FOOTBALL ’89 : BRAINS & BRAWN : Emphasis on Academic Enrichment Helps Inspire Occidental to Achieve Passing Grades in NCAA Division III Football

In the fall of 1895, on some long-forgotten field, two Los Angeles colleges played football. It was a time when the sport--just beginning its evolutionary journey--existed largely to enrich the college experience and ennoble the human spirit. Winning was important, of course, but so were such concepts as honor, purity and sportsmanship.

Nothing much is remembered about that game, but the score is preserved on an ancient football in a college trophy case. Scrawled in faded letters on the cracked and brittle leather: Occidental 10, USC 0.

But that was Stone Age football. Today, the teams never meet. And if they did, it wouldn’t be pretty. Like all the major powers--and a lot of the minor ones, too--USC plays football mainly to enrich its coffers. Winning is still important, but it’s also absolutely necessary. Nobility has fallen prey to marketing imperatives.

The old leather football is kept in the athletic department at Occidental, a private four-year school in Eagle Rock. It serves as an ironic reminder of how the times have changed--and how the Oxy football program has stayed the same. Over the decades, Oxy teams have kept pace with modern strategy and techniques without losing sight of the sport’s earlier ideals. Call them the Occidental Purists.

“This is what college football should be like across the board,” says Jack Kemp, secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Oxy’s most prominent former football player. “The emphasis on winning is put in perspective at Oxy. It’s not done at the cost of one’s soul.”

Barry Switzer’s worst nightmare: no scholarships, no active recruiting, no spring practice, no cuts, no long practices, no semi-literate players, no control over admissions, no cheating. Imagine a team that puts education ahead of competition, that even skips practice to study. It would surely be enough to drive Switzer out of football--had a scandal at Oklahoma not already done so.

But Dale Widolff thrives on what most coaches would see as major obstacles to a winning team. Widolff, head coach at Oxy since 1982, has managed to stay clean and win more than 80% of his games. His Tigers have been the top Division III team on the West Coast and have dominated the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, winning or sharing five of the last six league titles and going unbeaten in 1984.

While most college coaches come across as slick used-car salesmen, Widolff, 36, appears more cerebral and earthy, almost professorial with his short-cropped beard and glasses. He doesn’t wink when he says, “I want football to be one of the most rewarding things a player does here.”

Indeed, Oxy players don’t get under-the-table cash to play--they all have to pay the school to get in.

Despite its orange-tile roofs and balmy eucalyptus trees, Occidental seems more like an exclusive eastern college. Teaching liberal arts to some 1,600 students, it takes pride both in its high academic standing--The New York Times calls it “one of the best colleges on the West Coast”--and its high admission requirements. Admission standards require high school students to have a 3.5 grade-point average and/or a 1,200 SAT score. Football players, too.

“It takes a special person to play here,” says senior Tony Ferguson, a 5-foot-9 starting defensive end.

Instead of railing against such high standards, Widolff tries to use them to his advantage. Even before hyping the football program, a recruiting letter sells Oxy’s academic reputation, calling it “a leader among the nation’s top liberal arts schools.” Another selling point for Oxy: It graduates 100% of its senior football players. “The highest goal of any college sport is to prepare men for life after that sport,” Kemp says.

In competing with other colleges for a player, says Widolff, “If a kid has a choice between Oxy and a school with less of an academic reputation, we usually win.” On the other hand, “If a kid is thinking about going here or to Swarthmore, football will break the tie. He’ll come to Oxy.”

Of course, Oxy isn’t competing for blue-chip players, nor do blue-chip players even apply. Only a handful of Tigers (including Kemp, a quarterback who starred with the Buffalo Bills, and running back Vance Mueller, now with the Raiders) have made it to the pros. (Though Jim Mora, Kemp’s roommate at Oxy, is head coach of the New Orleans Saints).

The typical Tiger is a good high school player considered too small or too slow for big-time football. Most didn’t even know Oxy existed until they received a letter expressing interest in them. Nearly half come from out of state. Most are white.

Widolff takes the mail-order approach to recruiting. In the fall he blankets the western states, sending out 4,000 letters to coaches asking them to list players who qualify academically for Oxy. He’ll get about 2,000 names, and will follow those up with letters. About 1,100 players will return questionnaires.

Widolff and his small staff (three full-time assistants) can phone prospects but are not allowed to visit them.

