An Ivy League Lombardi Gets A Big Ten Jolt

This time last year Coach Bob Blackman had 250 offensive formations and was sitting pretty. This year he has 250 problems and is flat on his back.

Last year Blackman was at Dartmouth, producing another of his perennial champions and enjoying a reputation as the Vince Lombardi of the Ivy League. By the time the season was over he would have his third undefeated team, his sixth Ivy title, his second Lambert Trophy and a No. 14 national ranking.

This year he is at the University of Illinois, where he has yet to become known as the Vince Lombardi of the Big Ten. After going 10 years at Dartmouth without being held scoreless in a game, Blackman watched his team lose to Michigan State 10-0, North Carolina 27-0 and USC 28-0, then drop two more, 52-14 to Washington two weeks ago, and 24-10 to Ohio State last Saturday. With unbeaten Michigan coming up this week followed by formidable Purdue and Northwestern, it should be November before Blackman finally wins one. "I'm afraid people are going to start thinking I'm not the miracle man I was supposed to be," he says.

Blackman has never specifically claimed miraculous powers and in fact has been asking Illinois fans to "combine their enthusiasm with realism" since he took the head coaching job last December. But he does have a history of rising up out of the depths.

When he came down with polio at the age of 19, he went a couple of months without being able to swallow, much less walk. Now he jogs with only a slight limp and swallows enough to rank as one of the roundest-faced coaches in the nation. When he took over the head coaching job at Monrovia ( Calif.) High School in 1946, the team had not won in two years, attendance averaged something under 200 and the bleachers had been condemned. Within three years he had taken Monrovia to a 10-1 season and a final-game turnout of 15,000.

From Monrovia, Blackman went on to achieve the same sort of thing at Pasadena City College, the University of Denver and Dartmouth. At Dartmouth in 1957 he observed, "Every place I've ever gone to coach, the team was at rock bottom. But I've always been fortunate in having a championship by the third year." That was at the beginning of his third year at Dartmouth, in the course of which he won his first Ivy title.

Still, Blackman has never been 0 and 5 before (he lost his first four games at Dartmouth, but upset Harvard in the fifth on national television), much less faced the very real prospect of running it out to 0 and 8. He came into the 1971 season with an admirable 22-year record of 150-49-8, sixth in percentage and fourth in wins among active major-college coaches. Eight or 10 more years like this one and he is going to be in trouble lifetime.

How does it feel to be going so bad after all those years of supremacy? "I don't think I've ever been quite so disappointed and frustrated in my life," he told the press after the Ohio State game. He also confides that an esophageal hernia, which never gave him any trouble at Dartmouth, makes him feel this year like he has a lead weight on his chest. But by and large he answers questions about his own state of mind by expressing concern about how other people are reacting. These other people boil down to two groups, his team and all the people around the state who are, so far, buying "Win With Blackman" buttons and game tickets decorated with Blackman's full-color photograph.

The team? The team, Blackman says, "is capable of beating 90% of the colleges in America. But we are our own worst enemy." Never once last year did his Dartmouths allow an opponent to take over the ball beyond the opponent's 40. In the Illinois opener Michigan State got the ball beyond its 40 not once but 13 times. The Illini defense has been strong, but the offense keeps losing the ball because it keeps making mistakes. As the general said of his firing squad after they all missed the condemned man, "They just don't execute."

This is the kind of day it was against Ohio State, for instance: a pass bounced off the helmet of the intended Illinois receiver into a defender's hands; a short pass to a wide-open receiver in the end zone was thrown off-target; on a draw play the fullback inexplicably fell down on being handed the ball; a pass was overthrown on a beautifully breaking play that should have gone for a 60-yard touchdown; two Illinois drives stalled inside the Ohio State 10 (one when Quarterback Mike Wells and Halfback Darrell Robinson ran into each other on the two); and there was a prevailing gray spot in the middle of the orange "I" formed by the Illinois card section (through binoculars the spot appeared to be a dad—it was Dad's Day—who either was not issued or would not wear the requisite orange bib).