Dusty, Deek, and Mr. Do-Right: High School Football in Illinois

Chapter 8: Fourth Quarter

8 Fourth Quarter State Playoff In the early 1970s, a number of football coaches and athletic administrators from throughout the state began to lobby for a state playoff. Every other sport had a postseason tournament.Why not football? Other states conducted football championships .Why not Illinois? It wasn’t a new idea. In the early 1960s, Coach Warren Smith of Urbana had proposed a state playoff. He had a plan. But nobody would take it seriously. The argument from the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) officials was the plan lacked substance, no tangibles, no blueprint. Logistics wouldn’t allow it. But pressure began to build, especially after the newly formed Illinois Basketball Coaches Association successfully lobbied for a two-class format in the state basketball tournament, the IHSA’s signature event. “If they ever get serious about this,I have a plan in my desk drawer.I know exactly how we can do it,”said Lavere L.“Liz”Astroth, who was second in command to IHSA executive secretary Harry Fitzhugh at the time. Astroth was a former football coach and athletic director at Glenbard East in Lombard. He was the IHSA’s supervisor for football. He bounced ideas off close friend Bill Duchon, the football coach at Glenbard West in Glen Ellyn, and several other coaches,including Smith,Champaign’s Tommy Stewart,Pittsfield’s Deek Pollard, Oak Park’s Ed Zembal, and Geneseo’s Bob Reade. And he discussed the issue with athletic directors. The coaches began to get serious about the issue in 1970.They were in the process of organizing a state football coaches association. Coaches from all over Illinois met at the Drake Hotel in Chicago,site of a national football clinic.Zembal was a speaker. Smith,Duchon,Pollard,Loyola’s Tom Powers,Downers Grove’s Dick Carstens,Hinsdale Central’s Gene Strode, Sandburg’s Joe Devine, Morton’s Ken Geiger, Carbondale’s Joe Pollock, and East Moline’s Gene McCarter were there. There was an Illinois Coaches Association but no football coaches association. The Chicago Catholic League had a strong association. Suburban and Downstate coaches asked,“Why can’t we have what they have?”With Geiger’s leadership, they went to Peoria and East St. Louis to solicit Downstate support. “We had to show we were viable,”Zembal said.“Our goals were to establish an all-star game and a state playoff and a coaches’ Hall of Fame.We also wanted to sponsor a clinic—but we had no money.We asked Coach Chuck Fairbanks of Oklahoma’s national 244   / Dusty, Deek, and Mr. Do-Right championship team to speak. But he was going to Europe.We ended up with Galen Hall, one of his assistants,Tom Osborne, Lee Corso,Alex Agase, and Abe Gibron.” Phil Salzer,secretary-treasurer of the Illinois High School Football Coaches Association since 1973, said Smith and Duchon were the driving forces behind the coaches’ plan. They sat down with Astroth and did a lot of work. Astroth and Duchon were neighbors. Astroth’s son, Jon, quarterbacked Duchon’s unbeaten 1968 team. Salzer said,“After looking at the original plan, Astroth once told me,‘The whole thing will fall through because coaches want more than six games.They want every school in the playoff in the beginning,like basketball.To do that,they have to reduce the regular season schedule to six games. Nobody wants to do that.’ But Astroth had a plan.” “We talked all the time,” Duchon said.“We copied a lot from the Texas plan. I was real excited about it. It was my No. 1 project to get through.The problem was some football coaches weren’t as interested in the playoff as some of us were. If Liz had an issue, he’d call me and we’d talk about it.We saw it the same way.” While the Texas plan was predicated on counties, the Illinois plan was all about conference champions,a tournament of champions.But there were stumbling blocks to overcome. What about overtime to decide tie games? How many classes? How does a school qualify? How do you determine at-large teams? What about independent schools? It took the IHSA about five minutes to adopt a soccer playoff. It took nearly two years to agree on a football playoff for 1974. Astroth felt the football coaches were dragging their feet, that they were more interested in organizing their own association...