Category Archives: College football

Here’s the play….

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There was a recent headline on the website Yahoo!Sports asking if college football is “ready to get out of the stone age” by implementing in-game coach-to-player communication via tiny speakers inside players’ helmets. By copying that NFL system in effect since 1994, college coaches could further remove judgement calls from quarterbacks—who just happen to be the fellows in the cockpit of action—and endorse coaches’ control-freak impulses. There even have been reports that, unlike the NFL shut-off deadline of ending communication with 15 seconds left on the play clock, college coaches might be allowed to continue giving directions as a play unfolds.

“Joe’s open at the 10-yard line. Throw to him!”

My first thought, as a card-carrying member of the stone age, was of appalling micromanagement. Autocracy. Something between a general discouragement of athletes using their heads and complete player subservience. Isn’t decision-making an important role in individual performance, a demonstration of competitive awareness that abets physical skill?

“Interfering with the quarterback destroys his confidence,” Col. Red Blaik, who won three national championships during his 18-year career coaching Army, once argued. “He loses his faith in the coach….If the coach has worked properly with his quarterback [in training, the quarterback] knows more about running the works than does the coach.”

OK, Blaik coached in the 1940s and ‘50s. Ancient history. By the time Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown began shuttling “messenger guards” into games with play calls in the mid-50s, the evolution toward robotic quarterbacking had begun in earnest. Brown, in fact, was the first to attempt the use of in-helmet walkie-talkies to decree a specific play, though those primitive gadgets sometimes picked up local radio stations and air-traffic controllers and soon were discarded.

That obviously didn’t stop the march toward dictating real-time orders from the sideline, leaving only the implementation of actions to the on-field cast. By the 1970s, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry was shuttling his quarterbacks into the huddle on successful plays, a system that neither Roger Staubach nor Craig Morton appreciated.

But typically, critics—fans and commentators—so often ascribe blame for failure to the workers, not the boss. So the modern coach figuratively calls for a forward pass of the buck. (Once, when coach John McKay was asked what he thought of the on-field “execution” of his forever bumbling Tampa Bay Bucs, a first-year expansion team in 1978, he said, “I’m in favor of it.”)

It is difficult to imagine that, for decades, college football had a rule banning any instructions relayed from the bench—subject to a 10-yard penalty. The NFL, too, had such a prohibition until 1944. The first college coach to use baseball-like signals to telegraph plays from the sideline, in 1967, reportedly was Ohio State’s Woody Hayes. (Not that Hayes’ schemes appeared especially creative with a team known for its predictable “three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust” attack.)

Understandably, coaches seek as much control over developments as possible, given that retaining their jobs depends on winning. A belt-and-suspenders approach therefore has come to predominate. Coaches are electronically attached via headsets to assistants who are doing reconnaissance of the enemy from the press box. Signals are sent from the sidelines on “picture boards”—the photo of a bald-headed celebrity (no hair=no running backs) indicates the formation to the players; a drawing of an elephant might signify as so-called “heavy package” of extra tight-ends for short yardage; pictures of books could telegraph that players “read” the defensive alignment. Coaches wave arms, point fingers, pat their heads to relay instructions.

Plus, of course, there is the ubiquitous sight of the coach peering intently at a large laminated card on which he has various options. (A silly social media post, from some Brits self-styled as the Exploding Heads, just surfaced after the Super Bowl, wherein a English bloke accustomed to soccer wonders at many American football oddities, including, “Why is the coach holding a take-away menu?”)

All this military-like maneuvering, and especially the need for secrecy, of course has intensified after the University of Michigan was accused this past season of stealing opponents’ signs. Prominent NCAA coaches have contended that electronically transmitting commands—coach’s lips-to-player’s-ears—would solve the problem and, after some testing at a few bowl games, ought to be implemented forthwith.

From a stone-age perspective, that sounds like giving the coach a joystick and closing in on Esports.

Then and now

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What are the chances, when Notre Dame and Army renew their long-standing college football quarrel in New York City this coming Fall, that some sports journalist—steeped in history of the sport and of the profession—begins his or her game recap with some twist on “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky….”?

That’s how Grantland Rice commenced his report from the Polo Grounds a hundred years ago, a lede that has been called the most memorable in sportswriting history.

Of course, everything has changed since then—the evolution of sports coverage, mostly away from the “Gee-Whiz” tenor of Rice’s time; the rules and strategies and downright danger of football. This time, the two old rivals will meet at Yankee Stadium, long since Army (6-6 last season) has been a football power. In 1924, Army had lost only twice the previous two seasons and Notre Dame was on its way to a perfect 10-0 record.

They essentially were the two “national” college teams at the time, as Indiana University professor Murray Sperber documented in “Shake Down the Thunder,” his 2002 book that traces the history of Notre Dame football. Furthermore, as Allen Barra wrote in a 1999 New York Times recollection of that ballyhooed match, the 1920s “were the golden age of myth-making sports journalism.” And Grantland Rice was “king of the Gee-Whizzers,” the new breed of sportswriter that trafficked in “the most florid and exciting prose.” (And seen as opposing a more circumspect “Aw Nuts” school of scribes.)

