What's the Fuss?

By Josh Weinfuss
News Herald Writer
747-5069/ jweinfuss@pcnh.com

Forty-one years later and Duffy Daugherty still has a point.

Two weeks before he led the Michigan State Spartans to a 10-10 tie with Notre Dame, Daugherty called for the extinction of college bowls and the implementation of a playoff system.

In an Associated Press story that ran in the Nov. 1, 1966 edition of The News Herald, Daugherty proposed an eight-team playoff involving the champions of the six major conferences and two ranked independent teams. He emphasized that it would require less time away from the classroom for the players and more money for schools through television contracts.

“He worked ‘till his dying day to get a playoff system,” said Pat Gallinagh, the starting left guard on Daugherty’s 1966 team.

Daugherty died Sept. 25, 1987.

Daugherty’s strong convictions were inspired by the AP’s snub of Michigan State in the 1965 poll. Until 1968, the AP voted its national champion before bowl games, expect for that season.

That year Michigan State, undefeated during the regular season, lost to UCLA in the Rose Bowl and lost the AP title, but the Spartans were named national champs by the United Press International’s coaches poll.

The next season, Michigan State was bit by two old Big Ten bylaws that said league teams could only play in the Rose Bowl and not in consecutive years. That left the 1966 Spartans, 9-0-1 and Big Ten champs, without a bowl and relying on the Fighting Irish to lose and give them the title. Notre Dame defeated USC handily.

“We felt we lost the national championship on an open date,” Gallinagh said. “He just felt it was unfair the way they were determined. It’s kinda mythical, even with the BCS the way it is now.”

Not much has changed since Daugherty’s fight for a playoff. The four traditional bowls are still the epicenter of college football’s postseason.

Michigan State fullback Regis Cavender remembers Daugherty’s playoff philosophy was to decide who the best team was on the field and nowhere else.

Even before the infamous 10-10 tie, former Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian agreed with Daugherty. Until 1969, the Irish weren’t allowed to play in a bowl.

“I think that when we would go to the American Football Coaches Association meetings, we would try to put it in the hopper,” Parseghian said of a playoff. “It was a very common annual review by coaches that would believe in it and by those that did not agree with it.”

Parseghian said every year the proposal would get denied, sometimes by the belief that academics would be affected. Then and now, bowls extend seasons by more than a month.

Daugherty’s playoff idea would have extended it by four.

His plan also included dividing the television revenue so all 120 schools would have received at least a $20,000 share.

Gallinagh said through AFCA coaching clinics, Daugherty pressured college presidents but the four traditional bowls wouldn’t budge. Daugherty was also against a trend that reared in last year’s BCS games and will be this year.

He felt there was an unfair disparity between West Coast teams and Midwest teams in their bowl games. The West Coast teams typically had only a few weeks break between their last game and their bowl. The Midwest teams sometimes had more than a month off. In last year’s championship game, Florida, which had just more than a month off crushed Ohio State, which didn’t play for more than 50 days.

“That’s something that Duffy didn’t like,” Gallinagh said.

Parseghian said 2007 is an awful lot like 1966.

“Basically what had happened, every year as you got toward the end of the season there was a big disagreement and argument about who was number one,” he said. “That same thing would crop up in the last quarter of the season and everybody would talk about it and nobody would do anything about it.”

Now, that discussion is magnified through television and the Internet.

Yet, Daugherty’s goal of a playoff is still where it was in 1966 — just a dream.

Parseghian doesn’t know if there will ever be playoffs, either does Gallinagh, but both see the possibility slowly developing.

“I’ve been out of it a long time, but I’ve seen the developments very slowly aiming in that direction,” Parseghian. “What we have now is better than what we had. What we have now could be better. And it’s a very slow moving process that I’ve witnessed as a coach and since I’ve been out.”

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