College Football Playoff: When Alabama and Ohio State Turned Down Pasadena

College Football Playoff: When Alabama and Ohio State Turned Down Pasadena

As the Crimson Tide and Buckeyes Meet in the Playoff, a Look Back at a Controversy That Links Them

By Randy Roberts in the Wall Street Journal

The Ohio State faithful blamed the insignificant professors who, after all, only taught at the school. The Alabama loyalists castigated a bookish reporter who wore thick black glasses and wrote for a West Coast newspaper. Scapegoats seemed the only way to explain why their teams wouldn’t go to Pasadena, Calif., for the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day 1962.

Ohio State and Alabama, which meet on Thursday in the College Football Playoff semifinal at the Sugar Bowl, have little shared history. Despite being two of the sport’s premier programs, the teams have played only three times. They are linked, however, by a game 53 years ago Thursday that neither of them played in.

In 1961, the Buckeyes and the Crimson Tide boasted two of the finest squads in the land. Like this season, when the Buckeyes stumbled early against Virginia Tech and then fought back into national-title contention by winning out, in 1961 they tied their opener against Texas Christian and won their remaining eight. They completed the regular season ranked No. 2 in the nation, behind the Tide.

As expected, the Rose Bowl committee invited the Buckeyes to face UCLA. All that was needed was for the players to pack their bags and an Ohio State faculty committee to accept the invitation. That’s right—a faculty committee! In those days it was believed that the faculty should have a say in such matters.

For years some professors at Ohio State, like their counterparts at other universities, had complained about postseason games. “It is not a championship; it is a commercial venture,” declared one professor. And that was the heart of the matter: the Rose Bowl had been a commercialized extravaganza since its inception.

The committee decided it was time to draw an academic line in the sand. By a vote of 28-25, it declined the invitation.

The action prompted an immediate response. Protesters assembled just off the Columbus campus at the intersection of 15th Avenue and High Street. Demonstrators marched to the school president’s home, and then to the faculty club. They broke windows, and held high placards reading “Damn the Faculty.”

In a series of letters to newspapers and the school, angry alumni, fans and students complained bitterly about the decision. One asserted that the faculty was merely “a secondary group” in the university. Another asked, “Cannot something be done to see to it these ‘little’ people” don’t interfere with the ambitions of the football program?

The protests failed. Ohio State’s season was over.

The Buckeyes’ pain meant another school’s pleasure. At that time, the Rose Bowl committee was free to select any school (not just a Big Ten one), and it turned to top-ranked Alabama. Undefeated and untied, the Tide were coached by the great Paul “Bear” Bryant.

The Rose Bowl was sacred ground to Alabama followers. In 1926, in their first Rose Bowl appearance, Alabama had upset Washington, 20-19. The game, commented the president of the school, “was a great victory for Alabama and the South.” Simply put, it marked the arrival of Southern football. Dan McGugin, coach of conference rival Vanderbilt, later said, “Alabama was our representative in fighting for us against the world.”

During the next two decades Alabama returned to the Rose Bowl five times. Bryant competed as a player in the Tide’s 1935 victory over Stanford. The thought of returning there for 1962 game fired his juices. “I would just about walk out there for a chance to play in it and I believe my players would, too,” he told reporters.

That’s when Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times came to Alabama. As the coach and the state dreamed of the Rose Bowl, Murray put on his best Grinch-like smile and asked, “Coach Bryant, what did you think of the announcement out of UCLA that the colored players would not take the field against your team if it got to go to the Rose Bowl?”

Murray knew that the “announcement out of UCLA” was vague. That hardly mattered. He had injected race into the mix at a time when Alabama was at the center of the civil-rights movement. The state’s treatment of the Freedom Riders, combined with the fact that the Crimson Tide—indeed, the entire university—were segregated, made the school’s administration defensive to any discussion of race.

Yet Murray discussed the matter in numerous columns, chiding that in Alabama, “evening dress” meant “a bed sheet with eyeholes” and that ranking an all-white team No. 1 entailed “a denial of democracy.”

The criticism and embarrassment, and certainty of more to come, were too much for university president Frank Rose. Instead of accepting a Rose Bowl invitation, he decided that the Crimson Tide would play Arkansas, another segregated team, in the Sugar Bowl. Alabama, which had already been voted national champion after the regular season (as was customary then), won, 10-3. Minnesota played in the Rose Bowl instead, defeating UCLA. It was another decade until Alabama’s first black players reached the field, in 1971.

For more than a century, such controversy has followed college football. From the early 20th century when concerns about excessive violence forced President Theodore Roosevelt to intervene, until today, as lawsuits over player rights and brain injuries appear on court dockets, football has served as a fractured mirror reflecting Americans’ concerns about violence, education and safety.

In the years since the 1962 Rose Bowl, challenges to big-time college football have lessened. Not long after, the faculty at Ohio State and other universities lost any say in crucial football decisions. All this year, the Crimson Tide and the Buckeyes have been clawing to get into the first national championship playoff. Yet problems of commercial excess, faculty involvement and player equity endure.

—Randy Roberts, a history professor at Purdue University, is the author with Ed Krzemienski of “Rising Tide: Bear Bryant, Joe Namath & Dixie’s Last Quarter” (2013).

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