JRN 362 - Lecture Fourteen

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Fourteen

Review
• College football remained
enormously popular from the 1930s
through the 1970s despite the rise of
professional football and the
emergence of television.

Review
• And so did high school football, which
had become the center of life for
many towns in the football crescent
and the south.

Review
• High school football followed the
template established by the founding
myths of the game in the 19th century
and by popular culture in the first half
of the 20th century.

Review
• James Wright ‘s poem “Autumn
Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
perfectly captured how a community’s
life and the trajectory of its myths
circulated around high school
football.
• The poem revealed how the game
cycled through generations …

Review
• For many communities in the football
crescent, it would prove to be the
lasting link to its most prosperous
past as economic changes roiled
through the region in the 1970s and
beyond.

Review
• While local attention remained fixed
on the high school team, regions and
the nation followed college football as
the century entered the second had
of the 20th century with the same
passion as they had at the start of the
20th century.

That College Game
• In fact, some scholars assert that
during the 1950s, college football
represented American culture as
carrying the ideal balance “discipline,
strength, and toughness” to meet the
perceived threat from the so-called
“Communist menace.”

That College Game
• As in previous generations, college
football served as a front-line defense
against all that threatened the U.S,
including itself.
• In fact, football and other sports and
physical activities were thought to
represent a return to manliness for a
culture gone soft.

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• In 1956, President Dwight
Eisenhower – who played football at
West Point - established the Council
on Youth Fitness in 1956 to
encourage a return to the manly
virtues of physical fitness.

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• In 1961, Eisenhower’s successor,
John F. Kennedy, delivered a
stunning address in which he
asserted other countries had “moved
ahead of younger people in this
country in their ability to endure long
physical hardship, in their physical
fitness and in their strength.”

That College Game
• JFK said that in addition to
intellectual abilities, American youth
needed to “participate in physical
exercise” and show a “ willingness to
participate in physical contests, in
athletic contests” in order to
“strengthen this country,” among
other things.

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• It was in this context that the tension
between the old – the physical
expression of manhood as
represented by football and its
authoritarian coaches – would collide
with movements that called for free
speech, free love, the end of
segregation and the end of a war in
Southeast Asia.

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• Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated
captured the essence of college
football of the moment in the 1960s
with his classic book Saturday’s
America (1970).

That College Game
• Both sarcastic and serious, the book
revealed the atmosphere of college
football in a way that matched the
tone of the period.
• It was as far removed from the
glorification of the game as
represented by the words of
Grantland Rice in a previous

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• Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times
described Jenkins as the best college
football writer in the country, high
praise from a man who was a highly
respected writer himself.
• Murray had this to say about the
modern sensibility of Jenkins’ prose.

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• “Certainly, Dan reads as if he was
written half by Jove and half by a
leprechaun. Grantland Rice called the
Notre Dame backfield ‘The Four
Horsemen,’ but only Jenkins would
have mused on them as ‘Harry
Pestilence, Don Famine, Sleepy Jim
Destruction and Elmer War.’”

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• Jenkins captured college football at
the point where one era was ending
and another beginning.
• Periods such as that are noted by
chaos, as modernity crushes the old
way of doing things.
• And the game and a single region
that resisted modernity ended the
period firmly lodged in the new

That College Game
• College football had endured the
scandals of the late 1920s and the
Great Depression that followed.
• Then, World War II sent many of its
players off to combat in Europe and
the Pacific in the 1940s.
• The game sort of stood still on the
surface, despite new coaches and
tactics.

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• An examination of AP poll results
revealed the complex regional shifts
underway from the mid 1930s to the
1960s.

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• AP national champions tended to
emerge from two regions over the
first two decades of the polls:
- The football crescent. (coal)
- The southwest. (oil)

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• Here are the AP champions from the
1930s (1936-1939):

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• The teams are evenly Split between
the crescent – Minnesota and
Pittsburgh – and the Southwest –
TCU and Texas A&M.
• Now Here are the AP champions
from the 1940s:

That College Game
• The champions from the 1940s are
lodged firmly in the crescent, with
Notre Dame winning four titles (1943;
1946-47; 1949), Minnesota two
(1940-41), Army two (1944-45) and
Ohio State (1942) and Michigan
(1948) winning one apiece.

That College Game
• Notre Dame’s four national
championships solidified the work
established by Rockne in the 1920s
in transforming the college into a
national power under coach Frank
Leahy.
• But things were changing.

