On the day of the national championship game between Notre Dame and Alabama, which probably will have two-thirds as many viewers as will the president’s inauguration, consider some curiosities of the sports-academia complex.
According to Eric M. Leifer in “Making the Majors: The Transformation of Team Sports in America,” in the 1920s, the professional football Maroons of Pottsville, Pa., (pop. 23,000) drew such large crowds that the New York Giants chose to play them there rather than in Gotham. By the 1890s, Yale’s football receipts “accounted for one-eighth of the institution’s total income, an amount greater than its expenditures on law and medicine.”
Before the late Myles Brand was president of Indiana University he was a philosophy professor, and when he left Indiana to become head of the NCAA, he waxed philosophical about entangling a huge entertainment business with higher education.
It is, he said, “essentially malfeasance” for university administrators not to make the most of the money-making opportunities that sports present: “Athletics, like the university as a whole, seeks to maximize revenues.” In doing so, college football teams have abandoned old conferences and embraced new ones with more lucrative television and other payouts.
College football has proved Karl Marx right about how capitalism dissolves old social arrangements: “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . . all fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away . . . all that is solid melts into air.” Blame college football’s turmoil on male beer-drinking truck drivers, and technology.
Young men are, in TV-speak, a “coveted demographic”: They buy beer and pickup trucks. But like everyone else nowadays, they tape TV programs and watch them later, fast-forwarding through ads. Thus the explosive growth of lucrative TV contracts for sports broadcasting rights: Men can’t fast-forward through live sports telecasts.
Tonight’s game should be sweet satisfaction for Father Theodore Hesburgh, 95, who managed to make athletic and academic excellence compatible. This year Notre Dame is the first school in the history of the Bowl Championship Series to rank first in football and first in the graduation rate (tied with Northwestern) of its football players. Notre Dame graduates 97 percent; Alabama 75 percent.
In this, Notre Dame benefits from a self-imposed recruiting handicap — the two-semester math requirement for all freshmen that prevents the university from recruiting many blue-chip high school players.
Hesburgh’s achievement was hard-won. In the 1920s, Notre Dame under Knute Rockne, was known as a football factory. Rockne’s most famous player, halfback George Gipp, was a hard-drinking gambler who bet on Notre Dame games.
Beginning in 1941 under coach Frank Leahy, Notre Dame came to dominate the sport as no team has since, with six undefeated seasons, including 39 games without a loss, and four national championships. But in 1949, when Hesburgh was appointed the university’s executive vice president and athletics chairman, he set out to make Notre Dame “the Harvard of the Midwest,” which required de-emphasizing football.
This required bringing to heel the imperious and mercurial Leahy, who flouted NCAA rules with illegal practices — and refused to speak to Hesburgh.
Leahy was a national celebrity. In 1956, he would second the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower at the GOP convention. In 1953, however, the steely Hesburgh had fired Leahy. Since then, Notre Dame’s football fortunes have varied but its academic reputation has risen steadily.
Football has hardly lost its hold on the campus. The large mural on the library that overlooks the stadium shows Jesus with both arms raised and is called “Touchdown Jesus.” The statue of Father William Corby — a 19th-century president of the school — depicts him with his right hand held straight up and is known as “Fair Catch Corby.” And the statue of Moses with his index finger pointed skyward is “We’re No. 1 Moses.”