This Year You're Going To See Red

We've all heard it so many times that no one really listens when a coach like Arizona State's Darryl Rogers says, "This is going to be one great year for college football. It's going to provide more excitement and great games than we've ever known before." Or when Oklahoma State's Jimmy Johnson says that most coaches he has talked with "feel they have more talent and experience and that the overall quality of the game will be much better." Or even when Penn State's Joe Paterno predicts "more upsets than usual." Come on, Joe, more upsets than last year, when No. 1 teams lost on five of the first eight Saturdays?

But, incredibly, there's a very specific reason why, for once, all this talking up may come to pass, why the college game in 1982 may be better than it ever has been—or will be again until at least 1986. The reason: a rule that slipped through largely unnoticed at the 72nd annual NCAA meeting in Atlanta on Jan. 11-13, 1978. There, against a backdrop of yawns and clinking glasses, a motion was passed that allowed freshmen to be redshirted, something that previously had never been permitted.

Redshirting is the practice of holding a player out of competition for a season without that player losing a year of eligibility. It was first adopted by the NCAA in 1961 to allow an athlete to play his full four seasons even if he missed a year because of injury. But as will happen, this noble intent was soon subverted to serve more nefarious ends. A coach, upon scrutinizing his roster, would find himself overstocked at certain positions. Say he had two flankers of roughly equal talent, and say both were juniors. The coach would then redshirt one junior, thereby ensuring that his team would have at least one good flanker for the next three seasons, instead of two good flankers for two seasons. The redshirt gets to practice like the other players, gets chewed out like the other players, goes to sleep in meetings like the other players and takes his lumps like the other players. He does everything like the other players, except he doesn't play in games. Which is to say, he gets everything football has to offer but the fun. By doing this the player preserves a year of eligibility for later use and presumably not only learns a whole bunch—talk to a few coaches about the pass-blocking ability of an average offensive-line recruit if you want to know what's to learn—but also grows up physically.

Oddly, the rule change was pushed through the convention by Gene Sullivan, then athletic director at DePaul, on behalf of a basketball player, Guard Randy Ramsey. "I didn't tell anyone why I wanted the rule changed," says Sullivan, who's now the basketball coach at Loyola of Chicago. Ramsey hadn't played as a freshman, but he made DePaul's team his second year and ultimately became a starter. As a fifth-year senior, he wouldn't have been eligible for the NCAA tournament, because of a rule, predating the 1961 redshirt rule, that an athlete could play in postseason competition for only three years after his freshman year.

Sullivan told the convention—correctly—that a situation whereby a "player is eligible for regular-season play and ineligible for postseason play" wasn't "logical, sensible or fair."

Sullivan's proposal, to eliminate the old post-season rule and thereby allow an athlete to redshirt in his freshman year, sailed through the convention, and Ramsey went on to have the best offensive performance of his career in the first round of the NCAA tournament his senior season, scoring 16 points against Creighton. "I don't know how Sullivan got it done," says Ramsey, now 27 and working as an assistant sales manager for C.F. Air Freight in Chicago, "but I sure do owe him a bottle of wine."

So, too, do many coaches, especially those canny ones in football who were quick to see how the new rule could be turned to their advantage: Redshirt the freshmen—let them age and improve in the wine cellar, as it were—and still have them around for four varsity seasons. Nifty. But as happens, it was nifty for just that one year; the NCAA reversed itself on freshmen redshirting at its next convention. The NCAA re-reversed itself at its annual meeting last January, but we'll have to wait another four years to see the fruits of that vintage. The 1978 crop, though, will be ready this fall, and that's why there are going to be a lot of new names in the polls.

Nowhere was the unique opportunity presented in 1978 seized more expertly than at the University of Washington. There, Coach Don James relaxes in his office, scans the boat-dotted glories of Lake Washington just outside his window and tries not to look like the cat who swallowed the canary. In the fall of 1978, James quietly redshirted 21 of his 23 freshmen recruits. This fall, when Texas-El Paso shows up for the season opener in Seattle, 15 of those 21 will be playing key roles for the Huskies, and eight will be starting, not including field-goal and PAT expert Chuck Nelson, twice an All-Conference selection.

"I'd say our weakness is complacency," says James, "whatever position that is." True, if ever a team looked loaded to make a run for a national championship, it's defending Rose Bowl champion Washington (see page 41). Oregon State Coach Joe Avezzano says glumly, "We're all going to be chasing a bunch of redshirts around Seattle. It's going to pay off for them, that's for sure."

In explaining his maximum utilization of the 1978 rule, James says, "We felt it had been an 11th-hour vote, and our consensus was the rule wouldn't last." Right on both counts. But James also was in the enviable position of having the Husky program in good shape, so he felt he could get through 1978 in fine style without using freshmen. After all, his 1977 team had won the Pac-8 title with an 8-3 record, followed up with a 27-20 Rose Bowl victory over Michigan, and 18 starters were coming back. Washington, it turned out, fizzled in 78, falling to 7-4. But in 1979 the Huskies were 10-2 and beat Texas in the Sun Bowl; in 1980 they went 9-3 and lost to Michigan in the Rose Bowl; in 1981 they were 10-2 and thrashed Iowa in the Rose Bowl. And now comes 1982, the season they've been pointing for.