Interesting Article About State of College Sports In 1975

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The president of Long Beach State, who woke up one morning to find that his athletic department was on its way to making the Guinness Book of World Records for being naughty, says (only somewhat facetiously) that it is no longer a question as to who can make the Top Ten but whether there will be 10 left. Certainly, unless the football coaches union, beloved division, can do something about it quick, there just aren't going to be any of those cushy little schedule-maker athletic director jobs left to grow old in.

Which brings us to Don Canham, late of a multimillion-dollar five-company conglomerate known as Don Canham Enterprises, but for the last seven years head of the athletic department of the University of Michigan, which might best be known, rather like a detergent, as the New! Improved! Don Canham Enterprises. If intercollegiate athletics has any future whatsoever, it is with men like Canham.

In college football, the hierarchy is fixed; it is a much more stagnant enterprise than the pros. In more than a decade the only big new teams to emerge have been Arizona State and Houston. College sports is the best evidence the pros have that some sort of draft selection and binding reserve clause are required to inhibit polarization. Frank Broyles, the Arkansas football coach, suggests a college draft whereby the teams with poorer records would be permitted to enroll more scholarship players: 40 if you won only two games last season, 28 if you won three, down to 22 if you lost one game or less. His is a voice crying in the wilderness.

And yet one of the main reasons why the pros have licked the colleges has been because there is hope in the pros. The Miami Dolphins were champions of the world in only their seventh season. In college, the more things go on, the less they change. Even in basketball, where one player can overhaul a team, the same schools usually dominate. Thus, while it is both maddening and depressing, Don Canham's Michigan blueprint for the survival of college athletics may be applicable only to the prime schools. In effect, he may only be capable of showing the rich how to get richer.

That sort of prospect chills Canham, yet he agrees that all the evidence points in one direction—to a national collegiate superconference with a $100 million TV contract and playoffs into February. Maybe a dozen colleges would survive to make the league. Everybody else, from San Diego State to Harvard, would say forget it and set aside Saturdays for fraternity flag football. The divisions grow wider. Notre Dame and Penn State suck up huge amounts of TV money and bowl money and have no conference colleagues to share it with. Oklahoma has made gurgling noises about quitting the Big Eight and keeping its payoffs all to itself. Penn State somehow got out of a schedule commitment with Navy, a poor draw at Annapolis, and signed up Ohio State for a bigger dollar gate. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a university like Southern Methodist, with a team that almost never beats Texas in the Southwest Conference or the Dallas Cowboys in the newspapers. The SMU athletic director is Dick Davis, a former stockbroker whose job is to balance the budget. For a price, SMU will now play its home games away. Eventually, this could turn into a situation like the Roller Derby, where there were designated "home" and "visitor" teams. What good player will go to a college to play on the road?

"A superconference would make millions for Michigan," Canham says, "but do I want that? It wouldn't be an improvement. It would just be what was left, built on the ruins of intercollegiate athletics. But make no mistake, that's where we're heading if we don't find some sanity. We've got to keep schools playing, the Albions and the Bucknells as much as anybody. The idea is to play. We just forced Tampa into dropping football. By we, I mean the big shots.

"O.K., no skin off my back. My football program costs $800.000, and when everything is considered—TV, our Rose Bowl share—we return $3 million on it, and the difference pays for a lot of varsity sports [there are 17 at Michigan]. But what happens when there's nobody left to play football against? The handwriting is there. When you see a place like Oregon State wipe out some scholarships, you know they'll be wiping out nonrevenue sports next, like at Syracuse, and then they'll be wiping out football because there won't be anything else left."

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