from the financial obligation of maintaining minor leagues.
To put it bluntly, baseball and hockey were self-sustaining; football and basketball were like cuckoos, depositing their eggs in the nests of others and accepting no financial responsibility for either the rearing or the training of the beginning players on whom their very existence depended. The American educational system has been called upon to provide enormously expensive training programs so that professional teams could prosper without putting up any money.
Chancellor Maurice B. Mitchell of the University of Denver, which dropped football to become a big-time hockey power, has been especially vocal on this issue. I have heard him fulminate several times:
Our universities train professional athletes at a dead loss. We give them scholarships, large helpings of the best food, medical care, the finest coaching. And what do we get back? Not even thanks. The professional owner uses our product with no obligation but with enormous profits. The universities ought to rebel against this unfair exploitation.
James Armstrong, in his capacity as member of the Orange Bowl Committee, has many contacts with universities, and he agrees that under present conditions they are being ill-used:
I think we should institute a program, right now, whereby any professional team which drafts a player out of a university is obligated to reimburse that university for the full cost of the player’s education, coaching and health services. In addition, the professional team should hand over to the university a percentage of any bonus paid the young man, but here I’d establish a top limit of, say, $5,000.
Chancellor Mitchell suggests a practical refinement:
Colleges should state that they’ll give no more athletic scholarships … only loans, and then if the athlete goes into business or law school or medicine, when he graduates you tear up the loan. But if he goes into professional sports because of what you’ve done for him, you don’t tear up the paper, and he owes you that money. We might even institute a check-off system, with the professional team sending us our money direct from his pay check.
Since most baseball and hockey players reach the pros without passing through college, they would be exempt from this rule; but any who did attend on athletic scholarships would be subjected to it. If an athlete had attended two or even three schools, the income from the pros could be prorated.
Even if a given university elected to participate in Group One with an openly professional team or in Group Two with a semi-professional one, it would be obligated to provide a full program of amateur athletics for the entire student body. The professional teams perform in the stadium, the amateur teams on the practice fields. The indefensible situation that prevails at St. Jude’s, where the entire basketball program focuses on only sixteen young men with a gigantic palestra reserved for their use alone, would no longer be tolerated.
For Groups One and Two, I tend to favor the accounting system followed at Michigan, where the athletic department has a separate budget, separately controlled, and this receives funds for public entertainment and disburses them for that, without heavy faculty interference. Health programs, which loom so large in my thinking, should be paid for by the general fund of the university, as should intramural programs of games for fun. Let the professional offering be conducted professionally.
If Group One were assembled, with proper rules—and this may be closer at hand than some think; economics and television combined will hasten the day—there would be agitation for an end-of-year play-off for the national championship, comparable to the one now conducted so successfully in basketball. Originally I favored this, because I have a Germanic-type mind which likes to see loose ends tied up, and it offended me to watch the slap-happy manner in which the bowl games were arranged, with rarely a clear-cut match-up of the top challengers. It seemed to me that it would be simple to arrange schedules so that eliminations could begin by mid-November, with the quarter-finals going to various bowls in early December, the semi-finals to other bowls at Christmas, and the finals, with play-offs for third place, in still other bowls on New Year’s. (The finals would be shifted year by year from one of the four major bowls to the next.)
Penn State’s Joe Paterno, who is rapidly becoming the philosopher of the coaching profession, is strongly in favor of such a national play-off. ‘Look what the system has done for the pros. There’s interest right down to the final week. Look, we’re supposed to be academic institutions. You mean we can’t sit down and figure out a workable play-off system for college football? I think it’s important for our game that we do.’
I do not think it right for a television network which has a contract for a particular bowl game to inflate that confrontation into a play-off to decide the national championship, as ABC did in the fall of 1973 when it decided—and stated so on the air interminably—that the game between Alabama and Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl would decide who was number one. True, the two teams had unbeaten records, so that the claim was not ridiculous, but in actuality they were not the first two teams in the nation; they were more likely the fourth and fifth best teams, behind Oklahoma, Michigan and Ohio State.
