By Scott Graber
It is Tuesday and I’m sitting in a small, pleasant room lined with bookshelves. The room also comes with a sword, a shako, and a computer on which my friend, John Warley, writes.
For those who may not know, a shako is a conical, helmet-like cap that we once wore (at dress parades) at The Citadel. John tells me he has just replaced the black feathers that attach to the brim ($88) and, for a moment, we think back on those Friday afternoons where we wore uniforms not unlike Gebhard von Blucher’s Prussians at Waterloo.
But this afternoon our focus is football — actually the changing nature of football — and John is a student of the game having been the starting center on Citadel’s varsity in 1966.
“It’s about money,” he says.
And so we begin talking about the $20 million that many programs — not the Citadel — will divide among their roster. Although he got a full scholarship, the only cash he got was $17 a month for “laundry.”
“It wasn’t much,” he says, “But hey, in 1966, $17 would fund a pretty good night in downtown Charleston.”
There is litigation still underway, but cash payments — $500,000 to $800,000 for a serviceable quarterback — will start on July 1. This kind of money is, apparently, available from gate receipts at Death Valley (Clemson) and at Williams-Brice (USC), but $20 million won’t be available in Charleston.
But the real problems for The Citadel are the “portal” which allows a player to transfer to another college without the penalty of having to sit out a year, and something called NIL (name, image and likeness), another way to pay players.
John then tells me a story about a baseball player, a very talented pitcher, who was recruited by a small Upstate college. After this pitcher had a fabulous year finishing with an 8-2 record, he was offered $200,000 by a Southeastern Conference school with a history of winning the SEC championship.
“He took the money,” John says.
“The portal and the NIL mean that schools like The Citadel, Wofford, Coastal Carolina and Furman effectively become farm teams (in football) for the ACC and the SEC.”
There is also the looming prospect of a playoff scheme that expands the current 12 team format to 16 teams. One proposal is for the Big 10 and the SEC to have 8 guaranteed slots in the playoff, with the ACC and the Big Twelve getting a total of 4 slots, with Group of Six Conference getting one slot.
This then reduces the rest of the college football world to 3 at-large slots.
These extra games — played in the month of December — will bring even more money into these top-tier, player-buying, semi-pro teams.
I told John that when I was 11, my father returned to Ohio State to get his doctorate. Every Saturday he would work in his lab giving me and my brother his tickets to the game. And almost every Saturday the Buckeyes, under coach Woody Hayes, won.
This win made me and 80,000 other Buckeyes fans delirious. It created a glow that lasted the entire week. I would talk about the game with my young pals, discussing Howard ‘Hop Along’ Cassidy’s 40-yard run right through the middle of Purdue’s Boilermakers. It also created the notion that Ohio, as a place, was better than, say, Indiana. A win in Columbus was a huge anti-depressant injection for the entire state.
This happened almost every Saturday in the Fall; and often OSU would spend New Year’s Day in Pasadena. In those days the Rose Bowl was more or less reserved for Ohio State or Michigan.
“But when you consistently lose,” John replied, “this is huge disappointment for the team, and the school and the alumni. It’s depressing.”
“I think the only solution is for these small colleges to play football like the Ivy League where there are no scholarships.”
“I know The Citadel alumni will raise hell about this,” he continued, “But it’s the only way to get back to winning, at least in football.”
The Ivy League does not have scholarships, or deals with ESPN, and their “student-athletes” are indeed students, some majoring in Pre-medicine as opposed to Hospitality Theory or Hotel/Motel Art. All of which reminded me of The Citadel’s team in 1966 when John slept in a bunk bed, ate in the mess hall, and took on Vanderbilt, East Carolina and West Virginia on Saturdays.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