Anyway, the story is that a Notre Dame press assistant happened to liken the 1924 Notre Dame backfield to a recent film, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” and Rice ran with that ball:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.

Rice rhapsodized (and maybe embellished) Notre Dame’s dominance—the final score, after all, was a thoroughly competitive 13-7—“through the driving power of one of the greatest backfields that ever churned up the turf of any gridiron in any football age.” Those Notre Dame backs “seemed to carry the mixed blood of the tiger and the antelope,” and when Layden scored the first Notre Dame touchdown, Rice described the 10-yard run “as if he had just been fired from the black mouth of a howitzer.”

Another factor at work that day was what Sperber cited as Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne’s media savvy, an understanding that playing in New York City—which had 11 daily newspapers at the time—was a marketing gold mine (and birthed the school’s so-called Subway Alumni). And Rice, columnist for the New York Herald Tribune whose work was syndicated widely, was “by far the most famous sportswriter of his era,” according to “King Football,” the 2004 book by Oregon State University liberal arts professor Michael Oriard—a former player, by the way, for both Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Rice’s Four Horsemen narrative, for all its poetic use of imagery and spectacle, left wide gaps of information that would not meet current editing standards. He did not use first names of players. He did not provide cumulative statistics such as team or individual yardage gained. His report was vague about when the scoring transpired. There is not a single quote in the piece, from coach or player or official.

That was the fashion then. Just as the exploits of the Horsemen—fullback Jim Crowley, halfbacks Elmer Layden and Don Miller and quarterback Harry Stuhldreher—were decidedly feeble compared to numbers common in today’s wide-open offenses. Stuhldreher threw only 33 passes all season (completing 25), hardly in the same ballpark as 2023 Notre Dame quarterback Sam Hartman’s average of 25 passes and 16 completions per game. Miller was Notre Dame’s leading rusher during the 1924 season with 763 yards, followed by Crowley’s 739, according to Sports-Reference.com. (There are no game statistics available for the Blue-Gray October Sky game.)

Still, as Barra wrote, the rise of college football in the 1920s, to a status in the American sports pantheon just behind Major League Baseball, “coincided with the rise of the sports pages” and “combined to make each other. And both helped to create Grantland Rice.” Even now, that first paragraph in Rice’s Oct. 18, 1924 Herald Tribune tale of the Four Horsemen riding to victory against Army endures in anthologies of sportswriting.

It could be argued that the opening lines are as memorable in the sports journalism universe as some of the great ledes in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Or this one, from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which, come to think of it, recalls a certain extravagance in Rice’s account: “All this happened, more or less.”

Won the big game but lost their poise

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At first, the headline in Slate seemed about right: “Tennessee Over Alabama Is Why God Invented College Football.” A dramatic midseason passion play between unbeaten longtime rivals, decided by the absurdly over-the-top score of 52-49 amid wild last-minute fluctuations, the show—especially the ending—was worth an exuberant yahoo!

First of all, Alabama—arrogant, insatiable Alabama, which has played in six of the last seven national championship games, winning three—had lost, a result that certainly delighted a major portion of college football followers. More delicious to the Tennessee crowd, in excess of 100,000 people, was that the home team had ended a 15-year losing streak against much-despised Alabama.

Slate emphasized the significance of the Tennessee upset by declaring that validation in college football comes “from two things: Beating the team you hate the most, and having the time of your life with you friends. That’s what Tennessee provided.”

Except. When it was over, Tennessee students and fans stormed the field, ripped down the goalposts and, overpowering security guards and police, dumped pieces of the posts into the Tennessee River behind the stadium. During the chaos, a county sheriff’s officer was sent to the hospital after being struck in the head by a bottle, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, which listed dozens of arrests for public intoxication and assault.

David Ubben, writing for The Athletic, chronicled the post-game madness in a lengthy piece that was thoroughly reported—but somehow came to the conclusion that the delinquents’ destructive rumble was “a little piece of heaven,” just an exuberant collecting of big-win souvenirs.

“For at least a few minutes,” Ubben wrote, “traffic laws didn’t exist and vandals were given clemency. All is forgiven on a night like this. And the police can’t hand out 500 jaywalking tickets.”

The Southeastern Conference could—and did—levy a $100,000 fine against the university for the fans’ rampage, yet The Athletic, in a follow-up post, posited that “the fine is completely worth the enthusiastic mayhem of Saturday in Knoxville.”

University president Randy Boyd didn’t exactly reveal himself to be a model of rectitude, either. Victory cigar in hand, Boyd, when asked how much the haywire celebration might cost his school, glibly assured that “it doesn’t matter. We can do this every year.” Sports Illustrated joined the endorsement of hooliganism by calling Boyd’s response “appropriate.”

So, OK: Herewith the fuddy-duddy reaction to Tennessee fans’ neanderthal behavior, starting with how it utterly perverted the definition of poise—”keeping one’s head while all those around you are losing theirs.”

That Tennessee’s gridders had at last knocked off mighty Alabama after 15 consecutive losses—on national television, with possible national-title consequences and maximum style points—was accurately described by Slate as “an exorcism,” and by winning coach Josh Heupel as “college football at its best.” The game itself was undeniably grand theatre, with an on-the-edge-of-your-seat finish. Enormously satisfying for all but Alabama rooters.

