By Mickey Furfari
For the Times West Virginian
MORGANTOWN —
The National Collegiate Athletic Association, otherwise known as the NCAA, continues its trend of treating football as a stepchild or misfit.
Those who make the rules in that governing organization apparently have their heads in the sand. They act as if they don’t know that football revenue pays the cost of nearly all other sports, except men’s basketball, at virtually every NCAA Division I school.
Instead of permitting million-dollar coaches to steadily improve the quality of football teams, the NCAA keeps tightening a damper on player development.
At least that’s the way a guy who’s in his 65th year on the college football beat sees it.
He remembers when a full two weeks of preseason, two-a-day practices were allowed. Now that number has been drastically reduced to just four days of two-a-day sessions in two weeks.
Why? It’s as mystifying to me as it may be to you. Just doesn’t make much sense.
Not only that, the NCAA doesn’t allow a college to scrimmage against another in preseason. But the National Football League allows each team to play four exhibition games before season’s start.
OK, so it’s the professional level. But the mounting cost of fans’ tickets to college games is becoming steadily closer to the NFL’s. But who is there to say the pros’ brand of football isn’t superior?
Does it make sense that college basketball is given two regulation-game scrimmages against other schools and college football is permitted none? Zero!
What’s more, the last time I looked, soccer teams — men and women — were permitted two preseason scrimmages against other schools. And it’s one of those sports that football helps by providing financial support.
In addition, I’m told that soccer gets five days of two-a-days in the spring, with interschool scrimmages if coaches choose. Soccer still doesn’t come close to breaking even financially.
Even the sport of rowing can compete against other crews in preseason, or so I hear.
In West Virginia, at least high schools may scrimmage against another school twice before opening a season. The NCAA wasn’t always so restrictive when it came to college football. In the 1950s, and for many years thereafter, it not only allowed two weeks of two-a-days but also at least one scrimmage.
West Virginia brought in the Quantico Marines, then loaded with former college players, for a full afternoon of skirmishing at Jackson’s Mill. The first teams battled each other, and the second teams did the same.
Fred Wyant, who had a 30-4 record as the Mountaineers’ starting quarterback, remembers that day vividly.
That obviously helped Coach Art “Pappy” Lewis and his three assistants produce a stronger team than a lot of colleges do today.
And the cost of game tickets was about $2.50.
Maybe the NCAA can’t be blamed for allowing outrageous coaching salaries. But it ought to quit treating football as a stepchild.
An honest-to-gosh athletic department couldn’t survive without football’s windfalls.
