Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era (review)

I begin this review by misquoting Otto von Bismarck, "College football is like sausages; it is better not to see them being made." The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football (and basketball) is a mass of contradiction and hypocrisy. Only the most naïve would believe otherwise.

Author Michael Oriard offers a unique perspective on big-time college football: He played football for Notre Dame University and for the Kansas City Chiefs in the National Football League in the late sixties and early seventies before becoming a professor of English at Oregon State University.

He opens his book by recognizing college football's potentially contradictory pulls of marketing and educating, a contradiction recognized by observers almost at the inception of the college game. College presidents and coaches debated whether it was better for alumni to support individual athletes or for universities to provide scholarships. NCAA carefully crafted its legislation and publicity, stressing "scholar-athlete" instead of "athlete-scholar." One of the NCAA's motives for doing so was to allow colleges to disavow that players were employees and thereby be eligible for worker rights such as worker's compensation.

While he does not state this quite as baldly, collegiate football, similar to the professional brand, depends upon older men (and, in a few cases, women) exploiting younger men. While collegiate football players pass through the system within four or five years, the older men—coaches, athletics directors, and college presidents—remain to dictate the rules.

Players do occasionally revolt. Perhaps the centerpiece of Oriard's book is his description of how college football was integrated in the South. By tacit agreement the press, the universities, and even the African-American players did not make much of this process. Universities faced potentially negative publicity; players faced ambivalence among the black community (as Oriard writes on page 67, black players faced "friends back home [who] 'regarded them as Uncle Toms and wondered why historically black colleges like Grambling, Prairie View and Florida A & M suddenly weren't good enough'"). At the same time that black players were integrating southern universities, their northern brothers were rebelling against coaches' fixation on hair length. While the rest of us recall the late sixties and early seventies as the time of groovy clothes and long hair that signified resistance to "The Man," athletes were saddled with being beacons of hope for the not-so-silent majority. Football coaches at Oregon State, Montana, Wyoming, and Iowa found themselves at the epicenter of burgeoning black pride.

Oriard believes that such outrageous behavior as sporting sideburns (no one, apparently, was suspended for wearing bellbottom pants) led coaches to seek greater control over their players. He believes that the one-year scholarship rule passed in 1973, whereby scholarships were renewed at coaches' discretion, was at least partly a response to the players' rebellion. Indeed, his thesis is found on page 5: "that this mostly forgotten reinvention of the athletic scholarship marks a crucial turning point for big-time college football…. The one-year scholarship, backed by the mindset that it represents, exposed socalled student-athletes to the mounting pressures of an increasingly commercialized sports while denying them a share in its new bounty [of television money]."

Oriard's discussion of the events that occurred during his playing career is another strength of his book. Indeed, had he focused even more on autobiographical detail and explored in greater detail the milieu in which he played rather than dwell on a lengthy discussion of reform, the book would have been shorter but more powerful.

His discussion of potential reforms foundered, as did the works of others, notably Murray Sperber, on the shoals of self-interest. Coaches and athletic directors will always prove more clever than rules makers in evading the intent of any regulations passed by NCAA bodies. Perhaps the best reform would be to allow players to receive...