An era of excess: In the 1980s, college football outgrew NCAA rules
On a February afternoon in 1994, Charley Pell drove his Buick to the end of a dirt road in Jacksonville, Florida, washed down a handful of sleeping pills with vodka, connected a garden hose to his car’s tailpipe and waited to die.
Pell’s friends and family found him in time to save his life. He was later diagnosed with clinical depression and became a public spokesman for mental illness, which had worsened amid the ignominy that he suffered during the 1980s, when he’d gone from a rising star in college coaching to a pariah who couldn’t find a job.
Pell had risen from Jacksonville State in Alabama to Clemson before taking on a rebuilding job at a moribund Florida program in 1979. He took the Gators to four consecutive bowls, but by 1982, he’d left a trail of NCAA violations in his wake — 107 of them in total, from paying players to spying on other teams’ practices. At first, Pell denied it all, and then he admitted partial guilt, and then, by 1984, he’d taken full responsibility. He was fired. He would never be a college coach again.
In an era of excess, both within and outside of college sports, you might argue that Pell’s transgressions were particularly egregious. But given that nearly half of the major college football programs were sanctioned at some point during the 1980s — given how one scandal after another plagued college sports during the decade, leading into an über-scandal in Dallas — you might also wonder, in retrospect, whether Pell was merely trying to keep up.
In the summer of 1984, in the months before Pell was fired, two things happened that foretold a reckoning for college football.
In June, the United States Supreme Court heard a case brought by the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma against the NCAA. This was the climax of a fight that had been building for decades, ever since televised college football became a lucrative enterprise. Now, powerful football schools like Oklahoma, which had formed an organization called the College Football Association, wanted greater autonomy over their television revenues; they didn’t want to be held back by the NCAA’s restrictions on how their games could be broadcast.
The Supreme Court, by a vote of 7-2, agreed with the universities. It labeled the NCAA’s plan “a classic cartel,” in which the organization was fixing trade by liming output. Finally, the floodgates had been opened. And soon after, money from television deals would come pouring in.
Of the two dissenting votes, one came from Byron “Whizzer” White, who had been an All-American running back at Colorado in the 1930s before moving on to the NFL. White believed the NCAA had to impose controls “because colleges would compromise amateur athletes by pursuing win-at-all-costs practices,” wrote author John Sayle Watterson. Without those controls, White suggested, the biggest schools would command the lion’s share of the money. The sport would veer ever closer to professionalism.
But even as he laid out his case, White’s argument had become an anachronism. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that the era of scandal coincided with the era of spiraling salaries and ballooning television contracts. Maybe the very foundation that college football had been founded on had become harder and harder to justify.
And then a second shoe dropped: In August, two months after the Supreme Court issued its decision, a former offensive lineman named Sean Stopperich, who had retired from football due to injuries, alleged that boosters at a university had induced him to sign by offering $5,000 in cash payments to his family. When the NCAA queried one booster, he stonewalled them completely, declaring that the NCAA investigators were “a bunch of Communists.”
That booster’s name was a millionaire real-estate investor in Dallas named Sherwood Blount. The school which he served, ostensibly as a bagman, was Southern Methodist University.
Two years earlier, in 1982, Pitt coach Jackie Sherrill was lured by Texas A&M with the promise of a massive contract: More than $1.7 million over six years, much of it funded by boosters. One dean at A&M noted that the money seemed entirely out of proportion, given that Sherrill was making more than many scholars and college presidents — in fact, according to The New York Times, he was likely the highest-paid university employee in American history. Texas A&M’s president justified it by saying that “nothing first-class comes cheap.”
Such was the ethos of the decade: You played it big, or you didn’t play at all.
With the money came the expectations. There was no room for losing. The boosters putting up the money wouldn’t have it. And they did everything they could to make sure it wouldn’t happen. When Jan Kemp, a tutor in remedial English at Georgia, alleged that the athletic department altered the grades of athletes in 1981, she was fired and demonized, until she sued the university to expose the truth. But by then, everything was broken: As was the case at Clemson (where Pell had once coached), schools were put on probation, swore to change their ways and then violated the rules again.
And it wasn’t just in the football-mad pockets of the South and Southwest. At Illinois, coach Mike White — who had already been fired at Cal amid allegations of recruiting improprieties — got the program put on probation in 1981 over the recruitment of quarterback Dave Wilson, a decision that led Illinois to consider departing the Big Ten altogether. Then White resigned in 1988 in the midst of yet another recruiting scandal. The system itself had been pushed to its limit. College sports, wrote author Murray Sperber, had become “a huge commercial entertainment conglomerate, with operating methods and objectives totally separate from, and mainly opposed to, the educational aims of the schools that house its franchises.”
