Introduction
With no offense to Jayson Stark and Sal Paolantonio, my ESPN colleagues
who wrote the first two books in this series, I don’t know why Triumph
Books didn’t start with me. Not me, specifically, but the sport I cover.
Opinion is the mother’s milk of college football. The polls—opinion polls,
lest we forget—owned exclusivity over the national championship until
recent years, when the conference commissioners created the BCS formula.
Me, I believe that mother’s milk holds more nutrients than formula.
You have your opinion. Trust me, I know. It lands in my inbox at
ESPN.com with a thud every day. I think I have been accused of having
either a love affair with, or a grudge against, nearly every region or major
conference in the country, not to mention a few minor ones. I grew up in
an SEC state, went to school in the Pac-10, worked in Big 12 country for
seven years, and have lived the last 14 in the Big East (slogan: “Sometimes
Relevant Since 1991”), and every one of those facts has been used to justify
my readers’ spewfest when they disagree with me.
So we all have our opinions. But here’s why you should listen to mine:
I have covered about 300 games since 1987. My work has taken me to
85 Division I-A campuses. I have covered 26 national championship games
in 21 seasons, math that adds up only in college football. I have inter-
viewed seven Alabama head coaches in the same building, including, yes,
Mike Price. I have covered every major rivalry except, to my embarrassment,
Army-Navy. That includes Alabama-Auburn, Ohio State–Michigan,
USC–Notre Dame, Miami–Florida State, Texas-Oklahoma, Georgia-Florida,
and Stanford-California, not to mention Texas–Texas A&M, Michigan–
Notre Dame, Michigan–Michigan State, Tennessee-Florida, USC-UCLA,
and Washington-Oregon.
You get the point.
I have covered six Rose Bowls, 10 Orange Bowls, five Fiestas, five Sugars,
and some assorted GMACs and Gators along the way.
No one has covered college football on a national basis without interrup-
tion longer than I have. That makes me the dean of the college football
press box, at least at the big games where the Verne Lundquists and Brent
Musburgers are lurking about. As B.B. King sang in “Better Not Look
Down”: “I’ve been around, and I’ve seen some things.”
(That same song contains one of the great lyrics of all time: “If the
arrows from Cupid’s bow that had passed through her heart were sticking
out of her body, she would look like a porcupine.” But I digress.)
I haven’t covered only the big games. I sat in the stands at a Baylor-SMU
game with the Tulane football team, five days after Hurricane Katrina.
Speaking of which, I stood on the sideline at Virginia Tech, reporting for
ESPN.com when Hurricane Isabel blew through a Thursday night game at
Lane Stadium. I have covered Bennie Blades, and his son, H.B. Blades, and
watched them both go on to the NFL. I have seen Oklahoma die and be
resurrected. I have seen USC die and be resurrected. I have seen Nebraska
and Notre Dame die and…well, we’re still waiting on those two.
I voted in the Associated Press poll for 16 years, from 1987 to 2002. The
AP doesn’t allow any media outlet to have more than one vote; some guy
named Fowler votes for ESPN, so my ballot got taken from me. It turns out
this Fowler guy has a Saturday morning show that’s all about college foot-
ball. Who knew? There’s a former quarterback on the set, and the two of
them flank a guy holding a pencil and wearing a mascot head. Maybe you
should check it out.
In his foreword to the book you hold in your wonderful book-buying
hands, Chris Fowler talked about the power of opinion in college football.
I like it. I am a poll guy. I enjoyed voting, although I don’t miss the frantic
calls from the AP office in New York wanting to know where my ballot was.
I recall one year at the Fiesta Bowl when I wandered into a postgame buffet
at the media hotel about 3:00 AM only to discover that the AP had all but
filed a missing persons report on me. It’s nice to be wanted.
