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George F. Will / Great days for the Irish: Notre Dame shows top football and academics can co-exist

George F. Will / Great days for the Irish: Notre Dame shows top football and academics can co-exist

WASHINGTON -- Yet another reason to revere Calvin Coolidge is that he thought the Chicago Bears were a circus act. In the 1920s, professional football was small beer compared to the already big business of college football. Which today prospers partly by selling beer: Watch the commercials that pay for the television contracts that have recently disordered many college football conferences and nullified what were solemnly called "traditional rivalries."

On the day of the national championship game between Notre Dame and Alabama, consider some curiosities of the sports-academia complex. According to Eric M. Leifer in "Making the Majors: The Transformation of Team Sports in America" (Harvard University Press, 1995), in the 1920s, the professional football Maroons of Pottsville, Pa., drew such large crowds that the New York Giants chose to play them there rather than in Gotham. By the 1890s, Yale's football receipts "accounted for one-eighth of the institution's total income, an amount greater than its expenditures on law and medicine."

Before the late Myles Brand was president of Indiana University he was a philosophy professor, and when he left Indiana to become head of the NCAA, he waxed philosophical about entangling a huge entertainment business with higher education. It is, he said, "essentially malfeasance" for university administrators not to make the most of the money-making opportunities that sports present. In doing so, college football teams have abandoned old conferences and embraced new ones with more lucrative television and other payouts.

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College football has proved Karl Marx right about how capitalism dissolves old social arrangements: "... uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation ... all fixed, fast-frozen relations ... are swept away ... all that is solid melts into air." Blame college football's turmoil on male beer-drinking truck drivers and technology. Young men are, in television-speak, a "coveted demographic." Why? They buy beer and pickup trucks. But like everyone else nowadays, they tape TV programs and watch them later, fast-forwarding through commercials. The technology that makes this possible has caused the explosive growth of lucrative television contracts for sports: Men cannot fast-forward through live telecasts.

Monday night's game should be sweet satisfaction for Father Theodore Hesburgh, 95, who managed to make athletic and academic excellence compatible. This year Notre Dame is the first school in the history of the Bowl Championship Series to rank first in football and first in the graduation rate (tied with Northwestern) of its football players. Notre Dame graduates 97 percent; Alabama 75 percent.

Father Hesburgh's achievement was hard-won. In the 1920s, the first golden age of sports superstars (Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden), Notre Dame under Knute Rockne was known as a football factory. Rockne's most famous player, George Gipp (played by Ronald Reagan in "Knute Rockne: All American"), was a hard-drinking gambler who bet on Notre Dame games.

Beginning in 1941 under coach Frank Leahy, Notre Dame came to dominate the sport as no team has since, with six undefeated seasons, including 39 games without a loss, and four national championships. But in 1949, when Father Hesburgh was appointed the university's executive vice president and athletics chairman, he set out to make Notre Dame "the Harvard of the Midwest," which required de-emphasizing football and bringing to heel the imperious and mercurial Mr. Leahy, who flouted NCAA rules.

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Mr. Leahy was a national celebrity. In 1953, however, the steely Father Hesburgh had fired Mr. Leahy. Since then, Notre Dame's football fortunes have varied but its academic reputation has risen steadily.

Football has hardly lost its hold on the campus. The large mural on the library that overlooks the stadium shows Jesus with both arms raised and is famously called "Touchdown Jesus." The statue of Father William Corby -- a 19th-century president of the university -- depicts him with his right hand held straight up and is known as "Fair Catch Corby." And the statue of Moses with his index finger pointed skyward is "We're Number One Moses."

First Published: January 7, 2013, 5:00 a.m.

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