The truth of the matter is that college football risks embarrassment every season, every Saturday. It is a sport dependent on a large number of athletes, played by institutions of higher learning that purport to align academics and athletics. This, of course, is a perilous venture. It's impossible for more than 100 Division I-A schools to issue 25 scholarships each year and include only scholars. Hence, poor behavior can ensue, practiced by players, coaches and recruiters. It is, at all times, a combustible mix.
The BCS is an embarrassment all by itself, without description. NCAA rules guarantee hilarity at any time and has served football well in this regard. And, of course, there is the occasional on-field folly.
1. Death and Teddy Roosevelt: November 1905
The role of America's 26th president in saving college football remains unclear. What is clear is that in the fall of 1905, college football, which had started in 1869, had become increasingly violent. Three college players died that season (and 18 players at all levels of the sport), prompting public unrest. This compelled President Roosevelt to summon the leaders of college football's "Big Three,'' Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to the White House to discuss the state of the game, with an eye toward quelling the violent and dangerous play. It has often been said that Roosevelt delivered an ultimatum to the schools to change the game of football or have it abolished. That account has recently been challenged by historians, yet it is apparent that college football had reached a crossroads. Not long after Roosevelt's intervention, dangerous plays such as the flying wedge were abolished, and the forward pass was legalized.
2. SMU gets the death penalty: Feb. 25, 1987
The history and mythology of modern college football are papered with examples of programs whose keepers and boosters flaunted NCAA rules by building quasi-professional programs with marginal student-athletes. But only one has received the NCAA's death penalty: Southern Methodist University. The Mustangs rose to the top of the high-powered Southwest Conference in the early '80s, riding on the back of the Pony Express backfield (Eric Dickerson and Craig James), and twice finished in the top five in the nation. At swank parties all over Texas, where football is big business, SMU alums bragged to their Longhorn and Aggie brethren. Then the bubble burst: SMU was found to have made approximately $61,000 in payments to athletes from funds provided by a booster, with the approval of university officials as high up as former -- and future -- Texas governor Bill Clements, who was then chairman of SMU's board of governors. NCAA officials did not levy the penalty lightly, but, said Dan Beebe, the lead investigator on the case, "I'm not sure what else would have gotten the message across to those people.'' It has been nearly two decades since the NCAA took down SMU; 16 schools have since been eligible for the death penalty, but none have received it. SMU has never recovered. "It's like an atomic bomb,'' SMU coach Phil Bennett told Sports Illustrated in 2002. "The NCAA did it once and caused devastation beyond belief, and it's never going to be done again.''
3. Woody Hayes punches an opposing player: Dec. 29, 1978
In 28 seasons as Ohio State's head coach, Woody Hayes established himself as one of the all-time greats, winning 205 games, 13 Big Ten championships and two national titles. He was also known for his legendary temper. Unfortunately, that temper would bring about a humiliating and untimely end to an otherwise distinguished career. With two minutes left in the Buckeyes' 17-15 Gator Bowl loss to Clemson, Tigers defensive tackle Charlie Bauman intercepted OSU quarterback Art Schlichter's pass, crushing the Buckeyes' last hope of victory. As Bauman ran out-of-bounds on the OSU sideline, an irate Hayes, 65, was caught on camera taking a swing at the Clemson player before being restrained. The shocking image of Woody losing control would be his last -- he was fired by the school the next day.
4. Scandals everywhere in the Old Big Eight: 1989-95
It's never been difficult to find athletes behaving badly. However, from the late 1980s into the mid-'90s, three schools from what had been the old Big Eight and became the backbone of the new Big 12 -- Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma -- set new standards for football players running wild. (SI.com doesn't wish to slight Miami's raging Hurricanes of nearly the same era; they belong on any list of the wacky and wildest college football programs. But it's impossible to ignore the regional bias here.)
Under Barry Switzer, Oklahoma's wishbone offense was nearly unstoppable. "Let's hang half a hundred on 'em,'' Switzer would say before trampling the likes of Iowa State. In late 1988, Switzer's program was found guilty of three major NCAA violations and only three months later became the focus of national attention when one player shot another and three others were accused of gang rape. Switzer was gone before the start of the 1989 season.