“I take three weeks off at Christmas, which is the peak recruiting period,” Widolff says with a grin, no doubt thinking of coaches who have to camp out on a recruit’s doorstep and spend hours analyzing film and making impassioned sales pitches.

Widolff not only has no influence with the admissions office, he’s usually the last to find out who among his recruits has been accepted (about 150 applied this year), making it difficult to plan for the next season. For that reason, “We don’t rely on players when they’re freshmen and sophomores,” says Widolff, who has 34 players coming in this fall, boosting the roster to 75.

Students pay nearly $17,000 a year for room, board and tuition. Like every student, football players are eligible for grants and loans, but the money is awarded based on financial need, not the ability to block and tackle.

Widolff doesn’t have trouble finding quarterbacks--”They’re usually very good students,” he says--but he’s discovered that offensive linemen with abundant gray matter are “the hardest players to find.”

That’s why Roger Laubengayer is so unusual. The 6-1, 250-pound senior guard has been named a preseason Division III All-America candidate by the Sporting News.

But Laubengayer wasn’t born a blue-chip player; he became one at Oxy. Only 6-0, 195 pounds in high school in Ellsworth, Kan., Laubengayer made all-state and good grades. He graduated with a 3.98 GPA, “but the scouts weren’t going crazy for me,” he says.

There went his dream of playing for Oklahoma or Nebraska, so he settled for a scholarship to Coffeyville Community College with hopes of building himself into a Division I player.

But then he hurt his knee and realized that a football career can end any time. He decided that his top priority was an education, so he picked Occidental.

Why the little college in L. A.?

“I wanted to venture to the West Coast,” he says. He also wanted to major in diplomacy and world affairs, and “when I heard Jack Kemp had gone to school here, it pretty much sold me on Oxy.” He arrived and discovered a different world. It wasn’t Kansas.

“Instead of talking football all day,” he says, “people were talking about apartheid and Central America and the economic situation. It was very exciting.”

Laubengayer also noticed another difference: The football program was unlike any he’d ever been involved with. “Yelling doesn’t work with the kids here,” he says. “The coaches aren’t dictators like they are at some schools. They know you’re a student first, then an athlete. They care about you and know what’s going on with your classes and work to keep you eligible. At other schools, if you’re not first team, you’re forgotten.”

The Tigers practice only 10 hours a week, including two night sessions so players can go to labs in the afternoons. Players don’t carry fat playbooks to class or study game film and there’s no pressure to take steroids, Laubengayer says.

With no pretentions about pro football careers, the players play, he says, “because they like it.”

Coaches relate to players as people, not meat on the hoof, Laubengayer says. On the wall of Widolff’s small office is an autographed photo from the class of 1986, illustrating his closeness with his team. “In appreciation of your great coaching and sincere friendship,” it says.

Had Widolff been a tyrant or a slug, however, the school administration would have heard about it.

At the end of each season, players fill out evaluation forms on all the coaches. It’s a school policy: all teaching personal are under the same scrutiny from students. Unlike most schools, Oxy makes the decision to retain a coach based not on won-lost records but on his evaluation and his ability to run a good program, according to David Axeen, dean of faculty. Even alumni are not insistent on a winning team.

“We occasionally hear from alumni about our football team,” Axeen says, “but they understand that we’re principally an academic institution. The things they like seeing are team members going on to medical school.”

This doesn’t mean that losing is accepted. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the Tigers were doormats of the league and the student body regarded them “as dumb jocks,” Widolff says. “They were campus rogues. But now the team is definitely more reflective of the overall student body.”

The bottom line, he says, “is that the school doesn’t want to be mediocre at anything. They want a first-class operation.”

Widolff would seem a strange choice to run the operation. An average player in high school and college (Indiana Central), he was a volunteer coach at Kansas State and Pennsylvania before coming to Oxy in 1980 as defensive coordinator. When Coach Jerry Howell left abruptly in June of 1982, Widolff was named interim coach. After posting a 5-5 record, he got the job permanently.

“But I don’t think I would have been hired by a search committee,” he says.

In his recruiting letter, Widolff writes that Oxy is “only five minutes from the Rose Bowl.” In the college football world of today, however, the distance is enormous. Widolff, who thinks he will leave Oxy for a bigger program some day, knows this. So do the players, especially stars like Roger Laubengayer.

“You sometimes have regrets about playing here,” Laubengayer says, “especially when you sit in front of your television watching the Rose Bowl. You say to yourself, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun playing with those people?’ But then you realize, there’s a lot more to life than football.”