Is Big 10 Football Overated?
Last night Ohio State gave up 41 points and lost. One week ago Michigan gave up 45 points and lost. Is the dominance which the Big 10 enjoyed in the 1950s also lost?
I believe that there are three reasons for the Big 10′s decline in dominance: (1) the shift of population out of the midwest: (2) integration of the South ( Sweatt v. Painter, Brown v. Board of Education, and Swan v. Mecklenburg; (3) the invention of Gatorade.
The 1950 census shows that two-thirds of America’s population lived north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. The center of the U. S. population was in Indiana.
Today of the four most populous states only one lies in that area. As Florida, Texas, and California have become the three largest states, it is easier for those states to produce home grown products to win in football. For example, Charlotte, N. C. had a 1950 population of 134,032 while Cleveland had over 900,000. Today Charlotte is larger than Cleveland.
In the 1950s the South was segregated. Sunny Jim Tatum who won national championships at Oklahoma and Maryland moved to the University of North Carolina where he shipped off African-American players like Bobby Bell to the University of Minnesota. In fine, the Big 10 had a great recruiting system whereby African-American players could not play in the South until the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in favoring of outlawing segregation. It took Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama to convince southerners, especially those in Alabama, that you needed the local African-Americans on your side of the ball not some Big 10 school.
Gatorade made the Florida schools power houses because it neutralized the adverse affects of dehydration. In the 1950s the best that Johns Hopkins medicine could do was to give players iced-tea after the morning practices along with a large salt pill. Dr. Barry Wood, head of the Johns Hopkins Medical School and an All-America football player at Harvard had a special interest in rehydration as his son was the captian of my high school football team.
With Gatorade you could drink during the course of the game, and not wait until it was over. Amazing, is it not, that the winning coach is sometimes doused with a tub of Gatorade.