One day after the terrorist attacks on the United States, the Big Ten, Southeastern Conference and Big 12 vowed to play this week’s football games.
They wanted to tee it up, they said, to prove the American way of life would go on despite the horrific events in New York, Washington and western Pennsylvania.
But the major conferences quickly reversed their field Thursday. As professional sports announced mass postponements and cancellations, the major colleges began to look like the only game in town and on television. And all of a sudden, football didn’t seem so important.
By Thursday afternoon, every Division I-A game had been postponed or canceled, 55 games in all. It is the first time major-college football has scrubbed an entire Saturday of regularly scheduled games. The day after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, many games were postponed, but several others were played.
The list of this weekend’s postponements includes at least three games with national title implications–No. 13 Washington at No. 1 Miami (Fla.), No. 8 Tennessee at No. 2 Florida and No. 10 Georgia Tech at No. 6 Florida State.
“Given the trauma that many Americans have experienced with Tuesday’s tragic events, it would be very inappropriate and highly insensitive to compete athletically this weekend,” Tulsa President Bob Lawless said after the Golden Hurricane’s trip to Oklahoma was postponed.
But compete is exactly what the Big Ten, SEC and Big 12 were prepared to do–at least until the NFL said it had called off Week 2. The NFL’s announcement triggered a spate of college postponements.
First Illinois said it would not play Louisville as planned. Then Fresno State called off its home game against Utah State. Soon the Western Athletic Conference pulled all its teams out of action, setting off another chain of postponements with non-conference opponents.
WAC Commissioner Karl Benson said the NFL’s move “had a very significant impact. We haven’t been able to go five minutes without seeing or hearing reports from the World Trade Center. No one has ever had to face this crisis before, not the commissioner of the NFL, the PGA or myself. The longer you can wait to make a decision, the better decision you can make.”
The Big Ten never did make a decision. It hosted a series of teleconferences with presidents and athletic directors but left the final call up to each institution, Commissioner Jim Delany said.
Purdue wanted to play Notre Dame, but the Fighting Irish refused, so their game was moved to Dec. 1.
By midafternoon Thursday, Michigan State was still planning to meet Missouri in East Lansing. But when the Big 12 called off its games, the Spartans didn’t have an opponent.
“We were not shepherding people in either direction,” Delany said. “We believed there were legitimate outcomes on both sides of the equations given different variables. The way we framed the discussion for our athletic directors was, this is a tragedy of a great magnitude. Lines have been crossed here that have never been crossed before.
“You have to understand why someone doesn’t want to get on a jet right now,” said Delany, who was forced to drive home from Philadelphia after Tuesday’s attacks paralyzed air travel across the country.
To play or not to play–that was the question. And it prompted an emotionally charged debate on many campuses.
At Tennessee, one athletic department secretary said she nearly had been brought to tears by irate callers ripping the Volunteers for deciding to play at Florida.
“They’re really upset,” she said before the game was postponed. “We’ve been bombarded with calls. They’re saying, `How can you people play these games?’ Before you get a chance to explain, they’ve cussed you out and hung up on you.
“When the NFL said they weren’t playing, it made us look even more the villain.”
There are plenty of real villains this week, but none of the conferences wanted to be portrayed as out of step with national sentiment.
“When we arrived at the decision to play this game [against Louisville in Champaign], we thought we heard a message from the White House to return to normalcy,” Illinois athletic director Ron Guenther said. “But when [Thursday] arrived and we tried to find a way to do the right thing, we felt more comfortable not playing.”
The most surprising reversal came in the SEC, which had said it would play its entire schedule only 24 hours earlier.
The SEC’s bloc began to crack when South Carolina was forced to call off its home game against Bowling Green because the Falcons chose not to fly.
As other postponements rolled in from around the country, the SEC began to look as if it were on an island. After a hastily called meeting of top officials from each school, Commissioner Roy Kramer announced that the SEC wouldn’t play after all.
It was viewed widely as a setback for Kramer, who had been adamant about playing the games a day earlier.
“We still believe the healing process has to begin at some point,” Kramer said. “As bad as this is, as much as we must express our grief, this country has to pull itself back together and move forward. We can’t sit in our living room and watch television 24 hours a day.”
Area schools
– Illinois vs. Louisville
postponed.
– Northwestern vs. Navy
canceled.
– Notre Dame at Purdue
postponed until Dec. 1.
– NIU at Wake Forest
postponed until Nov. 24.
– Western Illinois at Ind. St.
postponed until Nov. 17.
– SIU at Ball St.
postponed.
– Eastern Illinois at Illinois St.
postponed.
