Death Of A Conference

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Andrew Garfield (center) on the set of Death of a Salesman. ~ Brigitte Lacombe/Death of a Salesman Photographer/Broadway.com

About The Author: Kevin Edds is the Writer/Director of the documentary Wahoowa: The History of Virginia Cavalier Football. You can purchase the DVD from our sponsor UVA Bookstores (click here). For more information on his new film Hoos Coming to Dinner: The Virginia Cavaliers Unbelievable Rise to #1, please visit www.UVaFootballHistory.com. To Email Kevin, click here.

This is Part 1 of a three-part article series on the evolution of the ACC.

Andrew Garfield, your friendly neighborhood Spiderman, was sporting a pair of homemade UVa sneakers. It’s true, Garfield was actually wearing some Chuck Taylors with a hand-drawn UVa logo. Was Hollywood’s newest incarnation of the comic book web-slinger a converted Wahoo fan? Not really. In 2012 Garfield was the lead character Biff in the Tony Award-winning revival of “Death of a Salesman” portraying a high school stud footballer replete with a new pair of kicks and “UVA” emblazoned on the side. Biff was getting ready for a free four-year ride at the venerable Southern institution based on his athletic skills, not so much for his grades.

BIFF: Oh, Pop, you didn’t see my sneakers!
WILLY: Hey, that’s a beautiful job of printing!

BERNARD: Just because he printed University of Virginia on his sneakers doesn’t mean they’ve got to graduate him, Uncle Willy!
WILLY: What are you talking about? With scholarships to three universities they’re gonna flunk him?

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John Malkovich’s shoe from the film adaptation of Death of a Salesman. ~ CBS TV 1985

Salesman, the Arthur Miller classic, features Willy’s eldest son Biff sporting said shoes during a flashback to 1931. While Miller was not attuned to NCAA regulations of that era, in real life the University of Virginia was facing a hard decision concerning athletic scholarships. They did not cover room and board let alone tuition for athletes per the rules of their conference. UVa was part of the Southern Conference, an athletic amalgamation consisting of 23 southeastern colleges and universities. Yes, 23 members. It makes the recent formation of 14 or more member super-conferences seem cozy.

But how did we get here? How did the creation and break-up and reforming of these groups lead to the present state of athletic alliances where the University of Maryland has ended a 61-year tenure in the ACC and moved to the Big Ten? How odd will it be to see the Cavaliers and Terrapins tip off in basketball this Wednesday and it not be for conference bragging rights? And why does “conference realignment” seem like such a new thing – if we can still consider 2003’s conference shake-ups new – when in reality the only thing constant in the world of college athletics has been change?

The First Conference

In the early days of the sport, the 1870s and 80s, college football programs popped up rapidly at Northeastern institutions, specifically at Ivy League schools. But the “Ivy League” at that time was in actuality an amorphous entity with no hard and fast rules or contractual membership. The official league did not formalize until 1954.

The first need for athletic affiliation in all sports (there were single-sport alliances like “Rowing Associations” prior to this) between not just Ivy League schools, but those across the nation, arose mainly due to football and the absence of any legislative body. That’s because the NCAA didn’t come along until 1905.

The idea of playing on a “level field” already had become an issue in the 1890s due to eligibility abuses and the paying of players known as “tramps.” Schools were eagerly competing against one another, but with different eligibility standards. Some had athletes playing for seven or eight years, others had only part-time students who were taking but one class a semester if any at all.

2014EDDS_trophy001aIn 1892 the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SIAA) was born consisting of future SEC schools Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Sewanee, and Vanderbilt; and future ACC brethren North Carolina, Virginia, Clemson, and Georgia Tech (also an SEC charter member). Within a year they added more with the likes of Kentucky, LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Tennessee, and even the University of Texas.

Membership fluctuated between 20 and 30 schools for the better part of the next two decades. Specifically the SIAA’s goal was to monitor and control the prevailing issues of college athletics at the time, before the NCAA was even an idea. They formalized officiating, eligibility (five years maximum), barring professionals, mandating classroom attendance, and prohibiting faculty members from participating.

