Harold Stassen and the Ivy League, continued

    Penn managed to finish only 6-3 in 1950, with lopsided victories over three of the four Ivy rivals on its schedule as well as Navy and Wisconsin. But when it came time to draw up the 1953 schedule that winter, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Princeton all informed Murray that they would no longer play the Quakers. Left with only Cornell, Murray was forced to took elsewhere for opponents, although the details of that 1953 schedule remained a secret for the time being even from Penn Coach George Munger Ed’33.
    It was obvious to everyone at Penn that the other Ivy schools were staging a boycott, in the grand old Ivy tradition. In keeping with another tradition, it remained a whispering campaign until a sportswriter finally broke the story on January 15, 1951. The following day, Stassen suggested publicly that Penn was being snubbed because it had scheduled the Fighting Irish. “I do not believe in boycotting Notre Dame or any other American college team whether they are weak or strong, North or South, East or West,” the president declared to the press.
    Some suspected Stassen was using the opportunity to ingratiate himself with Roman Catholics around the country, but from the standpoint of Penn’s relations with the other Ivy colleges his statement was politically foolish. Columbia and others rushed to affirm their high respect for Notre Dame and everything it stood for, all the while seething at Stassen for having held them out as elitists. When Stassen added that Penn would “never drop a team from its schedule because the team has beaten Penn consistently,” he made Harvard and Yale out to be sore losers, as well.
    The feelings of Quaker alumni broadly mirrored those of their president. They wanted to belong to the Ivy League, but with the freedom to play a more ambitious schedule. In early 1953, The Pennsylvania Gazette polled 1,200 alumni on which teams the Quakers ought to play on a regular basis. The two leading vote-getters were Cornell (named by 95 percent) and Princeton (named by 94 percent). Two faux Ivy rivals, Navy and Army, followed, named by 93 and 92 percent, respectively. From there, it was a long drop down to Yale (62 percent), Columbia (60 percent), Penn State (57 percent), and Dartmouth (51 percent). Only 36 percent named Harvard as a team they would like Penn to play, just ahead of Notre Dame and Michigan. Brown came in near the bottom, at 8 percent.
    In an attempt to repair the damage, Stassen wrote to Princeton’s president Harold Dodds in March proposing that the eight Ivy presidents meet to begin a “reappraisal” of intercollegiate athletics. The presidents, many of whom wanted to create a formal league, agreed, and met in New York on April 3, 1951, for the first time since they signed the Intercollegiate Agreement. They undertook a complete overhaul of the 1945 agreement and promised to meet again in December. Little did Stassen anticipate that before the group would reconvene, Penn’s membership, not only in the Ivy League but in the NCAA itself, would be cast into doubt.
    The issue was television. In the fall of 1938, technicians from the Philco Company conducted an experiment, taking their new cameras to a Penn football game and beaming the pictures to their laboratory across town. There were only six television sets in Philadelphia at the time, all of them at Philco and all presumably tuned to the game, thus giving it, if one wants to look at it that way, the highest rating of any sporting event ever.
    Their experiment was such a success that two years later, Philco beamed Penn’s 51-0 whipping of the University of Maryland to some 700 sets in the Philadelphia area, making it the first publicly broadcast football game. The technology was still jerry-rigged—cameras perched atop the Franklin Field stands provided the pictures, while sound had to be piped in from the radio broadcast—but because there were more television sets in Philadelphia than in almost any other city in the country, Penn was ideally situated to take advantage of the new medium. “In the emerging world of televised sports,” one historian has written, “Pennsylvania was a pioneer without peer.” The Quakers quickly announced that they would televise their entire slate of home games.
    Broadcasts continued throughout the war. When Stassen took over, he recognized the revenue potential, not to mention the fundraising and publicity potential, that Penn could tap by televising its football games, particularly at a time when stadium attendance was failing. Here was a good way to plug the athletic department’s deficit. In 1950, Penn sold the TV rights to its games to the American Broadcasting Company for $150,000, a figure Murray thought he could double in 1951.
   Not everyone had a contract with ABC, however, and many of the schools that did not blamed television for their losses at the box office. The NCAA was their vehicle for doing something about it. In 1949, the NCAA hired a New York research firm to study TV’s effects on game attendance in four Northeastern cities. When that study proved inconclusive, delegates to the NCAA’s annual convention in 1950 voted to undertake another study, this one by the National Opinion Research Center, a nonprofit research group.
    The research center’s report also was inconclusive, but it found enough of a link between television and gate receipts to convince most NCAA delegates, very few of whose schools were yet getting much TV exposure, that something had to be done. At the association’s next convention in Dallas, the delegates voted 161-7, with 45 abstentions, to prohibit any live TV broadcast of college football games during the 1951 season.
    No sooner had the NCAA voted to ban television than public outcry forced it to retreat. The NCAA’s television committee instead approved a program to allow one national broadcast each week. No school could appear more than twice (once at home and once on the road) and the NCAA, not the schools, would negotiate the network contract and divide the proceeds. Any college that tried to defy the ban would be declared “a member not in good standing” and could be expelled from the NCAA altogether.
    For several months, Penn argued against the decision in NCAA meetings without success. Finally, on June 6, 1951, Murray notified NCAA President Dr. Hugh C. Willett that Pennsylvania would not comply with the television ban. To punctuate the point, he also announced a few days later that the Quakers had signed a new $200,000 contract with ABC to broadcast all eight of its home games in 1951 and would split the revenue with its opponents. True to its plan, the NCAA immediately announced that Penn was no longer a member in good standing. The Quakers would go to war.
    Stassen and Murray quickly discovered that none of their Ivy brethren wanted to be in the foxhole with them. Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, and Princeton (which had already dropped Penn for the 1952 season) announced that they would cancel their scheduled games for 1951, as well.
    Penn continued to keep up its public-relations offensive against the ban. Speaking to a group of alumni, Stassen sounded like a man running for something. He denounced the NCAA’s “central controlitis” and defended blanket television coverage by invoking the wounded servicemen at Philadelphia veterans hospitals, as well as the “thousands of shut-ins [who] follow the Red and Blue … Boys clubs, Scouts, school play-ground groups, follow these wholesome sports with their great spirit over television.”
    In no mood to trifle, the NCAA demanded that Penn change its mind by July 19 or be suspended, subject to formal expulsion at the next general meeting. This was a different matter. Quite apart from the damage to the school’s reputation, if Penn became an intercollegiate pirate it would have a hard time finding anyone to play. It would also have a hard time interesting anyone in televising its games. Football revenues, on which the entire athletic department depended, would disappear.
    As the deadline approached, Murray tried to maneuver by agreeing to comply in some respects but not in others. Willett immediately wired back, demanding to know whether Penn agreed to “conduct its live broadcasting of 1951 football games in accordance with whatever arrangements may be approved by our television committee?” Stassen and Murray mulled this over, and on July 19, the day of the NCAA’s deadline, capitulated.
    Stassen was practical enough to recognize the financial effect the ban would have on Penn’s finances. But he was also a man unembarrassed at tilting at windmills, as his six future runs for the White House amply demonstrated. He considered the NCAA’s ban an illegal restraint of trade and a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, an opinion buttressed, he claimed, by the opinion of the University’s general counsel.

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