It was only a matter of time before that frustration with the hypocrisies within the system began to manifest themselves on the field.
As the SMU story burgeoned into a scandal that would lead to the NCAA’s first and only imposition of the so-called Death Penalty in 1987, two of the most dominant programs of the mid-1980s, Miami and Oklahoma, carried themselves with a flamboyance — both on and off the field — that seemed deliberately intended to call the NCAA’s hypocrisies into question.
“The rules didn’t apply to them,” former Miami Herald columnist Dan Le Batard once said of the Hurricanes. “They were not of the NCAA. It did not apply to them. … It was a complete disconnect.”
So it went at Oklahoma, as well, where coach Barry Switzer would eventually resign under a cloud of improprieties (unlike Pell, Switzer found another job that allowed him to win a Super Bowl). At the end of the 1986 season, after he was suspended for a positive steroid test before the Orange Bowl (he claimed that the steroids were prescribed by a doctor), linebacker Brian Bosworth wore a T-shirt on the sideline that read, “National Communists Against Athletes.”
That was too much even for Switzer, who kicked Bosworth off the team. But the message had already been sent. The disconnect between the athlete and system had grown. If athletes were going to be used for their abilities — if coaches and boosters and even university administrators were willing to shatter the rules to lure them to their schools, and then show little concern for their educations — they had no reason to abide by the rules themselves. If everyone else was getting paid — and the more than 100 major NCAA football teams earned more than $500 million collectively through gate, TV and licensing revenue by 1988 — why shouldn’t they get paid? In a sport increasingly governed by money and defined by success, the rules simply made no sense to them anymore.
In 1989, driven by a fit of pique, Sports Illustrated’s Rick Telander — a former defensive back at Northwestern — published “The Hundred-Yard Lie,” a book-length screed about the sport’s excesses and the inherent hypocrisies of amateurism, with suggestions on how to fix them. As it turned out, Telander’s book was ahead of its time. But the forces of change were coming.
In 1988, the year before “The Hundred-Yard Lie” was published, a pair of sports agents with admittedly sleazy pasts, Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom, went on trial in Chicago for signing a number of players to professional contracts before their amateur eligibility expired. It was abundantly clear they had flaunted the rules of the NCAA, but increasingly, it was hard to find someone who wasn’t. Maybe, Telander suggested, the rules themselves were a large part of the problem.
“Sadly,” Telander wrote, “it often takes a criminal like Norby Walters to make us aware of basic abuses in our society.”
On a February afternoon in 1994, Charley Pell drove his Buick to the end of a dirt road in Jacksonville, Florida, washed down a handful of sleeping pills with vodka, connected a garden hose to his car’s tailpipe and waited to die.
Pell’s friends and family found him in time to save his life. He was later diagnosed with clinical depression and became a public spokesman for mental illness, which had worsened amid the ignominy that he suffered during the 1980s, when he’d gone from a rising star in college coaching to a pariah who couldn’t find a job.
Pell had risen from Jacksonville State in Alabama to Clemson before taking on a rebuilding job at a moribund Florida program in 1979. He took the Gators to four consecutive bowls, but by 1982, he’d left a trail of NCAA violations in his wake — 107 of them in total, from paying players to spying on other teams’ practices. At first, Pell denied it all, and then he admitted partial guilt, and then, by 1984, he’d taken full responsibility. He was fired. He would never be a college coach again.
In an era of excess, both within and outside of college sports, you might argue that Pell’s transgressions were particularly egregious. But given that nearly half of the major college football programs were sanctioned at some point during the 1980s — given how one scandal after another plagued college sports during the decade, leading into an über-scandal in Dallas — you might also wonder, in retrospect, whether Pell was merely trying to keep up.
In the summer of 1984, in the months before Pell was fired, two things happened that foretold a reckoning for college football.
In June, the United States Supreme Court heard a case brought by the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma against the NCAA. This was the climax of a fight that had been building for decades, ever since televised college football became a lucrative enterprise. Now, powerful football schools like Oklahoma, which had formed an organization called the College Football Association, wanted greater autonomy over their television revenues; they didn’t want to be held back by the NCAA’s restrictions on how their games could be broadcast.
The Supreme Court, by a vote of 7-2, agreed with the universities. It labeled the NCAA’s plan “a classic cartel,” in which the organization was fixing trade by liming output. Finally, the floodgates had been opened. And soon after, money from television deals would come pouring in.
Of the two dissenting votes, one came from Byron “Whizzer” White, who had been an All-American running back at Colorado in the 1930s before moving on to the NFL. White believed the NCAA had to impose controls “because colleges would compromise amateur athletes by pursuing win-at-all-costs practices,” wrote author John Sayle Watterson. Without those controls, White suggested, the biggest schools would command the lion’s share of the money. The sport would veer ever closer to professionalism.