At Colorado, under the God-fearing Bill McCartney (who would leave coaching after the 1994 season to found the Christian men's group Promise Keepers), Buffaloes football players ran amok to such a degree that a school policeman told SI's Rick Reilly, "At the first home football game of every season, a couple of detectives drop by the stadium and pick up a few programs. Saves you time. Instead of having a victim go through the mug book, you just take out your program and say, 'Is he in here?'''
Then there was Nebraska, which dominated college football from 1994 to '97, not long after coach Tom Osborne expanded his recruiting to include marginal students from all over the country instead of relying only on corn-fed local lads. The prime example was running back Lawrence Phillips, a gifted man-child from Southern California. (His game was a man's, his personality a child's.) Phillips was suspended in 1995 for dragging his former girlfriend down a flight of stairs, but Osborne, acting against strong public opinion, reinstated Phillips in November and allowed him to be a part of the Cornhuskers' second consecutive national championship. That decision forever smudged Osborne's coaching reputation.
5. Segregation
College football was no exception to the embarrassingly slow integration of every major sport in the United States. However, in his exhaustive history, "College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy," John Sayle Watterson writes, "Top be sure, college football never capitulated entirely to the racial exclusion that swept through most big-time sports, though only a few African-Americans competed before the 1950s.'' Integration came first in the North (Jim Brown starred at Syracuse from 1954-56, and predictably, much later to the South. In 1965, Jerry Levias became the first black player on scholarship in the Southwest Conference and, notoriously, the epic 1969 game between Texas and Arkansas featured two all-white teams.
6. Colorado's fifth down: Oct. 6, 1990
This is perhaps the most egregious and meaningful officiating error in modern college football history. Nine months earlier Colorado and Bill McCartney had reached the national championship game in the Orange Bowl and lost to Notre Dame 21-6. In the fall of 1990 the Buffaloes came to Columbia with a 3-1-1 record. A loss would have taken them completely out of the national-championship picture, but they won (33-31) when sideline officials brain-locked and failed to flip a down marker after second down and Colorado backup quarterback Charles Johnson scored on a fourth-, er, fifth-down plunge as Mizzou fans stormed the field. Colorado returned to the Orange Bowl for a rematch with Notre Dame, where Irish coach Lou Holtz told his team that the Buffaloes were "living a lie.'' No matter, Colorado won the game (10-9) and shared its only national title with Georgia Tech, thanks to one big mistake.
7. Alabama buys Albert Means: Feb. 2, 2000
Stories of big-money boosters inserting themselves into the often shady world of recruiting have circulated through the college-football grapevine for years, but never before had such a brazen act of cheating entered the public realm. In January 2001, Milton Kirk, an assistant high-school football coach in Memphis, blew the whistle on a plot by his former boss, Tresvant High head coach Lynn Lang, to shop his blue-chip defensive lineman Albert Means to the highest bidder. In the NCAA investigation and federal racketeering case that followed, it was revealed that Alabama booster Logan Young paid Lang $150,000 in a long series of installments in exchange for Means' signature with the Crimson Tide. The incident prompted severe NCAA sanctions for Alabama and touched off a long, ugly saga in which lawsuits were filed, fingers were pointed and the NCAA's entire investigative process -- in which Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer served as a secret witness against his rival school -- was called into question.
8. The Foot Locker shopping spree: Nov. 7, 1993
Six days before a crucial game against Notre Dame in South Bend, Florida State players were treated by sports agents to $6,000 worth of gear in a 90-minute after-hours foray at a Foot Locker store in Tallahassee's Governor's Square Mall. That visit was only the most brazen indiscretion committed by coach Bobby Bowden's Seminoles, who also took regular handouts from agents trying to sign them for their NFL careers. Florida State players wore their newly comped winter jackets to South Bend and were upset by the Fighting Irish 31-24, but later won their first national title with an Orange Bowl victory over Nebraska after Notre Dame was upset by Boston College. Two months after the trophy came back to Tallahassee, Sports Illustrated broke the shopping-spree story with a cover story headlined "Tainted Title." The NCAA was kinder, slapping the Seminoles' wrists with a one-year probation. Then-Florida coach Steve Spurrier got good mileage and laughs on the banquet circuit with the following joke:
What does FSU stand for?
