On the open market, a flashy high-school halfback came to as much as $10,000. An Ohio teen-ager got bids from 61 different colleges. One offer sounded like the prize list of a radio quiz show: board, room, tuition, books, free laundry, $300-a-month spending money, clothes, free transportation to & from games for his family, $5,000 in the bank in his senior year.
What was it all about? Football, which drew crowds and made money. Two years ago the National Collegiate Athletic Association tried to poultice the swelling with a mustard plaster called the Sanity Code. The code permitted athletes free tuition and one free training-table meal a day in season, and stipulated that part-time jobs held by athletes must be real jobs. Some 300 coaches accepted the code with their left hands and then hurried off about their proper pre-season business.
When the N.C.A.A. followed up with questionnaires asking colleges how they were living up to the code, seven of them were so annoyed that they told the truth.
In Manhattan’s Commodore Hotel last week, the chief embarrassing concern of the annual N.C.A.A. convention was the trial of the “sinful seven” — Virginia, Maryland, V.M.I., V.P.I., The Citadel, Boston College and Villanova. Six of the defendants, led by Virginia’s forthright ex-Governor Colgate Darden Jr. (now president of the University of Virginia), called the Sanity Code hypocritical and defied the N.C.A.A. to expel them. The Citadel had already sent in its resignation because it refused “to lie to stay in the association.” At week’s end, when representatives of 240 colleges were called upon to expel the rebels, 36 of them ignored the roll call.
The vote (in to 93) was 25 short of the two-thirds majority that was necessary for expulsion.
Said outgoing N.C.A.A. President Karl Leib: “I predict we will have chaos in college athletics.” If any college wanted to play Sanity Code football there was nothing to stop them — but nobody could make them do it.
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