The Janowicz era wasn't much different from today

Sporting News, The, March 11, 1996 by Ivan Maisel

To the day he died last week at 66, Vic Janowicz held the unofficial title of the greatest athlete to play at Ohio State. His career serves as a window to the explosion of college football in the postwar era. And not all for the good.

The renewed public interest in the game and the lure in the late 1940s of the two professional leagues to the grizzled veterans who came home combined to infuse college football with a Wild West lawlessness. Coaches stole players from other campuses in the dead of night, offering the sort of inducements that the Southwest Conference made famous a decade ago.

More than 60 schools recruited Janowicz, a 5-9, 186-pound back from Elyria, O. Several, he said, offered him money and/or a car. He went to Ohio State under the sponsorship of John Galbreath, the Columbus real estate magnate and university trustee. In those days, that was legal. Galbreath paid Janowicz's tuition and gave him a loan, which Janowicz worked off during the summers. It's no coincidence that after his college career, Janowicz played two seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates -- Galbreath owned the team. After two seasons of baseball, he played two seasons with the Washington Redskins.

Janowicz lived on the edge while in Columbus. The university suspended him once for poor grades. He also knew how to find a beer and a brawl. A Saturday Evening Post profile of Janowicz quoted Ohio State athletic director Dick Larkins as saying, "My daughter Sally is in Vic's anthropology class. It's an event when she comes home and announces, `Janowicz was there today.' "

Today, that statement would get an athletic director fired. But another quote from the story, by Janowicz, shows college football hasn't changed so much after all.

"There was no place I could go to get away from football," he said. "If I went downtown for a movie, people would gripe that they'd lost money on the team. Even when we won the game they complained we didn't get enough points to cover their bets. They expected me to score a touchdown every time I handled the ball. The phone drove me out of my room. Drunks asking me to settle arguments and dames angling for dates called all day and half the night..."

Janowicz, a single-wing halfback and defensive back, did play spectacular football. Against Iowa in his junior season, he threw for four touchdowns, ran for a fifth and returned a punt for a sixth. He also kicked 10 extra points in the Buckeyes' 83-21 victory. That game won the 1950 Heisman Trophy for him.

Woody Hayes used to joke he was the only coach who could stop Janowicz. Hayes came to Columbus in 1951, and Janowicz didn't do as well in the coach's white-bread offense. Nonetheless, after Hayes and Archie Griffin, no one personified Ohio State football more than Janowicz. In fact, no one personified all of college football a half-century ago more than Janowicz.

Thorny issue

Don't get your hopes up for a quick marriage between the Rose Bowl and the Bowl Alliance. Recent news stories to the contrary, we're talking IBM and Apple. It will take teams of engineers and months of research to find a path of compatibility between the two sides. The conferences in the Alliance and their three bowls don't want to give any deference to the Rose Bowl, whose officials continue to believe the earth revolves around them.

Given the annual high rating of the Rose Bowl and its century of tradition, they may have a point. But now that the marketplace for a national championship has all but passed by the Rose Bowl, its officials and ABC Sports must decide whether they want to come off their pedestal and bring all of college football into a national championship structure.

The most recent suggestion involving the Rose Bowl has the Rose Bowl staging the championship game in Pasadena if the No. 1 team came from the Big Ten or the Pacific 10. If those two leagues produced a No. 2, then the Alliance would keep the national championship. That proposal may be convenient for the Rose Bowl, but it would defeat one of the very reasons the Alliance came about. The Fiesta Bowl was able to pay $8.8 million per team last season because it could promise a national championship game to its title sponsor.

"You've got to know the rotation," says ACC assistant commissioner Tom Mickle, the de facto head of the Alliance. "You've got to know ahead of time. You can't pull in and out of the Rose Bowl depending on rankings. Other than that, we're pretty much open to anything."

That is, after the current rotation, which will take the championship game to the Sugar Bowl next January and the Orange Bowl in January 1998. Any solution must be approved by ABC, which holds the TV rights to the Rose Bowl into the next century. ABC Sports spokesman Mark Mandel gives an indication of how remote the possibility of a resolution is. "There's so many people to talk to and so much work to be done," Mandel says. "We would just rather not talk about it."