From purple daze to purple haze?

Sporting News, The, Dec 4, 1995 by Dave Kindred

Northwestern, the Halley's comet of college football, will make its twice-every-century trip to the Rose Bowl this winter. My, my. The wondrous Wildcats have streaked high over the smokestacks of football factories littering the landscape from Pennsylvania to Iowa. The temptation is to say that North-western's ascension shows that college football is all that it's cracked up to be: actual students attending an actual university with the idea of actually getting an actual diploma that has actual meaning.

In celebration of such a thing, we should retrieve our purple sweaters from Goodwill and wear them proudly, We should announce ourselves as the Wild-cats' subway alumni. We should make up lies about sneaking Ann-Margret out of her dorm. We should say we knew Charlton Heston before he went biblical. We should even get a map and learn where Evanston is.

Because this is the best story in college athletics today, we should enjoy Northwestern's thrill ride as long as it lasts -- for, alas, the end is coming. We can see it. We can see the inevitable result of magical work. We know what will happen. This will happen ...

It's the week after the Rose Bowl, maybe even the next morning. Northwestern's coach, Gary Barnett, calls a press conference at which he does an Ara Parseghian. That is, having worked a miracle, he leaves for an actual football job at an actual football school. A year later, mighty Northwestern is again Northwestern the mediocre. We subway alumni then repair to our usual dark places to wait another 50 years or so to see our Wildcats light up the sky.

This will happen because college football at the major-bowl level is about three things. It's about winning. It's about winning big. And it's about winning big all the time. The Northwestern stories are the beautiful exceptions that allow us to lie to ourselves. They allow us to imagine that college football is about kids having fun all over America.

For Northwestern, a private university that long ago made peace with its identity as a big-time football failure, the occasional success is all that's necessary. But for nine or 10 of Northwestern's conference playmates, perennial success is not only necessary but expected and needed. It's needed to sell 80,000 tickets every other Saturday. It's needed because college football is peripherally about college and directly about money.

At the top levels, college football is professional football with millionaire coaches, multimillion-dollar budgets, national television performances and the world's largest stadiums. All that's amateur about it are the players, who work for free in an exploitation so shameful that universities hide the truth even from themselves.

If college football occasionally gives us a Northwestern story all warm and fuzzy, more often by far the story is a different one. Usually, it's about a professional college football team deciding good isn't good enough -- such as the University of Georgia, which last week fired its coach, Ray Goff.

Goff, a Georgia native, had been Georgia's quarterback in the mid-1970s and later became an assistant coach there. When Vince Dooley twitched with a fit of ambition seven years ago -- he retired after 25 years coaching Georgia to consider a run for the U.S. Senate -- Georgia bumbled two opportunities to hire proven head coaches. Almost by desperate chance, the job went to Goff.

He worked under a burden unique to him in the Southeastern Conference. Seven years ago, Georgia alone of SEC schools had upgraded its academic requirements for athletes. It did so in response to revelations of academic manipulations on Dooley's watch. Some players worked three seasons for Dooley without advancing academically past the freshman level.

Forced to play on an uneven academic field of his pre-decessor's making, Goff soon fell far behind the genius coaches at Alabama, Auburn, Florida and Tennessee. In addition, so many Southeastern Conference programs took to breaking NCAA rules that folks said SEC stood for Sure Everybody Cheats.

Not Ray Goff; he worked honorably. Nor did he whine about his unique academic burden. (Not that whining would have been appropriate. After all, with no head coaching experience, he had been hired for one of America's richest football jobs. At $350,000 a year, he surely is an unemployed millionaire today.

Dooley, now the Georgia athletic director, said he fired Goff because seven years is long enough to measure a coach's progress. Dooley didn't like Goff's record against the top SEC teams (4-18-1 with Auburn, Alabama, Florida and Tennessee). And Dooley said university supporters were divided on the issue of Goff as coach. To bring people together, a change had to be made.

What Dooley didn't say because college administrators don't want to say it out loud for fear of exposing their hypocrisy is this: Georgia wants to win, to win big and to win big all the time.

In seven years, Goff did work that would get him hired most anywhere but got him fired at the place he loves. His teams ranked in the top half of America's best college football conference. His record: 46-33-1. But at Georgia's level of professional/college football, top-half doesn't get it. It gets you out the door.