That College Game
• The shift in regional power stemmed
from several sources, including
moves to deemphasize football at
elite colleges and the development of
coaches in World War II who now
looked for full-time coaching positions
throughout the country.

That College Game
• First, pre-war powers such as the
University of Chicago and Carnegie
Tech either dissolved their teams or
turned them into minor sports as
fresh scandals emerged.

That College Game
• Yale, the college where American
football was founded by Walter
Camp, joined Harvard, Princeton,
Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown and
Columbia in creating the Ivy League
in 1954.
• The league formally began play in the
1956-57 academic year.

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• The withdrawal by many eastern
schools from the national scene
would have been forced upon them
anyway.
• The shift in power toward the south,
southwest and west seemed to be
preordained.

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• Oklahoma under head coach Bud
Wilkinson emerged as the first power
outside of the east and football
crescent.
• Wilkinson played quarterback on the
Minnesota team that won the AP’s
first national championship in 1936.
He also played hockey.

That College Game
• And it was Wilkinson who perfected
an innovative formation that remains
today at the foundation of
contemporary offenses.

That College Game
• It’s called the Split T and stands as
the first option offense in the game
and the basis for the veer, wishbone
and many contemporary offensive
sets such as the spread.
• Like many other innovations, it
spread via the coaches of military
teams in World War II.

That College Game
• Missouri coach Don Faurot
developed the Split T and deployed it
in 1941, on the eve of the war.
• Unlike existing offenses at the time,
the Split T spread offense linemen,
forcing the defense away from the
congested middle of the field.

That College Game
• The name Split T is derived from that
spacing on the line.
• Generally, guards lined up a foot from
the center, the tackles two feet from
the guards and the ends three feet
from the tackles.

That College Game
• The formation featured a quarterback
under center and three running backs
standing parallel to the line of
scrimmage behind him.
• Faurot later moved one of the backs
off to a position off the line on the
wing.

That College Game
• Split T plays are deceptively simple.
Think RPO.
• “The quarterback takes the snap from
center, hugs the line as closely as
possible and shows the ball to the
defense. What he does next largely
depends on the reaction of his
opponents,” wrote Herman Hickman
in 1954.

That College Game
• The quarterback read the defense
and would run himself, handoff or
pitch the ball (or pass it downfield to
an end).
• It could be run right or left. Defenses
struggled against it.

That College Game
• “… when Don Faurot and his
Missouri team unveiled it for the first
time ever against Ohio State in my
first game as head coach, it gave me
some of the worst moments of my
coaching career,” said Paul Brown,
whose Buckeyes won the game,
accounting for Missouri’s only loss of
the season.

That College Game
• When war broke out, Faurot brought
the Split T to the U.S. Navy’s pre-
flight training station in Iowa where he
served as head coach, assisted by
Jim Tatum and Bud Wilkinson.
• After the war, Tatum landed a job
coaching Oklahoma in 1946 and
hired Wilkinson as an assistant.

That College Game
• Tatum adopted the Split T and it
powered Oklahoma to a Big Six (later
Big Eight) championship.
• He left to coach Maryland in 1947.
• Wilkinson replaced him at Oklahoma
and perfected the Split T.

That College Game
• On Jan. 1, 1954, No. 1 Maryland,
under Tatum, and No. 4 Oklahoma,
under Wilkinson, met in the Orange
Bowl.
• Both ran the Split T.
• Oklahoma won, 7-0.

That College Game
• Wilkinson deployed the Split T-
formation in the context of a hurry-up
offense and recruited players who
could thrive in it.
• Importantly, Wilkinson integrated
Oklahoma’s team, recruiting fullback
Prentice Gault in 1956, who later
played with the Cleveland Browns.

That College Game
• Under Wilkinson, Oklahoma with its
Split T developed into one of the
greatest programs in college football
history.
• Oklahoma won the AP title in 1950,
1955 and 1956.
• Between 1953-57, the Sooners won a
record 47 straight games.

That College Game
• The 1955 Oklahoma team is widely
considered to be one of the best
ever, finishing 11-0 by beating
Maryland 20-6 in the Orange Bowl on
Jan. 1, 1956.
• The team’s 47-game winning streak
ended on Nov. 16, 1957, when Notre
Dame beat them, 7-0, in Norman.

