The golden age of any sport inspires images of grainy highlight films, yellowed newspaper clippings and heroes long since gone. Think of baseball and you look past steroids to the Mick and Teddy Ballgame and day games at the Polo Grounds.
The NBA was never better than during Showtime, Larry and Dr. J. Boxing had Italian-Americans with big fists and Muhammad Ali boasting in 10 time zones.
College football’s golden age? Was it Knute Rockne in the 1920s, Oklahoma’s 47-game win streak in the 1950s or the electric wishbone teams in the 1970s? Nope.
How about now?
That’s right. You, with the bratwurst: When you bite into that luscious wiener at Saturday’s tailgate party, feel free to revel in the knowledge you are a fan in college football’s greatest era.
Since Rutgers and Princeton first teed it up in 1869, never has college football enjoyed more popularity. Whether you are a painted Theta Chi screaming behind the ESPN “College GameDay” set, a stodgy athletic director gladhanding boosters or a freshman linebacker from a dusty panhandle somewhere, you are giddy and happy because of the following:
The three top average attendance marks in Division I-A history have come the past three years, topped in 2006 with 46,249 fans per game. Seven of the 11 Division I-A conferences broke attendance records within the past two years.
ESPN and ABC report record viewership, with ESPN’s Saturday morning “GameDay” show reaching cult-like status, averaging 1.5 million viewers. Last year’s Michigan-Ohio State game was the highest-rated ABC game since 1993, with 14,479,000 tuning in.
Out of 119 head coaches in I-A, 33 have NFL experience, with 13 having served as head coaches.
Scholarship limits have spread the wealth. In the nine years of the Bowl Championship Series, nine schools have won national titles.
A Harris poll showed college football third among most popular sports in the U.S., behind the NFL and Major League Baseball.
And that’s not all.
“With video and electronics the way they are today, you get so much more information,” Texas coach Mack Brown said. “So if you want to learn about coaching, you can learn more than 20 years ago. Weight rooms and strength programs are better. Academic centers and awareness of graduation rates are much better. And cheating is a lot less than 20 years ago. It’s all good. TV ratings are better than ever. People are filling the stands. Football is really, really healthy and continues to grow.”
Take a bow, BCS
Sure, it has its problems. University presidents have killed any talk of a much-endorsed “plus- one” title game. Broke players still make millions for universities and their girlfriends must pay for their dates, and coaches are getting fired in record numbers.
But the above figures show fans crave the dog-eat-Longhorn urgency of every weekend. How- ever difficult it may be to admit it, the surge in popularity coincides with the introduction of the BCS in 1998. Crucified for its illogical and inconsistent ranking system, chastised for its unbending format, it has met its lowest goal: It’s better than what we had.
“You can be critical,” Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive said, “but the fact is in football, over the last 10 years the BCS has certainly not hurt college football and the interest in the regular season has been enhanced.”
It certainly has helped his SEC. In a league where college football has been worshiped since the Bear started growling in the 1950s, the SEC has increased its average attendance each of the past six seasons. Part of that is due to five of the 12 schools increasing stadium capacities over the past five years, but even Kentucky and Vanderbilt are no longer just basketball schools.
In the mid-1980s, could a Boise State ever play in a major bowl against Oklahoma, let alone win?
But it’s not just Boise, Idaho, where college football has burrowed a home. Its balance has made people turn on TVs and buy tickets from Corvallis, Ore., to Tampa, Fla., from Manhattan, Kan., to the other Manhattan.
“I sense it,” said Chris Fowler of “GameDay.” “I live in New York and there’s increased interest in college football there because Rutgers has brought the No. 1 media market into the thing. Here it is across the Hudson River. The Empire State Building is lit up in red. New Yorkers, and not just Jersey people, are talking about college football. The rise of the Big East has reawakened that region.”
Spreading scholarships
This is where the BCS can’t take credit. Before the 1974 introduction of Title IX, the federal mandate for equality in women’s athletics, football had no scholarship limitations. The maximum began at 120 but has settled at 85, with no more than 25 a year.
Soon, Boise State no longer was recruiting only from Boise High School. Every Saturday became more perilous, and with the BCS’s near one-strike-and-you’re-out survival plan, traditional powers see fewer soft spots on schedules.
Grant Teaff, director of the American Football Coaches Association, began coaching Baylor in 1972, just before scholarship limits.
“I remember Johnny Majors his first year at Pittsburgh gave 150 scholarships,” Teaff said. “What they did at Texas and other big schools is they’d sign everybody they could get. It was a system fraught with disaster for schools not on that level. Then when they went to the 25 limit, we started competing big time.”
With more improved teams, more alumni money is coming into athletic departments. While many programs remain in the red, much of the money is going into facilities and coaches’ salaries.
Schools such as Oregon, Texas- El Paso and Kansas State have team houses, locker rooms and training areas that rival traditional powers. In a culture where bling sings and so do plasma TVs, recruits no longer are willing to hang their clothes on a nail.
“The facilities when I was a player and coach at Oklahoma were as good as anywhere in the country,” said Eddie Crowder, Colorado’s former coach and athletic director. “During the (Bud) Wilkinson era, they built and rebuilt the stadium twice. What you see now make the conditions when I was there look ordinary.”
That money also is luring coaches from the NFL instead of the other way around. Want to know one little-known reason the SEC is the best conference in the nation? Three coaches – South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier, Kentucky’s Rich Brooks and Alabama’s Nick Saban – were NFL head coaches.
Pete Carroll came from the New England Patriots to lead USC to national titles. June Jones left the San Diego Chargers to make Hawaii’s offense the most exciting in the country. How many people think North Carolina will stay down long under former Cleveland Browns coach Butch Davis?
“Those coaches have made a good impact where they’ve been,” Florida State coach Bobby Bow- den said. “I think having NFL coaches get back into college has picked it up, because their ideas are so much further ahead of everybody else’s and they put these ideas into college, and colleges adapt them and it has probably helped us all to be better.”
Cheating “too risky”
So how are they doing it? They must be cheating, right? In the 1980s, there was so much cheating you couldn’t tell the eligible programs without an NCAA rap sheet. At one time, Baylor was the only school in the old Southwest Conference not on probation.
Lately, however, the sports pages aren’t filled with stories about NCAA investigators interviewing linemen behind the library. Coaches aren’t being fired for secret slush funds. The fallout from the ugly 1980s produced compliance staffs keeping coaches in line instead of a winking AD.
It has worked. According to the NCAA database, between 1980 and 1990, Division I-A schools committed 61 major football infractions. From 1998 to present, there have been only 22.
“It’s too risky,” Colorado State coach Sonny Lubick said. “It’s too easy to get caught. The only thing now is a team may badmouth another team. A team might say I’m getting too old. That gets me angry. I tell these guys they’re full of (it). They’ll be gone before me.
“But as far as cheating in recruiting, there’s nothing going on.”
Again, college football could be better. After Florida whipped Ohio State 41-14 for its national title last season, wouldn’t a Florida- USC game have whetted your appetite a little more? And wouldn’t it be nice if coaches got tenure?
Sure it would. But for now, put a brat on the grill Saturday and have another cold one. Then raise it to the grandstands. There has been no better time to toast college football.
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
