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The 2013 BCS Championship

The Early History

As 2012 drew to a close, football fans awaited their annual abundance of college bowl games. If any needed justification for settling on the couch for hour after hour of watching, they could take heart—the sport means more than they may realize.

College football may be destined for an echo of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War as Protestant Alabama and Catholic Notre Dame compete for dominance. The next great battle between the two storied combatants was set for the 2013 BCS Championship on January 7, but the legacies of the two programs suggest prolonged warfare. Meanwhile, both keep an eye out for an evangelical insurgency on the distant horizon, where yet another pretender for national prominence rises from the foothills of Virginia: the Christian soldiers of Liberty University, which hopes not only to win a national title but the nation’s soul.

All the expected sound and fury is to be taken seriously, because college football is not just a sport. It is America’s cultural dynamo, the only one of our organized sports that taps into the martial spirit and evokes the fervor of religious faith (elsewhere in the world, the equivalent is that other football, what we call soccer). Further, college football has been a fulcrum of social change in the U.S.; its schemes date back to Hannibal; and some of its themes are drawn from military history and Shakespeare’s tragedies.

How did such a tangle of art, history, emotions and intellect become embedded in a single sport? It evolved from rugby and has undergone various improvisations and mutations. Its passion arises from many sources—more acutely felt in the South with its bitter memories of defeat, isolation and scorn—but wellsprings of passion flow from school spirit, the pain of defeat and joy of victory, the awe inspired by wit and will pushing, striving, faking to overwhelm or outdo a similarly endowed opponent. Its purpose is not to entertain, though it does; its purpose is to win—an elemental motivator in humankind. It is a passion so flexed and fed in some schools it reaches the point of collegiate jingoism. I will not name names.

My first comprehension that there was an organized logic to the game came while sitting on a footstool before my Dad’s big red leather chair in the library. With the stub of an old copy pencil, which Dad, the late Col. Harry M. Ayers, used for polishing his Sunday editorials in the Anniston Star, he drew a diagram of the 22 players and explained what each did. Next in my arc of discovery was when I reached a certain age and was invited to accompany the grown-ups to the cathedral—a stadium whose very name was mythic: Legion Field—where heroic figures in crimson fought for the honor of school, state and posterity. It was a benchmark experience—a Protestant Bar Mitzvah. However, it was at a New England prep school, the Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut, that I was taught the moral aspects of the game. We were not merely encouraged but required to work or join a sports team. I chose football. What we learned were certain truths of life: the value of giving and taking solid licks, cooperation, and teamwork; the democratic leveling of seniors and prefects with underclassmen; the reality that some have greater skills than your own; the satisfaction of striving to perfect one’s own talent; the idle cheapness of boasting; the discovery that defeat is possible and can be borne with dignity.

During my college and early professional years, Dad and I attended many games together; he in a tan overcoat with the scent of pipe tobacco. These memories are part of the cluster of emotions that go deeper than fan loyalty, into the realm of patriotism. A final memory came after he had a stroke in 1964 and was confined to a convalescent hospital. He had not spoken for weeks when I visited him after attending a game at Legion Field. Leaning down, I took his warm hand and said, “Dad, we whipped the hell out of Georgia today.” He squeezed my hand.

Emotions like these, personalized to the individual’s team and family, spiral like DNA through the nervous system of college football fans.

By comparison, NCAA rules changes seem pretty mundane, and they are. One recent change moved the kickoff from the 30-yard line to the 35, to make touchbacks more frequent and runbacks more infrequent. So be it. Kickoff returns invite high-velocity collisions when injuries occur.

Emphasis on safety in both college and NFL games is a rising concern but it isn’t new. In fact, the game was almost abolished in 1905 when 18 undergraduate players died from injuries. Harvard President Charles W. Eliot led a move to abolish the sport. The New York Times editorialized against “Two Curable Evils,” lynching and football. Eliot might have succeeded but for the fact that Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House. The “first fan,” our most muscular president, proclaimed the game “Bully!”

Roosevelt convened a 1906 White House meeting with the presidents of the three big Ivy League universities—Harvard, Princeton and Yale—and Walter Camp, the leading figure in the game’s formative years.