That College Game
• The impact of the Split T was
widespread.
• In the 1950s, Minnesota, Alabama,
Houston, Notre Dame, Texas,
Michigan, Penn State, and Ohio
State, among others, ran the Split T
or its off-shoot, the winged T also
developed by Faurot.

That College Game
• But as Herman Hickman wrote in his
piece for Sports Illustrated about the
Split T in 1954, “Like any other
formation, though, the Split T needs
good players to be effective. As my
Grandpapa used to say: "You can't
go to town without the horses.’’
• And the best players increasingly
headed south and west.

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• The AP polling data underscore the
rise to prominence of Oklahoma and
other schools outside of traditional
powerhouse regions.
• Note the southward shift in the
following map of poll winners from the
1950s:

That College Game
• Of the 10 AP champions in the
1950s, only three – Michigan State,
Ohio State and Syracuse – were from
the crescent.
• Four came from the south:
Tennessee, Maryland, Auburn, and
LSU.
• And one, Oklahoma, came from the
Southwest.

That College Game
• In the 1960s, the trend continued,
with the west emerging as a third
powerhouse region to join the
southwest and south.

That College Game
• Only Minnesota, Ohio State and
Notre Dame won national
championships from the football
crescent in the 1960s.
• Alabama alone won three. Texas and
USC won two apiece.

That College Game
• The pattern held in the 1970s.
• Only Notre Dame (1973, 77) and
Pittsburgh (1976) represented the
crescent in the AP roster of national
champions.
• The others? Nebraska (1970, 71),
USC (1972), Oklahoma (1974-75)
and Alabama (1978-79).

That College Game
• The football heroes likewise came
from the south, the southwest and
west.
• John David Crowe, 1957 Heisman
winner from Texas A&M ...

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• Billy Cannon, Heisman winner from
LSU …

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• Joe Bellino, Heisman winner from the
Naval Academy …

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• Roger Staubach, quarterback of the
1963 Naval Academy team …

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• Mike Garrett, 1965 Heisman winner
from USC …

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Gary Beban, 1967 Heisman winner from
UCLA …

That College Game
• And O.J. Simpson, Heisman winner
from USC.

That College Game
• Despite the shift in power from the
crescent, another game of the
century took place on Nov. 19, 1966,
in East Lansing, Michigan, between
two old powers from the Great Lakes
region: Notre Dame and Michigan
State.

That College Game
• The teams were fully integrated
teams battling for college supremacy.
• That fact showed how far the
southern schools lagged in reflecting
the movement toward integration
outside of that region.

That College Game
• The game featured a buildup that
only a television culture supported by
the thriving magazine industry could
sustain.
• ABC was compelled by members of
Congress to air the game even
though it violated NCAA rules for
broadcasting.

That College Game
• It turned out to be a classic, with the
teams battling to a 10-10 tie.
• Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian -
who played at Great Lakes under
Paul Brown - was criticized for “tying
one for the Gipper” when the Irish
burned the clock instead of seeking
to move within field goal range.

That College Game
• That game was not certainly the last
hurrah for the football crescent in
terms of national power.
• But the dynamics of the nation and
population shifts to the south and
west meant that conferences outside
of the crescent would become
dominant.

That College Game
• College conferences had long
emerged from regional geography.
• The Big 10 (est. 1896); the Big 8 (est.
1907); the Southwest Conference
(est. 1914); the Pac 8 (est. 1915) ;
and the SEC (est. 1932) were joined
by the ACC (est. 1953).

That College Game
• The eastern elite schools, meanwhile,
continued to huddle within a tight
geographic region, linked under the
Ivy League (est. 1954, to begin play
in 1956).

That College Game
• These relationships by region would
within a generation shatter but for the
most part, all held for decades, with
the Big 8 becoming the Big 12 and
the Pac 8 eventually becoming the
Pac 10 and later Pac 12.

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• There were seven main teams that
played independently of any
conference: Miami of Florida, Notre
Dame, Penn State, Pittsburgh,
Syracuse, the U.S. Military Academy
(Army), and the U.S. Naval Academy
(Navy).

That College Game
• The regional variations extended
deeply into the cultural and societal
realms, which, in turn, co-mingled
with football.

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• Texas football developed a culture
where high school football dominated
communities on Friday nights and the
Texas Longhorns dominated the
state on Saturdays under coach
Darryl Royal.

That College Game
• But nothing was like the south. Unlike
the other regions, football
transcended the rituals of Saturday
and Saturday night.
• It became a de facto religion for a
region whose footprint reflected the
old Confederacy.