I also objected to that delightful little racket a bunch of southern gentlemen had rigged up whereby it was they who ran every bowl but the Rose Bowl, dispensing each year some $5,000,000. They saw to it that southern schools were regularly selected; in one year five SEC teams appeared, drawing down a neat $3,700,000 for their conference. The southerners had a good thing going for their cities, their stadiums and their athletic departments, and I wanted schools in other regions to be cut in for a fair share of the gravy.
Finally, I suspected that a good deal of loose money might be floating around for the benefit of everyone but the schools involved, and I wanted a stricter accounting so that a larger share of the profits could accrue to education.
I now confess that I was wrong. I see no advantage in establishing a system which leads to one uncontested champion. We have too much of that thing in America. A motion picture cannot be a modest success; it must be an all-time grosser. A book cannot be well received by knowledgeable people; it’s a failure unless it’s an all-time best seller. Girls cannot play tennis; they must become champions of this county or that state.
We have a play-off in basketball primarily because a scheduling of twenty-seven games throws up natural area champions, and in the play-offs a team has little difficulty in playing one game Thursday night and another Saturday afternoon. But I am not sure we have gained much by the basketball system, and I fear that if we attempted to mimic it in football, we might lose a great deal. The sloppy manner in which the bowl match-ups are made leads to a lot of frivolity, and at the end of the day almost any team can claim the national championship. Who is offended by such nonsense? A mania for neatness should not become an excuse for forcing things into unnatural postures. I now find that I prefer the present system, because it allows Penn State to claim the national championship each year, with some validity, whereas in a play-off it might not even make the quarter-finals.
There remains, I admit, a question of propriety. Should we continue to allow a bunch of southern sporting types to run the bowl system, and perhaps the national play-offs? And is it reasonable to siphon so much of the football dollar into the hands of athletic directors of southern schools?
I have been attending bowl games for some time now, and I think they are best evaluated as part of the grandiose nonsense of American life. They do no good and very little harm. They are a diversion without much consequence, and they liven the end-of-year festivities. The players do not take them too seriously, and neither should we. For example, the 1974 game between Texas and Auburn at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville was a disgrace insofar as football was concerned, since the Texas players obviously did not want to bother with a post-season game that meant nothing. I was appalled at their performance and wondered what had overtaken them. A friend told me that after the game he had talked with various Texas players, and they tol
d him, ‘It was all a crock of shit. Where can we get some beer?’
I was privileged to work rather intimately with the group of Miami sportsmen who operated the Orange Bowl. The committee in charge of selecting the two teams could have been composed of lineal descendants of Cesare Borgia, Black-beard the Pirate and Jack the Ripper. They knew every trick in the book and had but one objective: to scuttle the Sugar and Cotton Bowls by getting their bids in first.
Selecting the right teams was an operation so intricate that I could not follow the various divagations. Out of respect for the Orange Bowl people I had better use pseudonyms here, but they told me, ‘You’ve got to steer clear of teams like the Dynamiters and the Exterminators. They compile good records, and they play good ball, but they bring almost no supporters to the game, and those that do come sit on their pocketbooks. They don’t spend a goddamned nickel, that crowd.’ To my astonishment, I found that two other teams I had always judged favorably, Gesundheit and Fare-Thee-Well, were also duds. ‘They come down here the day before the game, refuse to engage in pre-game publicity, don’t play well, and bring no supporters into town.’
‘Who do you like?’ I asked.
‘Nebraska. Their supporters fly down like a swarm of locusts. They spend money like they were printing it in their basement. And they always put up a good game. Wyoming only came once, but it was super. Oklahoma’s good. But maybe Notre Dame is the best. Real class.’
I noticed that the Orange Bowl crowd was not afraid to spend money. They flew in scads of sportsmen from all over the country. For the big parade the night before the game they had three dozen marching clubs, a score of topnotch bands and enough floats to fill the streets of Miami. For the half-time ceremonies they had an incredible nine hundred performers, including clowns, dancers, trumpeters, unicyclists and a monstrous pyramid containing three dozen acrobats. This was gaudiness supreme, and everyone loved it.