Coaches Must Clean Up College Football, Frank Broyles Says

Assuming the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. holds its nose long enough to reach the bottom of the Southwest Conference worm can, and all others it finds between sea and shining sea, what then? Is there life for college football after it has been gang-tackled by bagmen alums, corrupt coaches and athletes on the take?

I mean, it has gotten so you can’t tell the players without a program showing front and side mug shots. Check the other pictures. Coaches are the big, smiling guys in shorts, the ones with car keys hanging out of their back pockets. The Big Cigars are posed in dark blue business suits, carrying attache cases from which protrude the tips of $100 bills.

Is Bobby Joe running for paydirt or his payoff? At the mention of student-athlete, are there knowing giggles because Sam, the senior linebacker, just learned how to sit in a chair? Has it come to these images with the public?

I asked Frank Broyles to come in on the other side of the issue. That is, assume without much imagination that college football has problems relating to ethics and morality. Then list reforms that might freshen the game before it lies unconscious and unmourned, gassed by its own fumes.

Broyles has ideas. They are not especially new or revolutionary. But some have not been tried. Broyles is a lifelong college man--player at Georgia Tech, coach at Arkansas for 19 years, presently the school’s athletic director and ABC-TV football analyst. His credentials for such a critique are in order.

He comes down hard where you would least expect--on coaches. Until coaches begin to protect their game and profession by exposing graft, he says there will always be a squalid side to the sport.

“It boils down to whether coaches want it to be clean,” Broyles said. “I’d estimate less than 20 coaches nationwide who are dedicated to the point of turning in any information on themselves or opponents. There are few football coaches and fewer basketball coaches other than Digger Phelps (Notre Dame) and Bobby Knight (Indiana) who’d turn anybody in.

“If coaches don’t want to clean it up, I don’t know how anyone else can. I don’t blame boosters. I blame coaches.” Broyles would pay college players. Pay everyone on scholarship or on the basis of need. One or the other. Make the sum $200 per month, same as allowed for service academy students and need scholarships in the Ivy League.

“I think that will eliminate the picky stuff,” he said. “It won’t eliminate the big ones--the automobile, the overly lucrative summer job. But it’s a step worth trying.”

Broyles would eliminate all alumni contact with recruits. No phone calls. No letter-writing. No nothing. He and Darrell Royal proposed that very format to Southwest Conference powers in 1974 but were greeted by snores.

He also would punish guilty athletes. Broyles said the SWC would vote to endorse unspecified sanctions against those who accept bribes. The kids are not so innocent these days. Many are wise to the ways of extortion.

“They are expert negotiators,” Broyles said. “They know what they’re doing. When they visit a campus, they’re put with the best athlete there. That best athlete knows the ropes. He’s got the rope. That’s why the coach puts him (the visiting star) there.

“At the next school, he gets a different education. He becomes a pretty good negotiator when it comes to the night before signing.”

Broyles also hopes the media wises up. In his opinion, there is almost a witch-hunt quality to discovering who did the turning in, rather than why.

“The tough part is, papers pick on anybody who turns a school in. He becomes the bad boy. The whipping boy. That’s not the way it should be. He should be applauded. If a school is honest, it has nothing to worry about. If it’s guilty, it should be punished.”

How rotten was recruiting when Broyles coached?

“I didn’t think much of it,” he said. “I guess there wasn’t as much reward in those days. Coaches’ salaries today are astronomical for winning. There are shoe contracts, TV shows, camps. That kind of lucrative job attracts different kinds of people.”

Broyles recalled when he told his college mentor, Bobby Dodd, that he had decided to coach. Dodd replied, don’t, you can make more money doing almost anything else. Broyles disregarded the advice and became the all-time winning coach (144-58-5) at Arkansas.

Broyles quit on his own terms without undue repugnance toward recruiting. He had long planned to get out by age 45 and said he worked up enough nerve to do it at 51. Broyles knew and respected the romance of coaching. He simply felt it was a limited style of living, something he did not want to do into old age.

“People in my time coached for the love of the game,” Broyles said. “I don’t know if that’s true anymore. In my travels across the country, during pregame interviews, I can tell whether a coach is in it for love of the game or money.

“Before the interview is over, he’ll ask about my investments. How much shoe contracts are worth. What so-and-so is making at Arkansas. The game’s a different attraction than it was 20 years ago.”

How different, Broyles expressed even more bluntly.

“Darrell and I have talked,” he said. “Most of the coaches we knew had a passion for people. We see many today who have a passion for profits.”