I was trying to decide what I wanted to put up on a rainy Sunday afternoon (at least rainy here in MD) and saw a great Sports Illustrated article written in Oct 1962 by a previous Pitt Chancellor, Dr. Edward Litchfield, about the national debate if Grant-In Aids (athletic scholarships) were a good thing to have on college campuses.
This intro below is a personal bit about why this article strikes my fancy. The article itself is the other audio bar.
Here is the body of the article – excuse the small mistakes if you will, I’m not a professional at this. I especially like the contrasts between Litchfield’s descriptions of Pitt athletics then and today’s state of college football. There are some great points made here – especially some timeless ones that hold true today.
Hope you enjoy it!
“Camel Driver” – try putting that on a kid today! I also love that we stole almost a whole opposing team –
Far back in 1903, for example, out-university felt mortified to have been defeated two straight years by the football team of little Geneva College. Football in those days seldom made much money at the box office but many colleges recruited passionately, simply because they found defeat unbearable. In the wake of our losses to Geneva, corrective action was deemed imperative and there seemed only one surefire way of seeing to it that we beat Geneva the next year. We took it.
We lured to our campus most of the Geneva players and the following season, 1904, defeated Geneva 30-0. During the balance of the decade Pitt football teams lost only 13 of 71 games. Now what sort of boys were they, do you suppose, that could be proselyted so frivolously? Because many of them have passed on, we were able to trace only 17. Of that number, four were physicians, five dentists, two attorneys and one a Ph.D.