Free Shoes University.
Epilogue: Four years later, star wideout Peter Warrick got himself into hot water after he and teammate Laveranues (Trouble) Coles received deep discounts at a Dillard's department store in the same mall.
9. George O'Leary's résumé: Dec. 13, 2001
It could be argued that as goes Notre Dame, so goes college football. When the Irish are up and running, all is well in the world. When the Irish are down and struggling, the sport slouches. The Irish's history is full of would-be resurrections, and in the last month of 2001, Notre Dame's search for the next Rockne/Leahy/Parseghian/Holtz landed at the door of Georgia Tech head coach George O'Leary, a gruff, white-haired Irishman from New York City, straight out of central casting. It turned out that O'Leary's résumé was no more real than a Hollywood script either. O'Leary had faked a college football career and a graduate degree; he was gone without putting a whistle around his neck. He was replaced by Tyrone Willingham, who was canned in only four years, tossed into the same slag heap as Gerry Faust and Bob Davie, who also failed to bring glory to the Golden Dome.
10. The BCS mess: Jan. 4, 2004
Let's be frank here. The BCS is a mess every year. But it was in 2003 that the system came crashing down in one big heap of absurdity. LSU, Oklahoma and USC each finished the season with one defeat. USC was ranked No. 1 in the media and coaches' polls but would not be invited to play in the BCS national-title game because the BCS rankings listed the Trojans at No. 3, keeping season-long leader Oklahoma at No. 1 despite its 35-7 thrashing at the hands of Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship game. Ergo, LSU thrashed Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl, one day after USC pounded Michigan in the Rose Bowl. Co-champions prevailed and would never meet on the field. One year later Auburn was similarly excluded from the Orange Bowl national title game despite a 12-0 regular-season record and the Southeastern Conference championship.
The BCS is an embarrassment all by itself, without description. NCAA rules guarantee hilarity at any time and has served football well in this regard. And, of course, there is the occasional on-field folly.
1. Death and Teddy Roosevelt: November 1905
The role of America's 26th president in saving college football remains unclear. What is clear is that in the fall of 1905, college football, which had started in 1869, had become increasingly violent. Three college players died that season (and 18 players at all levels of the sport), prompting public unrest. This compelled President Roosevelt to summon the leaders of college football's "Big Three,'' Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to the White House to discuss the state of the game, with an eye toward quelling the violent and dangerous play. It has often been said that Roosevelt delivered an ultimatum to the schools to change the game of football or have it abolished. That account has recently been challenged by historians, yet it is apparent that college football had reached a crossroads. Not long after Roosevelt's intervention, dangerous plays such as the flying wedge were abolished, and the forward pass was legalized.
2. SMU gets the death penalty: Feb. 25, 1987
The history and mythology of modern college football are papered with examples of programs whose keepers and boosters flaunted NCAA rules by building quasi-professional programs with marginal student-athletes. But only one has received the NCAA's death penalty: Southern Methodist University. The Mustangs rose to the top of the high-powered Southwest Conference in the early '80s, riding on the back of the Pony Express backfield (Eric Dickerson and Craig James), and twice finished in the top five in the nation. At swank parties all over Texas, where football is big business, SMU alums bragged to their Longhorn and Aggie brethren. Then the bubble burst: SMU was found to have made approximately $61,000 in payments to athletes from funds provided by a booster, with the approval of university officials as high up as former -- and future -- Texas governor Bill Clements, who was then chairman of SMU's board of governors. NCAA officials did not levy the penalty lightly, but, said Dan Beebe, the lead investigator on the case, "I'm not sure what else would have gotten the message across to those people.'' It has been nearly two decades since the NCAA took down SMU; 16 schools have since been eligible for the death penalty, but none have received it. SMU has never recovered. "It's like an atomic bomb,'' SMU coach Phil Bennett told Sports Illustrated in 2002. "The NCAA did it once and caused devastation beyond belief, and it's never going to be done again.''