But so many in the Tennessee mob lost their moorings in the wake of the winning field goal. It was a form of tribal joy gone wrong, using the occasion of a significant victory as justification for wreaking havoc (and endangering people). It has happened too often in cities whose teams have won the World Series, the Super Bowl or the NBA title, and on campuses when “having the time of your life with your friends” metastasizes into anarchy.

A few years ago, Sports Illustrated cited Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, the campus and surrounding Knoxville area for providing the best college football weekend experience in the nation.

After the Tennessee-Alabama game, though, you can have that experience.

That’s rich

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This is an old man speaking, susceptible to How Things Used To Be. Feel free to opt for trendier fare. TikTok videos. Look-at-me Instagram posts. Instant messages composed entirely of acronyms.

Nevertheless, I shall rail against the latest realignment of college athletic conferences, which really has nothing to do with colleges and very little to do with athletics as a whole. These days, it’s all about football “programs;” nobody calls them “teams” anymore, because their function is to serve as cash cows for television, coaches and athletic directors.

My problem—and here I acknowledge a fusty nostalgia—is believing in the outdated sense that conferences should reflect regional ties, traditional rivalries and institutional similarities.

Alas, the universities of Texas and Oklahoma which, in the public mind, are not so much bastions of higher learning as football operations in pursuit of wealth, have announced they will leave the already diminished Big 12 to join the nation’s richest league, the Southeastern Conference. It feels like a modern version of the priority voiced 70 years ago by Oklahoma president George L. Cross: “We’re working to develop a university that our football team can be proud of.”

I admit to loving the college game in spite of its meaner aspects, including a long history of tenuous connections to academics. In the late 1800s, for goodness sakes, the original football factory was Yale University. But there was a fairly recent time when a reasonable percentage of the hired guns were actual students and conferences facilitated contests for nothing more consequential than neighborhood bragging rights.

Then the big bucks got a little too big and the social climbing commenced, in the 1990s destroying the Southwest Conference that was modeled on geography, a collection of Texas colleges plus Arkansas. Roughly 20 years on, the Big 12—a grouping of mid-America/breadbasket schools which had cherrypicked four former SWC teams—went into decline with the departure of Nebraska (to the Big 10), Colorado (to the Pac-12), Missouri and Texas A&M (both to the SEC.)

When that shameless gold-digging was afoot, NCAA president Mark Emmert washed his hands, telling the watchdog Knight Commission in 2011 that his organization “does not have a role in conference affiliations and should never be in the business of telling universities what affiliations they should have.”

At that same Knight confab, though, then-Knight co-chair Brit Kirwan, at the time president of the University of Maryland system, expressed “great concerns over the fragmented governing structure” in which football establishments, seeking the most affluent league connections, were “wreaking havoc on a number of institutions” and their non-football athletes.

Kirwan recognized “the dance going on” to be based on the urge for Bowl Championship Series eligibility; i.e., more TV payouts. The next year, sure enough, Maryland—a founding member of the ACC more than a half-century earlier—jumped to the higher income bracket available in the Big 10.

It was then-LSU chancellor Michael Martin who in 2011 guessed, presciently, that “we could end up with just two enormous conferences, one called ESPN and the one called Fox.” Which sounds far more likely than the argument put forward in a recent article by Michael Benson, president and professor of history at Coastal Carolina University.

Benson claimed that “the two biggest brokers in these conversations” are not football muscle and TV riches; rather, “the role of academics and a given school’s ‘institutional fit.’” He cited the Big 10’s insistence that it welcomes only members of the Association of American Universities, the most exclusive club of pre-eminent research-intensive schools that includes only 64 of the nation’s roughly 4,000 degree-granting institutions (1.6 precent).

But Nebraska, now firmly ensconced in the Big 10, recently was booted out of the AAU. And when my dear old alma mater, the University of Missouri, jumped to the SEC in 2012, it became only the fourth of the league’s 14 schools—along with Vanderbilt, Florida and Texas A&M—that is inside the AAU’s velvet ropes. Texas would be No. 5. Oklahoma does not belong to the AAU, though it is doubtful that the Oklahoma football team’s pride is hurt by that fact.

Consider: Of the 23 Division I national football championship games dating to 1998, 16 were won by non-AAU schools. So much for the role of academics in these matters. Just follow the money.

Which gets back to my earlier Yale reference. Only last week, Don Kagan, Yale’s former professor of history and the classics, died at 89. In 1987, when Kagan was serving as Yale’s interim athletic director, we had a chat about that school—and its fellow conference members in the Ivy League—having long-ago chosen scholarly might over football supremacy.

Kagan said then, “This desire to gain [football] glory is understandable, and to a certain extent, not contemptible. But you have to realize that you’d still be great if you never won another football game. You have to think: Is it glorious to hire a bunch of mercenaries and then, when you win, say ‘Our mercenaries can beat your mercenaries’? What’s the point?”

Who’s going to win it all?

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Should we believe the polls? Are they really a reliable predictor of who will come out on top in the end? Of who will do what to whom? Seriously: What are the chances that Clemson, currently leading in the oldest of polls—which has been conducted by the Associated Press since 1936—will be the 2020 college football champion?

Oh. Those polls. The ones relating to the Electoral College.