That College Game
• College football analyst Tony
Barnhart once remarked that the
south had forged an “emotional bond
with college football that I have not
seen in any other part of the country
or with any other sport.’’

That College Game
• What makes the role of football
relative to religion even more
important to the region is that the
south is largely a theocracy, known
informally as the “Bible belt.”
• Southerners are more likely to attend
church than Americans in other
regions.

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• Yet what do we make of this
statement by a fan of Alabama
documented by scholar Eric Bain-
Selbo:
• “ … Alabama football has not, is not,
and never will be just a game. It’s
much, much more. It’s a way of life.
You are born with it, you die with it ...”

That College Game
• According to Bain-Selbo, southern
football fans equalize the experience
of football with “experiences
described by religious practitioners
(for example, mystics).’’

That College Game
• Because of that, he concludes,
“perhaps we have good reason to
take more seriously claims by
observers and fans that game day at
universities throughout the South are
occasions for religious experiences.”

That College Game
• That religious fervor the South holds
for football also plays out in the civic
realm, and this became clear when
calls emerged in the 1960s to
desegregate teams.
• And this is evident in the career of
Paul “Bear’ Bryant.

That College Game
• Born in Arkansas, Bryant, left, played
football at Alabama with Don Hutson,
who later starred with the Green Bay
Packers as one of the first star
receivers.

That College Game
• Bryant began coaching football
during World War II as part of the V-
12, pre-flight, program for naval
aviators.

That College Game
• In 1954, Bryant left the head
coaching position in Kentucky for the
top spot at Texas A&M.
• Bryant immediately stamped his
influence on Texas A&M, holding the
team’s first summer training camp in
a placed called Junction, Texas.

That College Game
• The 10-day training session became
famous for its ferocity and for
Bryant’s unyielding pressure on the
players in the summer heat.
• Many players left the program; those
who remained became known as the
Junction Boys.

That College Game
• Bryant’s legend grew even though
the team had a 1-9 record.
• Bryant moved to Alabama for the
1958 and it was there that he secured
his legacy as one of the top collegiate
coaches.

That College Game
• It is difficult to imagine the cultural
and social fabric of the south in the
1950s and 1960s when viewed from
the distance of generations.
• But Bryant coached in a fully
segregated region that sought to
keep all-white teams from playing
teams with Black players.

That College Game
• Before Bryant’s tenure as coach, for
example, the Orange Bowl invited
Alabama to play Syracuse on Jan. 1,
1953.
• Syracuse had one Black player,
Atavus Stone, and if he played, it
would violate a “gentleman’s
agreement that in effect banned
integrated games in bowl games.

That College Game
• The University of Alabama president
ordered coach Red Drew to take the
team off the field if Stone played.
• Stone was injured and didn’t play,
and Alabama won easily.

That College Game
• Alabama fired Drew in 1954 and
hired Oklahoma A&M (now state)
coach Jennings Whitworth.
• In 1951, Whitworth’s Oklahoma A&M
team attacked Drake University’s
Black quarterback Johnny Bright,
who was knocked unconscious three
times in the first seven minutes.

That College Game
• That attack against Bright was not
unusual whenever segregated
southern teams played against
integrated northern teams even in the
north during that period.
• Bryant, in short, fully understood the
racial dynamics of the region and
would be viewed as one who upheld
its segregated structure.

That College Game
• In 1961, Alabama finished
undefeated and won the national
championship.
• But Bryant and his team unwittingly
became caught up the hardening of
attitudes about segregation as
scholar Andrew Doyle has shown in
his research.

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• U.S. Rep. Frank Boykin of Alabama
wrote Bryant a letter that established
an underlying motivation as to why he
wanted the team to win in football:
showing the South’s “way of life” as
something that should be celebrated
and preserved.

That College Game
• “Bryant and his championship team
had become potent symbols of pride
and cultural vitality to white
southerners in the midst of a
profound social transformation,”
Doyle wrote.

That College Game
• “Paul Bryant and his national
champions possessed the power to
soothe the anguish and give
expression to the righteous anger,”
Doyle wrote.
• The editor of the Birmingham News
wrote that Bryant’s players embodied
“old true values” of the South.

That College Game
• Bryant, however, was not like his
fans. For one, he was a millionaire, a
businessman and author whose
works focused on contemporary
management techniques.
• He received permission to play
racially integrated Penn State in the
1959 Liberty Bowl.

