Desperately seeking a DOMINATOR

Sporting News, The, Nov 8, 1999 by Sean Deveney

Sure, there's no great team, but who cares? With scholarship limits creating parity and spread offenses piling up points, it's a great time to be a fan. But the coaches--who must be craftier than ever--aren't so thrilled.

College football coaches get a bum rap. They are not the glorified gym teachers they are often made out to be. Bet you didn't know, for instance, that Georgia Tech's George O'Leary's has a master's degree from NYU, or that USC's Paul Hackett was pre-med before changing majors and earning a history degree from UC-Davis. Coaches are often insightful in a variety of areas--but none so much as the nuances of their game.

You don't need a master's degree, though, to pick up on the nuances of this college football season. You need a Richter scale. Consider some of the outcomes: Cincinnati 17, Wisconsin 12; Illinois 35, Michigan 29; Louisiana Tech 29, Alabama 28; Oregon State 55, UCLA 7. Consider also that we are left with two top teams--Penn State and Florida State, both 9-0--that have relied on the generosity and sloppiness of opponents almost as part of their game plans. If you thought the Nittany Lions' win over Illinois last week was ugly, you didn't see the Seminoles stumble by Virginia. Strange doings. The little guys don't seem so little anymore. And the big fellas don't seem so big.

To get to the bottom of all this, we turned to the brainiacs themselves, the coaches. Late one night last week, at a coffeehouse in St. Louis' trendy Central West End, we huddled with some of the game's top coaches for a serious, philosophical discussion on college football '99. Like a bunch of beatniks crammed into a Paris street cafe, we drank lattes, espressos and super-grande frappaccinos, smoked cigarettes and stayed up until dawn. Florida State's Bobby Bowden, never one to shy from philosophy, showed up dressed in black, wearing a beret and tiny sunglasses--think Maynard G. Krebs meets Boss Hogg. Dig it, y'all.

Bob Stoops of Oklahoma arrived on his bicycle, carrying a volume of Thoreau in his knapsack and wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Ohio State's John Cooper, a student of the old school, wore a white tunic and spewed quotations from Aristotle. Gym teachers? They beg to differ.

More joined us: Lloyd Carr, Nick Saban, Dick Tomey, among others. Mack Brown of Texas, looking a bit ragged and puffing on a Pall Mall, started things off with a truly heavy observation. "The best way to describe it," he said of the state of college football, "is that it's really wacky right now."

Less is more

All right, so there was no coffeehouse meeting. But the way things are going in college football, coaches around the country are feeling philosophical, ruminating on the fleeting glory of modern tradition and the existential nature of scholarship limitations. The game has changed; it is, as Brown says, wacky. Few coaches welcome wackiness. They like order, an environment where David University beating Goliath State is so rare, it's biblical.

"Dominance," Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes announces, "has taken a nose dive."

"There was a time when you'd know who the dominant team is," Bowden says. "But not this season. You look at Penn State, and they win by five or six. We go out and win by three. Tennessee loses, Florida loses. Nobody is that far above anybody else these days. It's not so dear."

What is dear is that this season is not an aberration. Wackiness is evolving into normalcy. At the heart of it is a 1988 study on Title IX--the 1972 legislation that requires, among other things, gender equity in sports--that found the rule wasn't being implemented aggressively enough. No female sport comes close to the players required for football, so the football teams throw equity numbers out of whack. To combat that, the NCAA put a cap on football scholarships, which had been unlimited. First it was 120, then 110, then 95. Before the 1992 season, the number was lowered to 85, where it currently stands. The amount of practice time allowed also was cut, to 20 hours a week. On the surface, the effects are obvious--more players for everybody.

"Look at this state," Dykes says. "Say, in one year, we take in 15 recruits, Texas takes in 15, A&M gets 15 and Baylor gets 15. That's the four main Texas schools splitting 60 guys. There was a day when all 60 went to Texas."

"You can't gang up anymore," Bowden says. "Even us, we've been doing well these last few years, but if we had the unlimited scholarships like we used to ... man....

"Now, if you have four kids you like, and they all want to come, you have a spot for only one. The other three, they go somewhere else, and you wind up playing against them. They might be the guys who beat you."

Parity party

The word "parity" takes on several meanings for coaches. On one hand, it's the cutback in scholarships designed to even things with the women. On the other hand, it's the spreading of recruits, which causes talent to be more evenly distributed. Most of all, though, it is a catch-all explanation. Upsets? It's parity. Comeback wins? It's parity. Injuries? Parity. Breakdowns in the kicking game? Bad weather? Rising gasoline prices? Failing morals among political leaders? Parity, all parity.