College football is more popular and bigger than ever. But the composition of football-playing schools is different today from what it was during my youth. What was it like then? What is it like today? And what will the future bring?
No More: Vermont v. Northeastern, 1972. NU won, 29-19 (photo, Gridiron Garb)
Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote an article about college football. It was a quest to answer a personal question. I wondered why so many of the colleges I had followed as a youth no longer play the game.
I chatted with several friends to see if any of them shared my experience. One friend recalled the football demise of his home state school, the University of Vermont. The Catamounts dropped football in 1974. As we talked, we remembered that two other major New England schools had also cut the sport—Boston University (1997) and Northeastern (2009).
So with curiosity piqued, I launched into research, wondering just how many schools had dropped the game over the years. I learned that it wasn’t a school here and there. It’s a long list.
Catholic Exodus
Among other things, I found that Catholic colleges and universities figured prominently on the list.
1950 Salad Bowl, Xavier v. Arizona State. Xavier won, 33-21, to finish the year 10-1 (photo, Snipview.com)
The Catholic exodus began before and during World War II and included (partial list with last year playing football) DePaul (1938), Providence (1941), Gonzaga (1941). and Creighton (1942).
After World War II, other Catholic schools followed suit, almost always citing cost as the major factor. The list includes (last year playing football) St. Louis (1949), Duquesne (1950), Georgetown (1950), St. Bonaventure (1951), Loyola (CA) (1951), San Francisco (1951), Marquette (1960), Xavier (OH) (1973), Seton Hall (1981), St. John’s (NY) (2002), and St. Mary’s (CA) (2003).
Today, the list of Catholic schools playing major college football has dwindled to two–Notre Dame and Boston College. But there has been a rebound of play, too. Many Catholic schools have either resurrected programs or started new programs–not in major college football, mind you, but at lower competitive levels.
The re-start approach worked at some schools but not for others. Canisius College is an example of ‘we tried.” Canisius launched its program in 1918 and played through 1949. It re-started the program in 1967, playing through the 1972 season. That’s when the Golden Griffs called it quits.
My alma mater, St. John Fisher College, is an example of a Catholic school that launched a football program (1999). The Cardinals play in NCAA’s Division III as a member of The Empire 8 Conference. They’ve won multiple conference titles and have participated in DIII national championship postseason play. Football is aided by the fact that the school is the pre-season home of NFL’s Buffalo Bills.
1939 Cotton Bowl: St. Mary’s beats Texas Tech (photo, Wikipedia.org)
What’s especially interesting to me about Catholic college football (and it links directly to the question that drives this inquiry) is just how good Catholic college football was “back in the day.”
For example, Duquesne finished in major football’s Top Ten in 1941. For a time (mostly in the 1930s), the Dukes had one of the top winning percentages in the nation. St. Mary’s (CA) played marquee games against the likes of Notre Dame, California, UCLA, and Southern Cal. The Gaels finished #5 in the country in 1931 and played in multiple bowls, including winning the 1939 Cotton Bowl vs. Texas Tech. Marquette also played a national schedule, which included Michigan State, Kansas State, Wisconsin, and Arizona, among others.
Other Private Schools Drop the Sport
Nostalgia aside, my research also revealed that the trend to drop football wasn’t ‘just a Catholic thing.’ It was mostly (although not exclusively) ‘a private college thing.’
The beginning of that story begins nearly 90 years ago on the campus of a major college football team and a member of college football’s most formidable conference of the era. I’m referring to the University of Chicago and the Big Ten Conference.
Then as now, Chicago is one of the world’s leading institutions of higher learning. Lesser known is this: The Maroons used to be a college football juggernaut. Chicago played in a large, on-campus stadium, had football players with national name recognition (e.g., Jay Berwanger won the first Heisman Trophy), and its football team won two national championships and collected seven Big Ten championships.
Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins (courtesy, University of Chicago Archives)
The University of Chicago left the Big Ten in 1939, citing irreconcilable academic issues with football. Chicago’s then-president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, felt that football’s commercial nature interfered with the fundamental purpose of a university. He ordered the program shut down and demolished UC’s on-campus stadium. (Chicago has since returned to the game, in 1969, and plays at the Division III level.)
