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Show Nearing Scandal KS ANOTHER NEW YEAR slid into view the universities of Minnesota, Southern California, Stanford, Ohio State and a few others oth-ers were looking for new football coaches. Texas had just completed com-pleted a n exchange ex-change for Blair Cherry, retired. Savage alumni pressure, the demand de-mand for a winning win-ning team, had caused most of this turmoil and Grantland Rice just about reached the point of a 6candal. It has been generally recognized that football, a great game and a magnificent sport in the raw, had become big business in late years. Big business has overshadowed the sporting side. "Suppose we take the case of Jeff Cravath at Southern California," Cali-fornia," a well-known authority - out this way said. "Cravath is a fine fellow and he wasn't a bad coach. But Southern California Cali-fornia has a big sporting program pro-gram to support. Football does most of the supporting. Losing teams at Southern California In the last two years had fallen off some $400,000 from other normal nor-mal years. The fact that Cravath had won four Pacific Coast championships was forgotten. for-gotten. The problem had now become an economic matter. Southern California, being a private pri-vate institution, couldn't afford another bad year. I mean financially. fi-nancially. So Cravath had to go." Football has reached the point where you must have a winning team or take a financial beating. It has been shown that it costs leading colleges from $250,000 to $275,000 a year to run a football season. A bad year In the field means a bad year or even two at the box office. The alumni pressure on football coaches has become scandalous. This pressure becalme so heavy this last fall that Blair Cherry of Texas, Wes Fesler of Ohio State and Marchie Schwartz of Stanford all resigned. Cherry didn't even wait for the end of the campaign. It so happens that all three of these men are excellent sportsmen and on a high level as football coaches. Certainly Cherry and Fesler had two powerful teams, rated 1-2-3 in the national ranking most of the fall. There was no demand for their resignations. They all decided there must be softer ways of making mak-ing a living. The Coaching Tangle Part of the trouble first started when coaches began to jump three-or three-or five-year contracts for better offers. A coaching contract meant very little, but the university always al-ways got stung when a contract had to be paid up. Now universities have tried out the system of signing coaches coach-es to 10-year contracts. It remains re-mains to be seen how this scheme will work out when better offers are made. At least the universities won't be forced by any alumni group into picking pick-ing up six or seven years of a long-time contract. Southern California had to pay Jeff Cravath $30,000 to cancel the two years remaining on their agreement. There are now close to a 100 universities uni-versities that should be rated on football's big-time list. This number num-ber takes in seven or eight big conferences, con-ferences, plus a number of well-known well-known institutions that don't belong be-long to any conference. Notre Dame is on this latter list. So is Virginia, Miami, Villanova, Santa Clara, St. Mary's, Loyola, Army and Navy. Now it seems to be a reasonable thing to say that all 100 of these universities can't have winning teams. There must be a defeat against every victory. Colleges Col-leges that set up long winning streaks as a rule do so because they have softer schedules or much better material. And too often getting get-ting this material defie- any so-called so-called sanity code. This isn't always al-ways true. There are exceptions. It may have been rough for them but Notre Dame's bad season and Army's defeat by Navy were very healthy for football. So were Michigan's Michi-gan's three defeats. Coaches complain that experts rate their teams far higher than they belong and then start panning them for bad years. There is a good deal to be said for this complaint. com-plaint. A New Derby Hope A year ago the blossoming state of California had a new derby dream. His- name was Your Host, a comet-streak sprinter who was picked as the coming Derby and triple crown champion. Your Host was a fine sprinter. Now Santa Anita has another Derby challenger. After going all out for Your Host the west coast is a trifle more subdued about its new entry another Alibhai colt known as Gold Capitol. |