That College Game
• But non-Southerners – particularly
influential voters in the AP poll of top
college football teams – saw Bryant
as a segregationist.
• Still, writers voted for his team as the
best in nation on many occasions
through the years.

That College Game
• In 1962, Ole Miss was the best team
in college football and considered to
be a contender for the national
championship as determined by the
Associated Press poll.
• Even Sports Illustrated saw Ole Miss
as the nation’s best team and put the
school on its cover.

That College Game
• Yet the team would be caught
between football and the civil rights
movement when the federal
government moved to integrate the
University of Mississippi.
• Riots broke out on the campus when
James Meredith integrated the
school.

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• The role of football in the cultural
fabric of the South is evident in a
nationally televised speech John F.
Kennedy delivered on the role of the
federal government in protecting
Meredith on the Ole Miss campus.

That College Game
• “You have a great tradition to
uphold, a tradition of honor and
courage, won on the field of battle
and on the gridiron as well as the
university campus,” Kennedy said
in a speech directed to the state of
Mississippi.

That College Game
• The startling inclusion of football in a
speech designed to explain the
federal role underscores Kennedy’s
understanding of the importance of
the game to the south.
• He knew the Ole Miss team was
among the top in the nation and had
rallied the state behind its chance at
a national title.

That College Game
• Ironically, federal troops bivouacked
outside the football stadium.

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• Mississippi would not win the national
championship as AP voters, appalled
at the on-campus violence, selected
the University of Southern California
as national champion.

That College Game
• With more and more African-
American players enrolled in
previously all-white southern schools,
Bryant worked behind the scenes to
soften the segregationist stance of
Alabama, but it took a carefully
designed schedule to transform the
all-white Alabama team.

That College Game
• Bryant invited the University of
Southern California to play at
Alabama in 1970.
• USC had an all-black backfield,
featuring Sam Cunningham who
would later play for the Patriots.

That College Game
• Alabama lost the game, but Bryant
had made his point. Alabama needed
to integrate its team – and it did the
following year.

That College Game
• Alabama, with Wilbur Jackson, left,
and Georgia desegregated in 1971.
• Mississippi and LSU became the last
teams to desegregate in the SEC.
• Both did so in 1972.

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• The other great social movement in
the 1960s focused on the Vietnam
War.
• College campuses filled with tear gas
as protestors took to the quads to
demonstrate against U.S. military
intervention in Southeast Asia.

That College Game
• Football became a place for both
celebration and protest.
• At the Yale Bowl in October 1968,
Yale cheerleaders presented the
black power salute to fans during the
national anthem before the
Dartmouth game.

That College Game
• Yet the game had a unifying force as
well.
• Football turned out to be the single
old-timey ritual that both the greatest
generation and the baby boomers
could agree on.

That College Game
• “The hawkers of protest have made
the University of California at
Berkeley a symbol of campus unrest.
Far more typical are the students
whose interests embrace both
education and revolt, both football
and Vietnam. They make Cal exciting
and stimulating.” – Sports Illustrated,
Jan. 3, 1966.

That College Game
• "I went to a political rally yesterday. I
saw a person who had his picture in
Newsweek holding a picket sign
protesting the war in Vietnam. The
first thing he talked about was the
Oregon game, and then he told me
that he was going to the Big Game
instead” of the protest. – Sports
Illustrated, Jan. 3, 1966.

That College Game
• The game that best reflected the
insanity of the 1960s took place in the
oldest permanent stadium in college
football – Harvard Stadium - in
November 1968 between ancient
rivals Yale and Harvard.

That College Game
• Yale quarterback Brian Dowling led
the Bulldogs, but he also represented
a counterculture interpretation of
football via a Yale Daily News comic
strip called Doonesbury.
• His character named B.D. wore his
football jersey with its signature No.
10 everywhere on campus.

That College Game
.
• But Dowling and star running back
Calvin Hill entered college football
mythology for another reason: they
were part of one of the greatest
games ever played.
• Harvard score 16 points - two
touchdowns and two two-point
conversions in the closing minutes –
to tie Yale, 29-29.

That College Game
• Yale players have never let go of the
moment the game ended with the
score tied, 29-29.
• All agreed. they had lost.
• Yet all also agreed they had
participated in something historic,
something that made sense to two of
the schools that had played the

JRN 362 - Lecture Fourteen

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JRN 362 - Lecture Fourteen