I had been in a great mood until I read that reminder of the long, long slide. And I can't drink at the office, unfortunately.
MartinOKC wrote:
No one back then could have envisioned a CFA and a BCS and all that television money.
No one could likely have predicted those specific organizations, no, but football is a money game and has been for eighty years or so. That was already obvious. Funneling money into college football was not new in 1950. There had been pay-for-play scandals during the late 1920's and 1930's, funny business in admissions, all sorts of gaming the system (such as it was). Although there might not have national television audiences, large attendance figures at football games and the appetite for college football news during radio broadcasts, newsreel reports, and newspaper reports, as well as the emergence of football-themed specialty publications, should have demonstrated pretty clearly that there was a huge appetite for college football as entertainment. It wasn't necessary to predict television to see where the herd was headed. National and regional television audiences were effects, not causes, of increased interest in college football.
The herd was composed of the bigger, state-funded institutions. Big institutions with public funding became the big players in college football during the 1930's, even though smaller private schools (and schools with state funding with limited numbers of students) clung to prominence until about 1950. After that, schools like Fordham, Colgate, the Ivies, Santa Clara, Holy Cross, etc., dropped behind one way or another. But watching the herd should have been enough to predict where college football was headed.
Are we watching the herd now or determined to stand apart? And if the latter, is there a really good justification for doing so?