Camp was a formidable personage, a peer to the others in that White House meeting. He had done more than refine the grunts of rugby into a more elegant but still bone-breaking sport. His basic rules distinguishing football from rugby created a more fluid game of 11-member squads, seven linemen and four backs, on a lined field, with four tries to go ten yards or surrender the ball. Camp had played for Yale and was inducted into Skull and Bones, the secret network of elites. He became chairman of a watch manufacturing company, wrote hundreds of articles for national publications such as Harpers Weekly and Collier’s, advised the armed forces on physical fitness, and coached at Yale and later at Stanford.

According to John J. Miller, author of the definitive The Great Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football, Roosevelt told the conferees: “Football is on trial. Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.” He acknowledged that real and permanent changes had to be made. One resultant change outlawed the flying wedge, whose human leading spear point, when it collided with the receiving team, was literally bone-crushing—and harkened back to the disciplined charge of Roman legions.

Another rules change was legalizing the forward pass. That change spread out the field and also lessened the number of violent crashes between young men in leather caps, contests whose absence of rules rivaled WWE SmackDowns. Out of TR’s meeting grew the all-powerful, unsparing, unsmiling NCAA.

A cacophony of historians now claims to know who threw the first “illegal” forward pass, but my favorite candidate references man’s most basic instinct. In a scoreless game between North Carolina and Georgia, the UNC punter caught the snap just as Georgia rushers broke through with unpleasant intentions. The panicked punter scurried to his right and threw the ball to the first teammate he saw, who sprinted 70 yards for a touchdown. Carolina won 6-0.

The Rise of Notre Dame

The perfection and popularity of the forward pass—and the rise of Notre Dame as a football power—can be traced to a summer on an Ohio beach. There, a Norwegian immigrant and Notre Dame left end named Knute Rockne was lifeguard. He and his roommate, All-American quarterback Gus Dorais, spent the summer creating a forward pass tandem. Rockne’s path to fame was no series of summers on the beach. His father, a small-town Norwegian wagonmaker, immigrated to Chicago when Knute was five. To earn enough money to enroll at Notre Dame, Knute worked as a dispatcher for the post office until he was 22.

That summer’s games of pass and catch between roommates was put to effective use in the fall. On Nov. 1, 1913, Coach Jesse Harper used the newly minted tandem against heavily favored Army. The threat of Dorais-to-Rockne deep passes kept Army from crowding the line of scrimmage. Dorais was 12 of 14 for 243 yards as a confused Army team went down 35-14.

After Rockne abandoned a career in chemistry to coach the Irish, yet another Army game was transfigured into the hall of legends. The team had fallen behind Army 6-0. At halftime Rockne reminded the team of the fabled George Gipp, who died of strep throat in 1920, two weeks after being named Notre Dame’s second consensus All-American. Coach Rockne told his team what the Gipp had said on his deathbed: “I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are going wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.” An inspired team outscored Army in the second half and won 12-6.

In Rockne’s 13 years coaching the Irish his record was 105 to 12, with 5 ties and three national championships. He was a national figure who, when he died in a plane crash at 43, was mourned by President Hoover and whose funeral was attended by a personal representative of Norway’s King Haakon VII. Yet, through some strange spiritual transference, his story is associated more today with actor-cum-President Ronald Reagan who played the lead in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. Reagan took possession of “The Gipper” nickname because of his emotional rendering of Rockne’s locker room speech in the film.

Also now forgotten are the Notre Dame teams of Frank Leahy, 1941-53 with a won-loss percentage of .864, and Ara Parseghian, 1964-74 whose winning percentage of .836 had not been matched until now. A pall of mediocrity for two decades obscured Rockne’s successor teams. Notre Dame had not won a title in 20 years or ranked in the top 10 until the 2012 season. This year it joined the ACC, a conference noted more for its basketball teams, but maintained partial independence in football so it could still line up against such regional powerhouses as the Purdue Boilermakers.

Notre Dame’s glory in the early decades of collegiate football has been rekindled by a new, winning coach hired in December 2011. The 47-year-old Brian Kelly was 34-6 in three seasons at Cincinnati, leading the Bearcats to back-to-back Big East titles and two straight Bowl Championship Series berths. Before Kelly arrived to boost Notre Dame to its No. 1 AP ranking, the flickering memory of the Irish of yore was kept alive mainly by a continuing NBC contract to televise its home games.