The SIAA did very little to shape the big time college football world in the Northeast in those early days. This first official conference didn’t care about football scheduling. It didn’t even crown a football champion for years. They were more concerned with eligibility rules than championships. Because of this most of the country viewed football in the South as underwhelming. No Southern team had ever defeated a Northern power in Princeton, Harvard, Yale, or Penn until Virginia did so in a 1915 upset of Yale. What those Southern boys were doing down below the Mason-Dixon line had little impact on the college football elite.

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The early Virginia football teams, like the 1893 players, participated in the SIAA. ~ UVa Athletics Department

More Conferences Emerge

As football took hold in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and other Midwestern states in the 1890s the balance of power began to shift from the Northeast. Soon thereafter the first “big time” football conference was created in 1896 when today’s Big Ten was formed under the name “The Western Conference.” In 1907 the Missouri Valley Conference, which included schools such as Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri, became the second-oldest (Division I) athletic conference. Others soon followed. The Rocky Mountain Conference in 1909, the Southwest Conference in 1914, and the Pacific Coast Conference in 1915.

During the 1915 season a fracture in the foundation of the SIAA began to form when Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina proposed a “Southern Conference” of schools. They planned to still maintain membership in the larger SIAA, but the financial and enrollment stresses at schools during World War I put that plan on hold.

Soon after WWI ended SIAA membership became swollen with 30 institutions. Complaints of uneven scheduling and legislation were common. But by 1920 the growing issues of the larger schools were freshman eligibility and participation in summer baseball for money. When it came to barring freshman from competing, the smaller schools knew they could not compete with larger opponents if their already small pool of student-athletes was diminished even more. A proposal to eliminate freshman eligibility was presented at the 1920 meeting of the SIAA’s members but voted down 19-9 because of the abundance of smaller schools in the league.

The Southern Conference

One year later, on Feb. 26, 1921, fourteen members of the SIAA broke off and the Southern Conference officially was created. Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi State, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Tennessee, Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Washington & Lee were charter members. They immediately ratified a rule preventing freshman eligibility and even struck down all eligibility for athletes transferring into the conference.

At the time the Southern Conference was born, no other big time league (the SIAA was still considered a lower echelon group) had more than the Western’s 10 members. With 14 the Southern was larger than most, despite lacking the same talent. Striving to learn from their experiences in a 30-member alliance, the Southern Conference proclaimed that it would grow no larger than sixteen.

Just like the 2014 version of ACC football, the Southern Conference started with 14 members. At the SoCon’s first annual meeting the league announced that it would expand to no more than 16 members, they just couldn’t decide on which two schools to invite. So instead it brought in six: Florida, LSU, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tulane, and Vanderbilt. And they did it by raiding the SIAA, just like the ACC did to the Big East in 2003, 2012, and 2013. Just like that there were 20 member institutions.

One of the immediate perks of the new Southern Conference was more formalized scheduling between its members. The Big 10, Pac 10, and SWAC were all doing this, and while not a true round-robin, the more regulated SoCon scheduling policy helped the desire to start crowning a champion of its own.

This even helped heal – well, perhaps bandage over – an 18-year rift between two of its new members, Virginia and Virginia Tech. Complaints by UVa over Virginia Tech fielding an eighth-year student in 1905 had led to a break-up in the rivalry that didn’t look to be repaired. But a detente had been reached by 1923 in the third season of their conference affiliation and the rivalry resumed. Spirits were so high in Charlottesville that the loosely-nicknamed Wahoos officially created the new moniker “Cavaliers.”

Too Big For Its Britches

In 1923, just the third year of the Southern’s existence, a championship trophy was awarded to the football’s conference champion. But the Pickens Cup, so named for Alabama alumnus “Champ” Pickens who donated the 21-inch sterling silver cup, was not given without controversy.