3. Woody Hayes punches an opposing player: Dec. 29, 1978
In 28 seasons as Ohio State's head coach, Woody Hayes established himself as one of the all-time greats, winning 205 games, 13 Big Ten championships and two national titles. He was also known for his legendary temper. Unfortunately, that temper would bring about a humiliating and untimely end to an otherwise distinguished career. With two minutes left in the Buckeyes' 17-15 Gator Bowl loss to Clemson, Tigers defensive tackle Charlie Bauman intercepted OSU quarterback Art Schlichter's pass, crushing the Buckeyes' last hope of victory. As Bauman ran out-of-bounds on the OSU sideline, an irate Hayes, 65, was caught on camera taking a swing at the Clemson player before being restrained. The shocking image of Woody losing control would be his last -- he was fired by the school the next day.
4. Scandals everywhere in the Old Big Eight: 1989-95
It's never been difficult to find athletes behaving badly. However, from the late 1980s into the mid-'90s, three schools from what had been the old Big Eight and became the backbone of the new Big 12 -- Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma -- set new standards for football players running wild. (SI.com doesn't wish to slight Miami's raging Hurricanes of nearly the same era; they belong on any list of the wacky and wildest college football programs. But it's impossible to ignore the regional bias here.)
Under Barry Switzer, Oklahoma's wishbone offense was nearly unstoppable. "Let's hang half a hundred on 'em,'' Switzer would say before trampling the likes of Iowa State. In late 1988, Switzer's program was found guilty of three major NCAA violations and only three months later became the focus of national attention when one player shot another and three others were accused of gang rape. Switzer was gone before the start of the 1989 season.
At Colorado, under the God-fearing Bill McCartney (who would leave coaching after the 1994 season to found the Christian men's group Promise Keepers), Buffaloes football players ran amok to such a degree that a school policeman told SI's Rick Reilly, "At the first home football game of every season, a couple of detectives drop by the stadium and pick up a few programs. Saves you time. Instead of having a victim go through the mug book, you just take out your program and say, 'Is he in here?'''
Then there was Nebraska, which dominated college football from 1994 to '97, not long after coach Tom Osborne expanded his recruiting to include marginal students from all over the country instead of relying only on corn-fed local lads. The prime example was running back Lawrence Phillips, a gifted man-child from Southern California. (His game was a man's, his personality a child's.) Phillips was suspended in 1995 for dragging his former girlfriend down a flight of stairs, but Osborne, acting against strong public opinion, reinstated Phillips in November and allowed him to be a part of the Cornhuskers' second consecutive national championship. That decision forever smudged Osborne's coaching reputation.
5. Segregation
College football was no exception to the embarrassingly slow integration of every major sport in the United States. However, in his exhaustive history, "College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy," John Sayle Watterson writes, "Top be sure, college football never capitulated entirely to the racial exclusion that swept through most big-time sports, though only a few African-Americans competed before the 1950s.'' Integration came first in the North (Jim Brown starred at Syracuse from 1954-56, and predictably, much later to the South. In 1965, Jerry Levias became the first black player on scholarship in the Southwest Conference and, notoriously, the epic 1969 game between Texas and Arkansas featured two all-white teams.
6. Colorado's fifth down: Oct. 6, 1990
This is perhaps the most egregious and meaningful officiating error in modern college football history. Nine months earlier Colorado and Bill McCartney had reached the national championship game in the Orange Bowl and lost to Notre Dame 21-6. In the fall of 1990 the Buffaloes came to Columbia with a 3-1-1 record. A loss would have taken them completely out of the national-championship picture, but they won (33-31) when sideline officials brain-locked and failed to flip a down marker after second down and Colorado backup quarterback Charles Johnson scored on a fourth-, er, fifth-down plunge as Mizzou fans stormed the field. Colorado returned to the Orange Bowl for a rematch with Notre Dame, where Irish coach Lou Holtz told his team that the Buffaloes were "living a lie.'' No matter, Colorado won the game (10-9) and shared its only national title with Georgia Tech, thanks to one big mistake.
