December 2009 Archives

Longsuffering patrons of this site should breathe a beery sigh of relief at the news that the oft whined-about manuscript that has so  tormented the Ol' Bloviator over the last year or more  has finally been duly dispatched to the Yankee publishing outfit where it was supposed to have arrived several months back. In recognition of  passing this milestone, (which actually felt like passing a kidney stone at the very end) the OB is saluting the waning days  of yet another college football season by sharing this adaptation from his book text.  If anyone really  needs further confirmation of the South's enduring capacity to entangle continuity with change, then, by golly, here it is:  

The American Council on Education's Allan Cartter made no friends in Chapel Hill or Charlottesville when he  observed in 1965 that the South could not "as yet boast a single outstanding institution on the national scene," but  this judgment  of  the state of southern universities in general was hard to dispute Yet, even though a number of these schools  were still relatively new to the business of granting Ph.D.s at that point, as historian Clarence Mohr noted, they would soon be  "fully engaged in a serious effort to equal or surpass their peer institutions in other areas"

The obvious importance of research facilities to a successful courtship of  higher end  of  "high tech" industries had intensified the postwar trend toward greater public investment in higher education. With the success of the  fabled North Carolina  Research Triangle Park's corporate-academic partnership spurring them on, more progressive lawmakers and governors championed bigger  university budgets and better facilities, geared toward claiming more public and private research dollars and recruiting top-flight faculty. Meanwhile, publicly and privately funded scholarship programs began to keep more of the best high school  students in-state and attract others from elsewhere. By 2009, not only were Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, and Emory comfortably ensconced among the country's elite private institutions but with nine of the top twenty-five public universities according to U.S. News and World Report's eagerly-awaited national ranking, the South was better represented in this category than any other region.

                Strikingly enough, in addition to their enviable academic status, save for everybody's favorite homecoming opponent,  good ol' Bill and Mary, the remaining highly-ranked southern public  institutions, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, Clemson, and the Universities of Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina, also shared a common commitment to powerful, nationally competitive athletic programs. The fierce pride of many southerners in their local sports teams, whether scholastic or collegiate or professional, reflected a history of strong, localized attachments typical of a rural region. Yet big-time collegiate sports had emerged in the South in tandem with the urban and business boosterism of the 1920s when  officials at universities such as Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia began to see football as a means of promoting their academically undistinguished schools to a wider population within their states and beyond.

                When Georgia hosted Yale in an intersectional matchup to christen its new stadium in 1929, the game drew tremendous national attention, and it would not be long before southern teams taking on northern "powerhouses" like Michigan, Notre Dame, or UCLA were seen as Confederate soldiers reincarnate, doing battle for the honor and pride of the entire region. No team filled this role more frequently by the strife-torn 1960s than the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide, coached by the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, which won national championships in 1961, 1964, and 1965. Alabama was but one of nine southern teams that managed to claim at least a share of the mythical national crown between 1946 and 1965. This achievement seems all the more remarkable, although not necessarily admirable, in light of the fact that none of these schools had yet signed a single black player to a football scholarship. Until the late 1960s, promising black athletes pursuing possible professional careers had little option but to leave the region to play for schools in the Midwest, Northeast, or California.  Alabama fielded the first black player on its varsity in 1971, and Tide fans' acceptance of this move was likely enhanced by the 42-21 whipping put on their team by a thoroughly integrated and highly talented University of Southern California team the year before. Employing the "wishbone" offense to perfection, an integrated Alabama team would prove dominant throughout the 1970s and other southern schools would benefit enormously from the ability and desire of black players to perform before the "home folks" as well.

                It would not be long before the majority of the players on the South's major college football rosters were black, and white fans who had once been dead set against integration were now equally intent on canonizing black superstars like Georgia's Herschel Walker, Auburn's Bo Jackson, or Florida's Emmitt Smith. In the meantime, the declining gridiron fortunes of certain programs in other regions, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, would reflect the new reality that southern black athletes no longer needed a northern refuge from Jim Crow.

                Much to the delight of their large and rabid fan bases, southern schools would claim sixteen more national football titles between 1988 and 2008. For all that such success in football may have done for local morale and pride, however, critics within the region and beyond charged that too much of southerners' interest in their universities focused on athletics, football in particular, and too little on their academic needs or accomplishments. When he returned to his home state to assume the presidency of the University of Alabama in 1981, Dr. Joab Thomas found it no easy matter to deliver on his vow to give "the football team a university it can be proud of." Seven years later, Thomas's continuing conflicts with football boosters who had no time for such foolish talk  led him to leave Alabama for the presidency at Penn State University. That was 1988, of course, but the recent announcement that AllerBammer would suspend three days' worth of classes at the beginning of next semester while its sturdy lads are in Pasadena competing in the national title game gives us some indication of how much priorities on that campus have changed over the last twenty years.

                In reality, Alabama was but one of a number of southern universities that have launched major campaigns to upgrade their academic reputations in recent years. Such efforts have enjoyed a certain amount of success, but certainly not enough to dispel the impression that for all the talk about rising SAT scores and attracting more National Merit Scholars, athletics still reign supreme on most southern campuses. In 2009, with public higher education suffering mightily from funding cuts triggered by the severe economic downturn, nine of the nation's fifteen highest-paid college football coaches were employed at southern schools. Alabama's Nick Saban headed the list at $3.9 million annually despite a $75-million short fall in the University of Alabama System's funding for 2008. When the University of Tennessee fired head football coach Philip Fulmer in 2008, it not only promised him a $6-million payout over four years but wound up paying a new staff of coaches a whopping $5.3 million annually, all of this at a time when the university itself had already suffered such severe funding reductions that three academic programs were phased out altogether. Overall, a 2009 survey of the Southeastern Conference schools showed four-year percentage increases in spending on athletics outstripping increases in academic spending by a wide margin at ten of the twelve schools, most notably at Auburn, where the ratio was more than seven to one, and Georgia, where it was more than five to one. Not surprisingly, the faculty colleagues of the nine highest paid southern coaches did not fare quite so well. In a recent ranking  of colleges and universities based on salaries for senior professors, only Texas, at forty-seventh, made it into the top one hundred.

                Some argued that football madness was just as overpowering elsewhere.  There was, after all , the time that former Kansas and star NFL fullback John Riggins was to be recognized by his alma mater at halftime of a basketball game.  Miffed at having to share the spotlight with the university's newest Rhodes Scholar, Riggins reportedly received a riotous ovation after he grabbed the microphone and demanded to know "Where was the Rhodes Scholar when it was 'fourth and long'?" Some fools even manage to suggest with straight faces that levels of fan obsessiveness are comparable to the SEC in the Big Ten (Z-Z-Z-Z-z-z....), but this is not an easy case to make even in Columbus or Ann Arbor and an impossible one to make anywhere else. Beyond that, anyone doubting the importance of football to southern cultural identity need only ask themselves if fans of the University of Michigan would be likely to support a despised conference rival like Ohio State in the national championship game. On the other hand, regional loyalties were still strong enough among backers of Southeastern Conference teams like Ole Miss, Georgia, or Tennessee to override their traditional antagonisms long enough for them to rally behind the hated LSU Tigers or Florida Gators in their recent battles for the BCS title. Of course, fans and well-heeled boosters reserve their deepest affection and highest expectations for their own teams. Presidents of the South's major public universities might boast simultaneously of their school's academic and athletic prowess, but, in their heart of hearts, doubtless damn few, if any, can yet envision a day when they would actually feel comfortable asking alumni and boosters to sacrifice the latter in the interest of the former.