http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008812090367
End of college football era
By Bob Baird
Journal News Columnist • December 9, 2008
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It’s not at all unusual for a college alumnus to get mail asking for a contribution, but the letter I got in August 1965 was different.
I was weeks from stepping foot on Manhattan College’s Riverdale campus as a freshman and the letter was from fellow students, not the college itself.
That summer, students were passing up lucrative jobs to devote their time and energy to doing something that hadn’t happened at the college since the fall of 1942.
They were trying to field a football team.
This was the era of Joe Namath at Alabama, Bubba Smith at Michigan State and Mike Garrett at Southern California. Steve Spurrier was just a junior quarterback at Florida.
There was no illusion that the Jaspers, who had played in the forerunner to the Orange Bowl in the 1930s, would ever play against teams and players like those.
But students wanted football and wanted to field a club team, organized, financed and administered by students. With coaches hired by students, the Jaspers played NYU, Iona, Adelphi, Marist and St. John’s that first season. They hoped eventually to play cross-Bronx rival Fordham, which also had abandoned varsity football decades earlier.
Fordham, NYU and Georgetown had started the club craze in 1964 and a year later it was spreading from campus to campus as students collected money, hired coaches and scheduled games with other clubs. Over the next few seasons, Manhattan and Fordham would face off before crowds of about 14,000. Soon Manhattan was traveling to Scranton, Fairfield and Providence and hosting Seton Hall, Georgetown and King’s College of Pennsylvania.
There was a National Club Football Association and even national rankings and a national championship game.
That’s why it was so hard to hear a couple of weeks ago that Iona was dropping football from its sports program.
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Seton Hall, a fixture on Manhattan’s club schedule, went varsity in 1973, playing in NCAA Division III until 1981, the last season it fielded a team. Fordham, too, went varsity in 1970 and by 1974, they, too, were gone from Manhattan’s schedule.
Fordham, Georgetown and Marist, all Manhattan opponents in the club era along with Iona, remain healthy varsity programs, although they, too, have had some turbulent times.
Even after Bob Byrnes became Manhattan athletic director, the former club football star for the Jaspers couldn’t make a varsity program happen in Riverdale. The club program ended at the close of the 1987 season, just months before Byrnes took over. One of the student-hired coaches from his playing days, Bill Polian, went on to other coaching and management opportunities and has been the National Football League’s Executive of the Year five times with three teams.
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The college also cited the financial pressures of football, just as colleges had when students first showed an interest in the 1960s. And like the 1960s, parents thought there was another way to field a team. Several proposed lifting the financial burden from Iona, seeking to fund the program through outside sponsorships.
The college, however, opted to end the program, which has left its former players – including five from Rockland – in a lurch.
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Ed Day finds fault with Iona’s decision and says it appears to him the college knew it would disband the program but went ahead recruiting a freshman class and transfers from other college programs. He says that amounts to a betrayal on the part of the college.
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Reach Bob Baird at rbaird@lohud.com or 845-578-2463. His column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
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[JR: Sigh! It's all about the Benjamins. No margin; no mission. And, if you're not prepared to compromise on standards, you can't compete. Maybe it's the gooferment's fault. Why are they running "schools" that MC has to compete with? They have unlimited budgets and the power to steal from the taxpayer. How does a small private Catholic college compete? It's a miracle.]
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