But we’re still talking about surveying, no? Canvassing? Inquiries into public opinion from a sample of people? We are considering margins of error and predictions that occasionally are wrong. (Think of the grief that fivethirtyeight.com creator Nate Silver has had to deal with the last four years).

The urge to question the rock-solid certainty of these reports brings to mind celebrated old New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel, whose teams dominated the 1950s but, at age 70 in 1960, was informed that an AP bulletin said he was about to be fired. “What,” Stengel wanted to know, “does the UP say?”

The UP was United Press, AP’s rival wire service (for which I worked in 1969-70 when it was called United Press International and still was a viable competitor to AP). Appropriate to this discussion, the AP and UPI were primary disseminators of the college football polls for decades until the UPI poll, its panel of judges made up of coaches at the highest level, handed its ratings list over USA Today.

It’s certainly worth noting that, during my time at UPI, there were confirmed cases of coaches outsourcing their votes. Some, not wanting to bother with having to measure colleagues’ teams, quietly turned the chore over to the sports publicists at their schools. Others, reasoning that a victory—even a loss—against a highly rated opponent was good for their own status, consistently ranked their upcoming opponent somewhere in the Top Five. No matter that team’s previous success.

So much for thorough analysis. Which would not have come as a major surprise to the founder of the AP poll, Alan Gould, who admitted outright that his purpose simply was “to develop interest and controversy between football Saturdays….to keep the pot boiling.” To Gould, sports was “living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla.”

But the late Mickey Carroll, with whom I spoke years ago during Carroll’s long tenure as director of the highly regarded and widely cited Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, argued that the AP and UPI exercises weren’t “real polls,” because a real poll “takes some sort of group and, in a scientific way, sees how they feel.”

The college polls don’t do “a big enough sample,” Carroll said. “If they said, ‘Let’s poll football fans across the nation on how they feel,’ that’s a poll.” Quinnipiac’s methodology requires telephoning by some 300 interviewers, with computers randomly determining the numbers to be called. To obtain a typical total of 1,200 responses, Carroll said “at least double that number” had to be contacted over five to seven days.

The AP football poll, meanwhile, uses the same 65 sportswriters and broadcasters to determine their weekly ranking. In the USA Today poll, there are 62 coaches involved. In terms of prognostication, a recent review by The Bleacher Report website found that, of college teams ranked first in the AP and USA Today pre-season polls from 2004 to 2013, only three of 10 maintained top status through the season.

Mixing metaphors, that reduces the gridiron rankings to pretty much a jump ball. Marginally accurate in terms of forecasts. And while political polls aren’t perfect, either, the Electoral College—I’ve been unable to find a cheer or fight song for the institution—keeps finishing No. 1. So far, anyway.

Whistling Dixie?

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The zombie idea that there must be college football in the South despite a global pandemic does not appear to be about just college football. Even as coronavirus risks cited by widespread medical advice have convinced a majority of schools across the nation to close their stadiums, caution apparently is gone with the wind in the South.

Because, as Florida State English professor Diane Roberts noted in the Washington Post, “In the South, college football has long been a sort of do-over for the Civil War.”

The three major conferences intent on soldiering on—the SEC, Big 12 and ACC—have 25 of their 37 institutions based in the states from the former Confederacy (plus another five from Civil War “border states”). And a rebel legacy clearly is asserting itself on the gridirons of Dixie.

“Football,” Southern historian James Cobb told me years ago, “is a place where the Lost Cause reasserts itself. It’s a component of the South’s need to industrialize and beat the North at its own game. A way to re-fight the Civil War.”

It was during an assignment at the University of Tennessee three decades ago that then-Tennessee coach Johnny Majors, who died in June at 85, reminisced about how “even when I was a kid, so many people I knew would talk about the Yankees, what they’d done to us.” He made it clear that one answer to the Yanks’ superiority complex was the South’s football success; Majors not only had been an All-American player at the school in 1956, but also coached three SEC championship teams there.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern author Rick Bragg, in a 2012 essay for ESPN, confirmed that college football in the South “has been an antidote to often dark history for as long as even our oldest people can recall. We are of long memory here. I gave a talk once in Mobile, Ala., and mentioned that the Southern aristocracy had been on the wrong and losing side in two great conflicts: The Civil War and the civil rights movement, prompting one older gentleman to rise from his seat, huffing that I did not know what I was talking about, and leave the room.

“Later, I said I was surprised that mentioning the turbulent 1960s would anger anyone so, after so much time. A nice gentleman told me, no, that wasn’t it. ‘He’s still mad,’ the nice man said, ‘about the war.’”

It’s now 155 years in the past.  Roughly five generations ago.

But forget, hell. From 1939 to 2001, there was an annual All-Star football bowl called the Blue-Gray Game—contested in the original Confederate capital of Montgomery, Ala.—between players who competed for colleges in the North against players from schools in the former Confederate states, and which outfitted the teams in the colors of the Union and Rebel armies. With, by the way, the added historical element that Black players were banned until 1965.