7. Alabama buys Albert Means: Feb. 2, 2000
Stories of big-money boosters inserting themselves into the often shady world of recruiting have circulated through the college-football grapevine for years, but never before had such a brazen act of cheating entered the public realm. In January 2001, Milton Kirk, an assistant high-school football coach in Memphis, blew the whistle on a plot by his former boss, Tresvant High head coach Lynn Lang, to shop his blue-chip defensive lineman Albert Means to the highest bidder. In the NCAA investigation and federal racketeering case that followed, it was revealed that Alabama booster Logan Young paid Lang $150,000 in a long series of installments in exchange for Means' signature with the Crimson Tide. The incident prompted severe NCAA sanctions for Alabama and touched off a long, ugly saga in which lawsuits were filed, fingers were pointed and the NCAA's entire investigative process -- in which Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer served as a secret witness against his rival school -- was called into question.
8. The Foot Locker shopping spree: Nov. 7, 1993
Six days before a crucial game against Notre Dame in South Bend, Florida State players were treated by sports agents to $6,000 worth of gear in a 90-minute after-hours foray at a Foot Locker store in Tallahassee's Governor's Square Mall. That visit was only the most brazen indiscretion committed by coach Bobby Bowden's Seminoles, who also took regular handouts from agents trying to sign them for their NFL careers. Florida State players wore their newly comped winter jackets to South Bend and were upset by the Fighting Irish 31-24, but later won their first national title with an Orange Bowl victory over Nebraska after Notre Dame was upset by Boston College. Two months after the trophy came back to Tallahassee, Sports Illustrated broke the shopping-spree story with a cover story headlined "Tainted Title." The NCAA was kinder, slapping the Seminoles' wrists with a one-year probation. Then-Florida coach Steve Spurrier got good mileage and laughs on the banquet circuit with the following joke:
What does FSU stand for?
Free Shoes University.
Epilogue: Four years later, star wideout Peter Warrick got himself into hot water after he and teammate Laveranues (Trouble) Coles received deep discounts at a Dillard's department store in the same mall.
9. George O'Leary's résumé: Dec. 13, 2001
It could be argued that as goes Notre Dame, so goes college football. When the Irish are up and running, all is well in the world. When the Irish are down and struggling, the sport slouches. The Irish's history is full of would-be resurrections, and in the last month of 2001, Notre Dame's search for the next Rockne/Leahy/Parseghian/Holtz landed at the door of Georgia Tech head coach George O'Leary, a gruff, white-haired Irishman from New York City, straight out of central casting. It turned out that O'Leary's résumé was no more real than a Hollywood script either. O'Leary had faked a college football career and a graduate degree; he was gone without putting a whistle around his neck. He was replaced by Tyrone Willingham, who was canned in only four years, tossed into the same slag heap as Gerry Faust and Bob Davie, who also failed to bring glory to the Golden Dome.
10. The BCS mess: Jan. 4, 2004
Let's be frank here. The BCS is a mess every year. But it was in 2003 that the system came crashing down in one big heap of absurdity. LSU, Oklahoma and USC each finished the season with one defeat. USC was ranked No. 1 in the media and coaches' polls but would not be invited to play in the BCS national-title game because the BCS rankings listed the Trojans at No. 3, keeping season-long leader Oklahoma at No. 1 despite its 35-7 thrashing at the hands of Kansas State in the Big 12 Championship game. Ergo, LSU thrashed Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl, one day after USC pounded Michigan in the Rose Bowl. Co-champions prevailed and would never meet on the field. One year later Auburn was similarly excluded from the Orange Bowl national title game despite a 12-0 regular-season record and the Southeastern Conference championship.