Other private schools followed Chicago’s lead. The partial list includes (last year playing football): New York University (1952), University of Denver (1960), Pepperdine (1961). George Washington (1966), Bradley (1970), University of Tampa (1974), University of the Pacific (1995), University of Evansville (1997), and Hofstra (2009). That list also includes many liberal arts colleges, including (partial list, last year playing football): Clarkson (1952), St. Michael’s (1953), Haverford (1971), and Swarthmore (2000, which started playing intercollegiate football in 1878).
Yes, some public schools dropped football, too. Wichita State and Cal-Fullerton are two. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that public schools dominate big-time football these days. Just look at the 65 schools in the so-called “Power 5” conferences. Only 12 schools are private institutions, and a half-dozen of those play in one conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference (Boston College, Duke, Notre Dame, Syracuse, Miami, and Wake Forest). The PAC-12 has two (Stanford and Southern Cal), as does the Big 12 (Baylor and TCU). The Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten have one private university each (Vanderbilt, SEC, and Northwestern, Big Ten).
From Dropping to Adding: College Football as “An Institutional Enhancement”
Today, many private schools either don’t play football or play at a lower level of competition. What does that tell us? For one thing, it says there’s an economy-of-scale associated with competing at the highest level. Larger schools with more students and larger alumni bases have an advantage when it comes to top-level play.
Courtesy: Amazon.com
It also says that football serves other vital functions. It’s not just about “the game.”
Brand-name, high-profile private universities/colleges are less likely to need football to attract students to their doors. But football helps significantly at many other schools. At those locations, football is about what the game can bring to a school, including prospective students, alumni support/fundraising, and school identity. Kristi Dosh documents the advantages in her book, Saturday Millionaires: How Winning Football Builds Winning Programs. Let’s call it ‘football as an institutional enhancement.’
How important is that? Very. It’s a big reason why the trend I described earlier–schools dropping the sport–has been reversed. Around 180 new programs launched between 1978 and 2014 and the overall number of college football programs in 2014 was at a historic high of nearly 780 programs. Eleven new programs came on board in 2014 and 2015 alone. Recent additions include The College of Idaho, East Tennessee State, Kennesaw State, and Arizona Christian University.
And what happens these days when a university president tries to eliminate the sport–as Hutchins did at Chicago over 80 years ago? The answer is ‘trouble.’ Alabama-Birmingham is an example/ The president’s decision to drop football brought a quick political response–despite the enormous price tag required to keep the game alive. Alumni rallied, fundraised, and brought back the game–reversing the president’s decision–after a short hiatus.
And if a president seeks to drop in competitive level–as was the quest at the University of Idaho–trouble looms as well. Instead, a large number of schools are doing just the opposite–upping their level of play, that is, moving from a lower to a higher division of NCAA play. Georgia Southern University is an example. The Eagles went from small college standing in the 1920s, to no football at all for 40 years, to a resurrected program in 1981. Since going big-time, the Eagles play big-time competition regularly, schools like NC State, Georgia Tech, and West Virginia. College football has enhanced GSU’s name recognition and status–not just athletically, but academically, too.
Today, the storyline in college football isn’t what it was–schools dropping the sport. It’s about schools adding the sport. The list of football-playing colleges has grown to nearly 900 schools. That’s happening because schools have adopted a new paradigm for paying for the spot. It’s no longer only about fitting football into a school’s budget.
SBU’s Forness Field (dismantled in 1959) drew up to 13,000 fans for Bonaventure home football games (photo, The Franciscan Institute of SBU).
In the ‘old days,’ it sometimes didn’t fit and–because of that–programs were cut. St. Bonaventure is an example. In 1948, the Bonnies went 7-1-1, including beating national power, San Francisco, and tying Boston College, another nationally prominent squad. It seemed onward and upward for SBU. And it was for a while.
In 1951, the team had one of its biggest wins in program history, a 22-21 home victory against the University of Louisville. NFL great-to-be, Johnny Unitas, was a Cards’ freshman that year. The Bonnies went on to finish a winning campaign, beating St. Vincent’s of Pennsylvania, 28-13, in the season finale.