In his 2001 book, “King Football,” Oregon State University professor Michael Oriard, who had played collegiately and professionally, documented that the “three major Southern conferences remained entirely segregated until 1963” when Maryland, then in the ACC, first accepted a Black player. The Southwest Conference—its highest profile teams now are in the Big 12 (Texas and Oklahoma) or SEC (Texas A&M and Arkansas)—wasn’t fully integrated until 1970 and the SEC not until 1972.

Furthermore, Oriard wrote, “the most powerful force for integration was not high-minded principle but the need to win football games…”

The irony is that, in re-fighting the Civil War, Southern teams commenced doing so by recruiting Blacks (and Yankees), even as the majority of Southern college fans, student bodies, coaches and administrators has remained overwhelmingly white. In her Post essay, Roberts referenced a culture she called “retro-America” in which “racial roles are pretty stark….Older white men are in charge (85 percent of Power Five coaches are white) while young men of color—55 to 60 percent of the Power Five football teams—perform the labor.” Those numbers are even more dramatic in the three Southern leagues among the Power Five.

“Small wonder,” she added, “that civil rights historian Taylor Branch famously detected ‘a whiff of the plantation’ around college football.”

The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture declares that “more than any other sport, football seems to reflect characteristics of the South.” And Atlanta-based reporter/author Tony Barnhart has written, “Like all things in the South, the importance of college football can be traced back to the Civil War.”

To keep playing through a modern plague sounds like some argument for Southern states’ rights. And rites.

The Gagliardi Doctrine: Football sanity

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John Gagliardi began his letter—neatly produced by playing the Olivetti or the Underwood, one of those manual pre-laptop writing machines—“See. I can type.”

I had interviewed him a couple of weeks earlier at St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., where Gagliardi was in the 34th of his eventual 60 seasons coaching the school’s football team. He already was wildly successful at collecting championships in the NCAA’s non-scholarship Division III, but that wasn’t the news. The real story was how Gagliardi had an approach to his sport that was so foreign as to be a football non sequitur.

That was 1987, and it simply did not follow then—any more than there might seem a logical progression now—that Gagliardi’s rejection of tackling in practice, of playbooks and agility drills, of calisthenics and war terminology, of clipboards and whistles and blocking dummies, could set such an enviable example of gridiron might.

Anyway, Gagliardi was recalling back then how his coaching career began as a 16-year-old high school junior. And how, “meanwhile, there was a junior college in town”—Trinidad, Col.—“and I was also playing basketball in high school and the coach at the junior college asked me if I’d like to play for him after the high school season was over.

“He told me,” Gagliardi said, “to go to night school and take typing” to be eligible for the college team. “I wound up lettering four years in junior college in basketball—two years while I was still in high school. I got to be a hell of a typist.”

When Gagliardi died this week at 91, six years after retirement, he took with him a humanity and a wonderfully sly sense of humor. More than his 489-138-11 coaching record—by far the most accomplished mark in college football history—was his outrageously sane approach.

A football team that didn’t practice tackling? “That came to me,” he said, “as a young guy who was getting killed in practice” during his high school playing days at Trinidad Catholic.

No calisthenics? No drills? No laps? “When I was in high school,” he said, “we had a coach I learned a lot from. All negative. He was a fanatic on calisthenics and drills. Torturous stuff. And laps, laps, laps. We were worn out before we started. My memory of it was that Hell must be like this. Those damn duck walks. I hated them. Years later, everybody was told how bad those duck walks are for your knees. Anyway, then we’d scrimmage. We’d kill each other in practice. I came within a hair of not hanging in there.”

What saved his playing career, and launched his coaching vocation, was when that negative coach was called to military service during Gagliardi’s junior year. The school principal intended to disband the football team but Gaglilardi, the team captain, saved the day by volunteering to coach.

“We just wanted to play,” he said. “First thing I did was throw out all the calisthenics. See, I had noticed all the kids who would go play intramurals never did all the drills and that stuff, and I never saw any ambulances going over to their fields. The ambulances always were coming over to us.”

And another thing: “Our coach used to say, ‘Hit somebody! Kill somebody!’ But I noticed that I was the guy getting killed,” Gagliardi said. “The only tragic flaw in his system was that, when we lined up, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I was the tailback—you know, the old single-wing, Notre Dame Box and all that—and I noticed that when I’d call a play, there would be panic in the linemen’s eyes. ‘Who do I block?’ I thought the first thing we ought to do is figure out who to block.”

When Trinidad Catholic proceeded to win the state championship that year, Gagliardi had found his calling—and the conviction that a football coach need not stand on ceremony. At St. John’s, he did without staff meetings, grading of game film, the existence of a training table. No player was considered too small. No player ever was cut from the team, with in excess of 150 on the roster some years and as many as 120 sometimes used in the same game.

His players employed The Beautiful Day Drill, in which they would lie on their backs, gazing up at the foliage and Minnesota sky, observing to one another, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” The team had an informal Canadian Award, no more than a verbal prize, given to players who made it through the chilly Midwestern autumns practicing only in shorts. There was an inordinate amount of fun.

To those incoming freshmen, intent on proving they were worthy footballers, who asked Gagliardi, “Who do I hit or kill?” Gagliardi’s answer was, “That’s not the way to make a tackle. First, you’ve got to line up in the right spot. You’ve got to go to the right spot. You’ve got to figure out where the ball is. You’ve got to not get blocked. You’ve got to pressure the ball.