Fourteen sportswriters voted for the champion and their methodology was not revealed. Vanderbilt won the championship in 1923 with a 3-0-1 conference record. But Washington & Lee went 4-0-1 in conference and VMI 5-1, with each receiving only one first-place vote. 1-0-2 Florida received two second-place votes despite such a meager conference mark. 104-year-old UVa alumnus John Risher, a member of the 1931 UVa football team who has been attending Virginia games since 1919 was befuddled as well, “They had an enormous number [the Southern Conference]. So far as having a champion, I don’t know how they determined one.” (Read a recent ESPN.com article about Risher here).

With the conference crown a hotly contested debate, the issue of league membership was bubbling up again. At the yearly conference meeting in Raleigh, eight aspiring colleges’ applications to join the Southern were denied. But schools would continue trying with Duke eventually breaking in by 1928.

One of the most eagerly anticipated products of the Southern Conference each year was the annual track meet. In this sport all schools could compete against one another. But in the third year of the SoCon’s existence the members split their track and field competition into two tournaments. The seven schools from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina met in Charlottesville at the request of the University of Virginia while the remaining schools met in Montgomery, Alabama.

“There has been a feeling,” a Virginia alumnus admitted, “that the far Southern schools have kept too many of the events in their territory which made sending a full team of sixteen men there almost too costly to consider.” While football teams carried almost twice that number, the profits from a football game far outweighed those of a track meet. The burden of traveling to the deep South was now becoming troublesome.

Washington Post Columnist Norman Baxter opined, “There are enough schools in the northern half of the Southern Conference for them to be self-sufficient in all matters athletic. The present body, with its more than twenty members, is unwieldy. The only good that it accomplishes is through the establishment of a standard code of ethics as applied to sports.” And with regards to scheduling, Baxter said, “The South Atlantic members can form a compact group … to meet each other at least every other year in every branch of sport.”

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Teams in action at Lambeth Field in 1927. ~ UVa Athletics Department

 Breaking Up Is Easy To Do

1928 saw the first break-up of a Division I conference as six schools in the Missouri Valley Conference split off into what was informally called “The Big Six” – later to be known as The Big Eight. The remaining four smaller schools joined with Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) and fought to retain the MVC moniker. In fact both groups would claim the same historical starting point for decades, something the Southern Conference would soon deal with as well.

By 1932 the SoCon, the alliance formed a decade earlier with the intention of “keeping its numbers small” to balance scheduling, had grown from 14 to 23. Virginia Tech’s C.P. “Sally” Miles, president of this alliance, was notably proud of his position in this new superconference. But, when calling the 1932 meeting of its representatives to order, he was cut off by Georgia president Steadman Sanford who immediately announced that 13 schools were breaking away to form “The Southeastern Conference.” Florida president John Tigert said that while he regretted it, the conference had just “grown too large.”

At 23 members, the Southern Conference had become unmanageable. The lack of a round-robin schedule, or even divisions breaking off into a championship game, led to squabbles over who would be crowned each season. Several unofficial champions would claim the Southern title in the same season, even producing their own trophies to commemorate it.

The Big Ten, with its ability to definitively crown a champion, provided an example that the new SEC wanted to follow. A few years prior to their exodus, eight of the institutions had discussed a potential break-off. They even tested out the name “The Big Eight” like a lavaliered debutant trying out her beau’s surname to see how it sounded.

While 10 member institutions was good enough for the Big Ten, the 10 remaining schools in the Southern Conference: Clemson, Duke, NC State, Maryland, South Carolina, UNC, and Virginia, along with Virginia Tech, Washington & Lee, and VMI, searched for reinforcements. In four years, the SoCon was back up to 17 members with invitations to Wake Forest, George Washington, Richmond, William & Mary, The Citadel, Davidson, and Furman.

Conferences were dividing, reforming, and sprouting up anew constantly. The Border Intercollegiate Athletic Association, comprising of the Arizona and New Mexico schools, arose in 1931. Seven of the 12 members of the Rocky Mountain Conference would soon break up after the 1937 season to form the Skyline Conference. Realignment was rampant.