But even as he laid out his case, White’s argument had become an anachronism. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that the era of scandal coincided with the era of spiraling salaries and ballooning television contracts. Maybe the very foundation that college football had been founded on had become harder and harder to justify.
And then a second shoe dropped: In August, two months after the Supreme Court issued its decision, a former offensive lineman named Sean Stopperich, who had retired from football due to injuries, alleged that boosters at a university had induced him to sign by offering $5,000 in cash payments to his family. When the NCAA queried one booster, he stonewalled them completely, declaring that the NCAA investigators were “a bunch of Communists.”
That booster’s name was a millionaire real-estate investor in Dallas named Sherwood Blount. The school which he served, ostensibly as a bagman, was Southern Methodist University.
Two years earlier, in 1982, Pitt coach Jackie Sherrill was lured by Texas A&M with the promise of a massive contract: More than $1.7 million over six years, much of it funded by boosters. One dean at A&M noted that the money seemed entirely out of proportion, given that Sherrill was making more than many scholars and college presidents — in fact, according to The New York Times, he was likely the highest-paid university employee in American history. Texas A&M’s president justified it by saying that “nothing first-class comes cheap.”
Such was the ethos of the decade: You played it big, or you didn’t play at all.
With the money came the expectations. There was no room for losing. The boosters putting up the money wouldn’t have it. And they did everything they could to make sure it wouldn’t happen. When Jan Kemp, a tutor in remedial English at Georgia, alleged that the athletic department altered the grades of athletes in 1981, she was fired and demonized, until she sued the university to expose the truth. But by then, everything was broken: As was the case at Clemson (where Pell had once coached), schools were put on probation, swore to change their ways and then violated the rules again.
And it wasn’t just in the football-mad pockets of the South and Southwest. At Illinois, coach Mike White — who had already been fired at Cal amid allegations of recruiting improprieties — got the program put on probation in 1981 over the recruitment of quarterback Dave Wilson, a decision that led Illinois to consider departing the Big Ten altogether. Then White resigned in 1988 in the midst of yet another recruiting scandal. The system itself had been pushed to its limit. College sports, wrote author Murray Sperber, had become “a huge commercial entertainment conglomerate, with operating methods and objectives totally separate from, and mainly opposed to, the educational aims of the schools that house its franchises.”
It was only a matter of time before that frustration with the hypocrisies within the system began to manifest themselves on the field.
As the SMU story burgeoned into a scandal that would lead to the NCAA’s first and only imposition of the so-called Death Penalty in 1987, two of the most dominant programs of the mid-1980s, Miami and Oklahoma, carried themselves with a flamboyance — both on and off the field — that seemed deliberately intended to call the NCAA’s hypocrisies into question.
“The rules didn’t apply to them,” former Miami Herald columnist Dan Le Batard once said of the Hurricanes. “They were not of the NCAA. It did not apply to them. … It was a complete disconnect.”
So it went at Oklahoma, as well, where coach Barry Switzer would eventually resign under a cloud of improprieties (unlike Pell, Switzer found another job that allowed him to win a Super Bowl). At the end of the 1986 season, after he was suspended for a positive steroid test before the Orange Bowl (he claimed that the steroids were prescribed by a doctor), linebacker Brian Bosworth wore a T-shirt on the sideline that read, “National Communists Against Athletes.”
That was too much even for Switzer, who kicked Bosworth off the team. But the message had already been sent. The disconnect between the athlete and system had grown. If athletes were going to be used for their abilities — if coaches and boosters and even university administrators were willing to shatter the rules to lure them to their schools, and then show little concern for their educations — they had no reason to abide by the rules themselves. If everyone else was getting paid — and the more than 100 major NCAA football teams earned more than $500 million collectively through gate, TV and licensing revenue by 1988 — why shouldn’t they get paid? In a sport increasingly governed by money and defined by success, the rules simply made no sense to them anymore.
In 1989, driven by a fit of pique, Sports Illustrated’s Rick Telander — a former defensive back at Northwestern — published “The Hundred-Yard Lie,” a book-length screed about the sport’s excesses and the inherent hypocrisies of amateurism, with suggestions on how to fix them. As it turned out, Telander’s book was ahead of its time. But the forces of change were coming.
In 1988, the year before “The Hundred-Yard Lie” was published, a pair of sports agents with admittedly sleazy pasts, Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom, went on trial in Chicago for signing a number of players to professional contracts before their amateur eligibility expired. It was abundantly clear they had flaunted the rules of the NCAA, but increasingly, it was hard to find someone who wasn’t. Maybe, Telander suggested, the rules themselves were a large part of the problem.
“Sadly,” Telander wrote, “it often takes a criminal like Norby Walters to make us aware of basic abuses in our society.”