“You do all that, eventually you’ll make the tackle. Besides, if you’re in the hospital, you won’t make the tackle. And I hate visiting hospitals. If we tackle in practice, who do we hurt? Our own quarterback and running back. They’re human. They’ve got knees and mothers.”

In 2010, when the National Football League at last acknowledged the risk of brain damage inherent in the sport, I called Gagliardi, who often noted that “we haven’t made a tackle on the practice field since 1958.” Might such a system save the pros from further head trauma and long-range health and legal issues?

Gagliardi, who once declined to take an assistant coaching position with Bud Grant’s Minnesota Vikings, insisted that NFL coaches “certainly don’t need my advice. I’m not looking for converts. Certain things—religion, politics—you’ll never change.

“But I think we led the world in fewest injuries. It isn’t rocket science to me. I’ll never forget the first time we won the national championship and, at a clinic afterwards, a fellow says to me, ‘Don’t you think, if you’d have hit more in practice, you’d have done better?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We played 12 games and won them all. I don’t know how we could’ve won 13.’”

My type of coach.

Elusive football titles. And Slippery Rock

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Here’s the loophole in Alabama’s claim to the national college football title: The University of Central Florida.

This is not to diminish Alabama’s rollicking overtime victory over Georgia in the designated championship game. It is not a call for an expanded playoff system. Nor is it an assertion—impossible to make—that Central Florida would have beaten either Alabama or Georgia. It simply is an understanding that Central Florida, excluded from the four-team playoff by the 13-member committee of athletic directors, former coaches (and one journalist), is entitled to its national championship argument.

Central Florida, unlike Alabama and Georgia, never lost a game this season. Of the 137 schools in the NCAA’s top football division, only Central Florida was undefeated. Furthermore, among Central Florida’s 13 victims was Auburn, which previously defeated both Alabama and Georgia.

Central Florida’s situation is a far cry from the tenuous Slippery Rock Theory of No. 1-ness evoked in 1936. That year, divergent polls knighted Pitt (8-1-1) and Minnesota (7-1) co-national champs, but a Slippery Rock student had an if-then logic to his 6-3 team’s right to the title: Slippery Rock beat Westminster, which beat West Virginia Wesleyan, which beat Duquesne, which beat Pitt, which beat Notre Dame, which beat Northwestern, which beat Minnesota.

In 2008, once-beaten Florida defeated once-beaten Oklahoma in the championship game. (That was six years before the current four-team playoff format, but the title participants were just as subjectively determined.) Salon columnist King Kaufman posited that Tulane—which won two games that season—was the real national champion because Tulane beat Louisiana Monroe, which beat Troy, which beat Middle Tennessee, which beat Maryland, which beat Wake Forest, which beat Ole Miss, which not only beat Florida but also Texas Tech which, in turn, beat Oklahoma.

Such a calculus would have elevated my alma mater, the University of Missouri, to the national title in both 2006 and 2007. In ’06, Missouri was 8-5. But Ohio State lost the designated title game to Florida, and Florida lost to Auburn, which lost to Georgia, which lost to Vanderbilt, which lost to Ole Miss, which lost to Missouri. I rest my case. The next season, LSU defeated Ohio State in the championship tilt, but LSU earlier had lost to two teams, Kentucky and Arkansas, while Missouri lost to only one team that season, Oklahoma (though that happened twice). Furthermore, Missouri dominated Arkansas in its bowl game.

But, OK, fuzzy math and partisan methodology aside, it is fair to note that these championships are not settled entirely on the playing field. It can be debated that Alabama, in losing its final regular-season game to Auburn and failing to advance to its own conference championship game, never should have been admitted to the playoffs in the first place over six conference winners, including Central Florida.

Nobody is likely to contend that Central Florida’s league, the American Athletic Conference, is on a par with Alabama’s Southeastern Conference, but so what? Central Florida demonstrated its worthiness by conquering SEC-division champ Auburn in the Peach Bowl. Central Florida coach Scott Frost called the selection committee’s modest No. 12 ranking prior to conference title games a “conscious effort” to insure his team would be excluded from the playoffs.

It’s the same thing that happened to Boise State in 2006, when Boise State was unbeaten but ranked a humble 9th because it didn’t come from a so-called “power conference.” In that season’s Fiesta Bowl, Boise State upset power-conference member Oklahoma, but that was as close as it was going to get to the Florida-Ohio State championship match-up between once-beaten teams.

Frost, who has improved his chances of a playoff berth by ascending to a higher conference as Nebraska’s new head coach, had a point. There is an asymmetrical attention in these matters to the big-name schools and richer leagues, and folks in my profession—sports journalism—too often feed that narrative.

Definitive statements and established reputations rule. On the Sports On Earth website, Mike Lupica proclaimed Alabama’s Nick Saban “the best college coach of all time….there never has been a better coach in college football than he is, as far back as you want to go.” Which seems a bit over the top when one considers that there were 774 college head coaches, on various levels, in 2017. (And that doesn’t count two-year schools.) Throw in the fact that college football has been played for 148 years, and to anoint one fellow the best of all time sounds mighty presumptuous.