Scholarship

When Death of a Salesman’s Biff Lowman was being recruited by a fictitious version of the University of Virginia in 1931, one of the internal debates of the real-life Southern Conference was whether to allow scholarships. College football boosters had run wild by the 1930s, paying athletes substantial amounts to play for their teams, along with approved “subsidies” (i.e. scholarships) offered by the schools themselves.

In the Southern Conference five university presidents, including then UVa President John Newcomb, tried to reform the NCAA guidelines on subsidies, under-the-table payments, and enforcement of rules. But they had no luck. Going back to a purely amateur status, with no benefits whatsoever for athletes was something most football schools could not imagine. Newcomb instead focused his attention on reforming just the Southern Conference.

In the following weeks the schools’ presidents met to discuss enforcing an entirely amateur policy called The “Graham Plan.” It was named after UNC President Frank Graham who, along with Newcomb, drafted the code previously in their failed attempt at NCAA-wide reform. The SoCon presidents passed it by a narrow one-vote margin. Now all athletic subsidies and funding from alumni would be prohibited.

While good in theory, the Graham Plan did not survive long. UVa’s administration quickly realized its mistake. For a student-athlete to excel at both football and academics, life was tough. With the country in the throes of the Great Depression, many students were paying for their own expenses as most parents were merely trying to put food on the table.

To play football, thrive academically, and work a part-time job to pay for tuition, room, and board was virtually impossible. Burdening athletes with all three tasks would lead to academic attrition in the eyes of the UVa administration. For the Biff Lowmans of the world to play football at UVa, its administration changed course on the Graham Plan and became adamant that scholarships were necessary.

Unbeknownst to Graham, UNC alumni had been secretly assisting their own football players at an alarming rate and did not stop when the Graham Plan took effect. The cabinet members at UNC commented: “We can’t afford to become Simon Pure and lose out like Virginia.” The first year of the Graham Plan, Virginia finished 1-5-4, with four scoreless ties and lost to the Tar Heels 61-0.

During the time they were still trying to adhere to the Graham Plan, one Virginia alumnus wrote: “… every school in the conference is violating the very principals of it.” So instead of diving into the world of under-the-table payments, UVa simply left, becoming an independent for the next 16 years.

Knowing that the Graham plan was an impossible ideal to live up to, the remaining presidents of the Southern Conference soon repealed it, but Virginia refused to rejoin the group and decided to continue as an independent. With the ability to offer scholarships Virginia’s teams, so dismal since WWI, started to work back towards being a dominant power in the South.

The Business Of College Football

In the aftermath of the SEC defection in 1932, the Southern Conference would ramble on, holding strong throughout World War II. The Southeastern Conference, though, started to grow into a dominant force in college football, one not seen since the early days of football’s birth in the Northeast.

The business of college football also saw consistent growth. In 1948 the SEC was not only paying for a full ride for its football players, but gave them a $10 monthly stipend, about $93 in today’s dollars. In 1950, LSU players received $250 “spending money” (or about $2,400 today) for participating in the Sugar Bowl, in addition to compensation for meals, hotels, and entertainment.

Oklahoma players and their wives (yes wives, times were different back then) were taken on a vacation to Cuba. The University of North Carolina, which played in the 1950 Cotton Bowl, paid for its players’ families to attend the bowl game. Even in 1950 bowl payouts were considerable. UNC’s $125K bowl payout when factoring inflation would be about $1.2 million today.


 

End of Part 1: Up Next, A Big Bowl of Defiance

In the next installment of “Death of a Conference” the University of Maryland rises to the ranks of the best football team in the country putting it at odds with the smaller schools in the Southern Conference. As tensions rise and Maryland is suspended from the Southern secret plans are hatched to form a new league, the Atlantic Coast Conference.

For more information on the author’s new film Hoos Coming to Dinner: The Virginia Cavaliers Unbelievable Rise to #1, please visit www.UVaFootballHistory.com.

3 Responses You are logged in as Test

  1. I’m so glad this is a freebie. Very well written and documented. I look forward to the rest of the story.

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