Does the football tail wag the university dog?

Thursday, June 02, 2011  Cleveland Plain Dealer

When I was a sports editor of The Michigan Daily back in the middle of that other century, legendary coach and Athletic Director Fritz Crisler told me he wanted to double-deck the already huge Michigan Stadium and increase the capacity of the "big house" to 125,000.

1948 Rose Bowl . Coach Fritz Crisle

The reaction to my story, which appeared on page one of The Daily, complete with an architect's drawing, was immediate and final. 
 
No way, said the university president, who was an aging but world-renowned biologist, whose specialty was reptiles. No way, said the board: We already were the "victors," as the fight song goes. We had won the national championship the previous year. 



The tail, so to speak, was not going to wag the dog in Ann Arbor any more than it already did. Crisler retired the following year and things settled down for a while. The university survived a number of embarrassing losing seasons, although donations from alumni predictably sagged somewhat. 


I thought about that incident this week when I learned of the sad departure of Jim Tressel from Ohio State University. I had always viewed him, perhaps naively, as a good man trying to do the bidding of his university. I still imagine him as a victim of the system that created him, and of the monster that big-time football has become. 

  I also reflected on some post-retirement conversations I had some years ago with Harold Enarson, a wonderful person who left the presidency of Cleveland State University to take the top job at OSU. It was his bad luck to be in the president's chair when football coach Woody Hayes slugged an opposing player on national television. He had to fire the legend, and he wasn't loved for it. 

 Soon, Enarson himself was asked to leave OSU, in large part over the Hayes incident. He retired to his tranquil cabin that he loved in the mountains above Boulder, Colo.

Enarson

He, too, was a victim of the system. 


Thus, two good men taking the fall over the passion to win at all costs. Not good.
My problem with what I have just written is that I still love big-time football with a passion. I can't explain my mental gymnastics, intellectually. We are hard-wired to love a winner. Better yet, we need a winner in our mundane lives. 


But somewhere in the recesses of my head, the events of the past weeks tell me that the time may have come to say, enough already. 


In addition to his short career as a sports writer in college, Weidenthal was a writer for The Cleveland Press and vice president of Cuyahoga Community College.