I have always liked the polls, perhaps because I grew up when the polls
made the champions. And you know what? When we had split national
championships—and we had 11 of them from 1954 through 2003—the
world kept spinning. Nothing bad happened. Balfour made twice as many
national championship rings, and the T-shirt makers sold twice as many
T-shirts. The value of the split national championship, once fans get past the
hurt feelings of being voted down, is just as rich. My point is that living on
opinion alone is possible, and perhaps even preferable, to the dog’s breakfast
of a formula we have now. As math wizards go, conference commissioners
make great former athletic directors. The BCS commissioners do a great job
of changing the formula to solve the previous year’s problem. However, they
will never have a formula that accounts for every squirrelly permutation in
the sport.
I like the idea that No.1 and No. 2 play. The BCS Championship Game
is a showcase for the sport.
But let’s not be in too big a hurry to shun the power that opinion plays
in college football. Which brings us back to The Maisel Report: College
Football’s Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Coaches, Teams, and
Traditions.
What you are about to read is my opinion, and I figure that I owe you
an explanation of how I went about my overrating and underrating. First of
all, you can’t really confuse them with rating. It’s one thing to rate the best
rivalries in college football; what I’m doing here is judging the ratings. For
the next couple hundred pages, I invite you to meet me at the intersection
of Reputation Road and Performance Parkway. I’ll be wearing the media
badge and carrying a bag of roasted peanuts. You can’t watch a college foot-
ball game, in person or at home, without a bag of peanuts. Those stadiums
that don’t sell peanuts in the shell—that would be you, Big House—are
about to hear about it.
Any disparity between reputation and performance big enough to catch
my eye made the book. Take the role that tradition and reputation play in
developing the public’s opinion of players who win awards and teams that
win national championships. It hasn’t always been fair. It hasn’t always been
right. Those are the entries in this book.
It’s worth pointing out that the judging of players, coaches, teams, and
conferences has some basis in fact. Statistics can be used to bolster an argu-
ment, although I tried not to compare statistics across generations. For
instance, in 1939, Iowa back Nile Kinnick rushed for 374 yards and five
touchdowns. His passing statistics (31-of-93, 638 yards, 11 touchdowns, 13
interceptions) that season wouldn’t get him a look from a Division II coach
today. But that’s the year he won the Heisman Trophy, and the state of Iowa
will suspend the First Amendment if you suggest he shouldn’t have. The
eight interceptions on defense, the 39.9-yard punting average, and the 604
return yards point out why Kinnick did win. The standards have changed,
so there is a little cross-generational dissing here, but not much.
With players and teams, stats matter. When judging traditions and stadi-
ums, not so much. You may agree. You may disagree. That’s the point. One
man’s Golden Egg is another’s Script Ohio. My take on fight songs, for
instance, has as much to do with clef notes as cleft chins. So I will stipulate—
a word I learned watching Law & Order—that those ratings have more to do
with personal taste. However, I hope you came here for the same reason that
Lonely Planet sells a lot of travel guides: I’ve been around, and I’ve seen some
things.
The office in my home has a wall of books that I have collected during
my career. If there’s a used bookstore near campus, I like to go in there the
day before a game and scour for college football books. I’ve saved a few cre-
dentials and the media guides from a few national champions, but other
than that, my office is no shrine to college football. In fact, there is only one
item hanging on my office walls that pertains to our—your and my—
favorite sport.
It is a letter dated October 18, 1966, on Alabama football stationery.
The text of the letter reads:
Dear Ivan:
I certainly appreciated your note of October 17. Thanks so
much for your interest and support of our team.
Best of luck in your school work.
Sincerely,
Paul Bryant
It is signed with a thick black marker, the crossing of the “t” slanted from
left to right. He responded three days after No. 3 Alabama defeated Tennessee
11–10, coming back from a 10–0 deficit in a driving rainstorm to take the lead
late in the game. The Vols’ Gary Wright missed a 20-yard field goal as time ran
out. The 1966 team, which finished 11–0, won every other game by at least
10 points. The Tennessee victory helped turn Bryant into a legend. That could
be why I wrote Bryant. But I doubt it.
After all, I was only six years old.
To tell you truth, I’d really love to see the letter I wrote him.
When you disagree with The Maisel Report—and there’s something in
here to torque off just about every fan—just keep in mind that I didn’t just
arrive on campus on a truckload of watermelons. I’ve got a letter from the
Bear to prove it.