Here’s another school of thought, prompted by the news of Carmen Cozza’s death the week of the Alabama-Georgia buildup. Cozza, who was 87, had been Yale’s coach for 32 seasons and, if greatness is winning, Cozza certainly qualified as among the best. His Yale teams averaged fewer than four losses per year and, during one stretch in the late 1970s, Yale was Ivy League champion seven of eight years.

But, because Ivy League schools opted in 1945 not to participate in post-season play—based on the quaint egghead reasoning that colleges should prioritize education over football—Cozza’s teams never had any hope of playing for a national championship. And so what?

Days before Cozza’s final game at Yale in 1996, against annual rival Harvard, I sat with him in his New Haven, Conn., office as he mulled What It All Meant.

“I think,” he said then, “that anyone in this business has aspirations of being in the Rose Bowl. But I know people who took jobs like that. They are friends and I’ve seen what happened to them. So I’m saying to myself, ‘Be thankful for what you have.’”

More than once, Cozza had been contacted about taking higher-profile jobs but found himself wondering “if I’d be as happy as I was at Yale. I’d certainly have liked to have players bigger and faster sometimes. But nobody coached as many doctors and lawyers as I have, as many leaders. I always couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning.

“The game is for the young men. It’s not for fund-raising for the university. It’s not for putting schools on the map. I don’t think an institution should ever use an athlete to promote its well-being. If we’re not doing what’s in the best interest of the student, we’re not being educators.”

That same week, Harvard’s coach, Tim Murphy, told me, “If you take the two ends of the spectrum—Vince Lombardi’s ‘winning is the only thing’ and Grantland Rice’s ‘it’s how you play the game’—I think Carm is somewhere in the middle. And me, too.”

And me, too. Congratulations to Alabama. Congratulations to (sort-of) national champion Central Florida. Don’t get carried away.

He outlived Hofstra football

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It was just last week that one of my Hofstra University journalism students, for his final paper of the semester, wrote a lament of the school’s 2009 decision to disband its football team. “A Lost Program Gone But Not Forgotten,” he called it.

And now comes the news that a central figure in both Hofstra and Hofstra football history is gone as well: James Shuart, dead at 85.

By the time Shuart retired after 25 years as University president in 2001, he had come to be a sort of Father Hofstra. He had Dutch roots, like the school itself. He had earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Hofstra. He had been one of the first 12 football players to receive a Hofstra athletic scholarship and was a member of the original Hofstra lacrosse team.

He had returned to his alma mater to work as admissions officer, faculty member, dean and vice president before assuming the presidency in 1976, at a time when the university was struggling financially. During his tenure, Hofstra increased enrollment, expanded academic offerings and library holdings, initiated presidential conferences, became the first private university campus in the nation to be fully accessible to the physically challenged, moved its athletic department into top-tier Division I and founded the school of communications—where I now work after 44 years as a reporter for Long Island’s Newsday.

The year after Shuart retired, the football stadium was renamed in his honor. James M. Shuart Stadium still stands, but in 2004, the school’s athletic nickname was changed, from Flying Dutchmen to Pride, and in 2009 Shuart’s successor, Stuart Rabinowitz, did away with intercollegiate football for fiscal reasons.

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I am the first to acknowledge that, in the reality-based world of 21st Century college sports, it is difficult to rationalize the expense of fielding a football team at a small private school. Enormous costs for insurance, equipment and staff are virtually impossible to offset when there is none of the rabid spectator following or the massive television-fueled revenues of thoroughly professional powers such as Alabama or Ohio State.

Furthermore, it is not impossible to be a top-flight institution of higher education without a football team.

But it was sad to see the Dutch label ditched. Hofstra takes its name from William Hofstra, an early 1900s Long Island lumber magnate of Dutch heritage upon whose land the university is built. And Shuart told me, during a long interview shortly before he retired, how his surname “really is from the Dutch ‘Sjoerd,’ which means ‘George’ and was used as a last name when Napoleon insisted that people had to have last names. I’m one-quarter Dutch; one of my grandparents allegedly was Dutch.”

When the teams were called the Dutchmen, Hofstra dressed a coed in a Dutch-girl costume as a mascot, complete with wooden shoes, and called her Katie Hofstra—after William’s wife. (Hofstra still holds an annual spring Dutch Festival to showcase a campus flooded with tulips—another Shuart initiative.)

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More to the point, Shuart epitomized the sound mind, sound body ideal in college, a “student-athlete” before the term was coined by the NCAA as a brand to rationalize the recruitment of jocks whose primary purpose was to win games and boost the salaries and resumes of coaches and athletic directors.

Shuart, a history major, was captain of the 1952 Hofstra football team his senior year, when Hofstra lost only one of nine games. That loss was to Alfred, when an Alfred punt took an odd bounce, glanced off a Hofstra blocker and afforded Alfred the fumble recovery that set up the winning score.

“We were so upset,” Shuart recalled. “Young men—20, 21 years old—tears streaming down our faces.” Hofstra’s coach then was Howdy Myers, who in 1950—Shuart’s sophomore year—had started the school’s lacrosse operation.

“He called his first meeting of the football players that February,” Shuart said, “and handed us gloves, a helmet with wires and sticks. He said, ‘Gentlemen, this is lacrosse.’ That was his spring training.”