And a finale it was indeed. When Bonaventure’s players walked off the field that day they closed a chapter of school history. There wouldn’t be ‘a next year.’ “Disproportionate resources to maintain a football team at a small school,” is how President Juvenal Lalor phrased it.
Today’s administrators have re-framed the budget calculus. Football isn’t just an item to be paid from a university’s general fund. It’s a target of alumni giving and a fee that can be charged students. There’s revenue via media rights and merchandising, too.
For Schools, Is College Football Worth It? ‘It Depends’
My, how things have changed! But is the picture unilaterally rosy? Research suggests that football is likely to benefit some schools more than others. Based on their research, Eric Joseph Van Holm and Sandy Zook conclude that it’s a mixed picture. “Universities that added football teams increased the number of applications by 13.7% compared to schools without football, but achievement scores for accepted students went down, and retention rates were slightly lower. These mixed results suggest that…new football programs have been oversold…in comparison to other factors, such as faculty quality and pay.”
Madonna University is in the 2020 batch of schools that will launch football programs. The Livonia, MI-based private, Catholic, liberal arts school will compete in the NAIA’s Mid-States Football Association (photo, Detroit News).
The researchers also found that football enhances students’ overall collegiate experience. I believe that’s a big reason why the pendulum still swings in favor of resurrecting, starting, and upgrading programs. Over the last decade, fewer than 25 schools have dropped football while nearly 70 have added the sport–ten in 2019-2020.
Still, though, ‘it depends on the school’ is a conclusion that seems to make the most sense.
Northern Kentucky, for example, studied possibilities and then decided to upgrade its basketball program (including moving up to Division 1 in NCAA status and building a new arena) rather than launch a football program.
Northeastern University (mentioned at the beginning of this article) dropped the sport. What has been the impact? New York Times‘ reporter, Bill Pennington, commented that “applications have more than doubled. Research funding has nearly tripled, and in just about all the sort of obvious ways, Northeastern has had a great ten years since it dropped football.” “Now,” Pennington continues, “I don’t think anybody there really says it’s because we dropped football. But, interestingly, it has certainly not held them back.”
Nearby Anna Maria College, on the other hand, launched football at about the same time that NU dropped its program. When asked about the comparison, Penninning said: “I wrote a story 15 years ago about schools like (Anna Maria) adding football. The reasons then are the same as they are now: it increases the number of male applicants–and that’s considerable for a school (Anna Maria had been an all women’s school) with an enrollment (at the time) of 750-800 students. Football tends to attract other male applicants, even if they don’t play football, because they want to go to a school with a football team.”
Pennington also notes another important factor that favors playing football at smaller schools. “Schools like Anna Maria don’t offer athletic scholarships. That means football-playing students pay tuition, room, and board,” which Pennington estimates to be about $25k per player per year on average.
What Will the Future Bring?
I predict the next wave of change will be the result of circumstances that are largely outside of higher education’s control. Factors include legal settlements associated with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), state and federal oversight, outcomes of player organizing, escalating costs, adjustments in pro sports policies and structure, and changes in public attitudes and preferences.
I believe we are at the beginning stages of a third sea change in the evolution of college football, and I believe it will be an era of struggle. If I had to pick a metaphor, it would be a flickering light–sometimes burning brightly and sometimes making it impossible to see.
While I don’t predict that college football will go the way of horseracing and boxing, I don’t see the college game’s uptrend continuing unabated. One reason is that the sports’ leadership at all levels–institutionally, at the conference level, and the NCAA– hasn’t responded adequately to chronic issues that have faced the game. Instead of addressing those issues head-on, authorities have focused on money, marketing, and evolving the game into a pro-like offering.
Here are two issues that are as present today as they were decades ago.
“There is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw, which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages. … The medical profession or the public can no longer ignore the condition.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1928.
“I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.” Robert Maynard Hutchins, Saturday Evening Post, 1938.
College football then isn’t what it is now. College football tomorrow won’t be what it is today.