As president and after his retirement, Shuart remained a passionate Hofstra football fan until the sport was dropped, a fixture at the team’s home games long before the stadium assumed his name. For years, a Jim Shuart Football Scholarship went to one of the school’s players.

In 1999, when Hofstra advanced to the Division 1-AA football playoffs before losing to Illinois State, a star of the team was Long Island native Kahmal Roy, a sophomore wide receiver who had been granted one of those Jim Shuart scholarships.

“They never threw the ball to me when I played,” said Shuart, who had been an interior lineman. “But when Kahmal scores a touchdown….oh, man!”

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Bowl games and grid inflation

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College football

It’s a zeitgeisty thing to have the holiday season filled—stuffed, crammed, clogged, jampacked—with college football bowl games. But we are up to 40 major-college bowls this season, and even some of the sport’s insiders have begun to wonder about a form of grid inflation.

Because, while there is no danger of running out such events, we are running out of blue-ribbon teams to play them.

Three of this winter’s 80 bowl teams—that’s almost two-thirds of the 128 schools that field maximum-scholarship teams—have losing records (Minnesota, Nebraska and San Jose State). Another 12 also are not above .500 after scratching out 6-6 seasons.

Only 18 teams are either conference or conference-division champions (though two independents, 10-2 Notre Dame and 9-3 BYU, could be added to that level of accomplishment). One bowl, the first-year Arizona Bowl, was so desperate for participants that it had to settle for two middling teams in the same conference, fellow Mountain West members Colorado State and Nevada. (One of 7-5 Colorado State’s losses was to that below-par Minnesota outfit, and Nevada is among the crowd of 6-6 teams.)

“Clearly,” Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said, “the system is broken.”

Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby is on record acknowledging that “we do have too many bowl games and have more bowl games waiting in the wings.” According to Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford, his league’s athletic directors would prefer teams be at least 7-5 to be bowl eligible.

Even NCAA president Mark Emmert, the primary-care official for college football, last week cautioned that his organization members “are going to have to figure out what’s the purpose of bowl games? Is it a reward for a successful season, or is it just another game that we’re going to provide an opportunity for?”

Behind that curtain of concern, though, are some financial and competitive realities that don’t appear likely to change:

  • ESPN, which will televise 34 of the 40 bowls—plus the national championship game—wants the programming and the advertising riches that brings. (ESPN, in fact, owns 13 of the bowls through its ESPN Events subsidiary.)
  • Athletic departments and conferences want the payouts for bowl participation, which last year ranged from $325,000 per team in Boise’s Famous Idaho Potato Bowl to $18 million each for contestants in long-established bowls such as the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton.
  • Coaches want the added game experience for players with remaining eligibility, plus the recruiting-tool visibility. Not to mention the automatic bonuses that schools routinely spread throughout their staffs. (The Seattle Times recently detailed how Washington State has guaranteed head coach Mike Leach an additional $75,000 for getting his team to the Sun Bowl, while Leach’s assistant coaches will receive from $15,000 to $35,000 each, and athletic director Bill Moos $50,000.)

No surprise: Money was the motivation when all this started with the 1902 Rose Bowl, which leaned on college football’s growing popularity as a way to finance the annual Tournament of Roses Parade, then 12 years old. The final score was so lopsided—Michigan 49, Stanford 0—that the Rose Tournament’s game was held in abeyance until 1916. But, by 1935, the Orange and Sugar Bowls had appeared, and the Cotton in ’37.

Only Major League Baseball was more popular and more widespread than college football then, though perennial superpower Notre Dame had stopped accepting bowl invitations after winning the 1925 Rose and didn’t lift its self-imposed ban on the post-season until 1970.

There was some assertion that Notre Dame chose not to extend its seasons with bowl appearances because the additional games didn’t jive with the primary purpose of education. But that quaint notion was quickly discarded as big money increasingly came with bowl appearances and the Associated Press decided, in 1968, to discontinue crowning its national champion prior to the bowl season.

With that, bowl games (of which there were only 10 in 1969) suddenly evolved from holiday exhibitions to match-ups with we’re-No. 1-implications. And continued to multiply, sending all on this Road to Excess. Civic leaders want the prestige and the free publicity of staging bowl games. Conferences want pre-arranged tie-ins with bowls for a slice of the lucre. Corporations want bowls as billboards. The Quick Lane Bowl. The GoDaddy Bowl. The Zaxbys Heart of Dallas Bowl. The AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl. The Foster Farms Bowl. The TaxSlayer Bowl….

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An irony is that the year-old, four-team national championship tournament has clearly diluted the significance of all but the two bowls serving as championship semifinal sites. (This season, those are the Orange and Cotton). And that is just as predicted in 2007 by UCLA administrator John Sandbrook, who first studied a possible playoff for an NCAA committee in 1994 and provided an update on the subject for the NCAA-watchdog Knight Commission in 2004. A formalized playoff for No. 1, Sandbrook said then, would “overtake” the traditional bowl format.

Then again, it hasn’t slowed a more-of-less-accomplished-teams trend. And what are the odds that some player on one of those under-.500 teams, giddy to win a bowl and finish a humdrum 6-7, will then run around proclaiming, “We’re No. 1”?

lucy