Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

For four seasons, from 1946 through 1949, American football fans had two major leagues to follow.  In addition to the National Football League, there was the All-America Football Conference.  Competing head-to-head with the ten-team NFL for fans and players, the AAFC offered a product that was clearly the equivalent of that provided by its older rival.

In this year’s Super Bowl, the two surviving franchises of the AAFC will, for the first time, square off against each other for the championship of professional football. Read more »

For the past several years Georgia-native Roosevelt Jackson has been making appearances across the country at baseball parks and at public events commemorating Negro baseball.  At these events, the now 95-year old African-American is usually hailed as the “oldest living former Negro Leagues player.”

Moreover, in 2010, the Georgia State Senate adopted a resolution praising Mr. Jackson for his contributions to baseball, to civil rights, and to African-American culture.

Though by all accounts, Jackson is a gracious, intelligent, and compassionate individual who devotes much of his public remarks to the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Barrack Obama, and the Civil Rights Movement, a number of individuals knowledgeable about the history of the African-American baseball have pointed out that there is no record that Roosevelt Jackson ever played in the Negro Leagues.

Is there merit to such charges?  Well, yes and no.  Read more »

Larry Williams says his life is “about using athletics to grow as a person.” The commitment at Marquette University to that approach to its athletes is what convinced him to become Marquette’s athletic director a year ago, and it is the centerpiece of the philosophy guiding major decisions on Marquette’s sports future, Williams said during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Eckstein Hall on Thursday.

The foremost of those major decisions is the recently-announced move to withdraw, along with six other Catholic universities, from the Big East conference and form a new conference. “At the end of the day, we’re really excited about the opportunity to control our own destiny,” Williams said of the move.

Williams said Marquette leaders were aware of the risks of starting a new league, but he was confident that the future would bear out the wisdom of the decision. In the Big East, as it is shaped now, “our destiny was being determined by a sport we didn’t even participate in,” Williams said, referring to football. “We wanted to align with schools that have the same objectives we have” when it comes to athletic excellence and development of athletes as individuals. Read more »

Professional sports team relocations have been a feature of the American sports industry since the nineteenth century.  Team owners have been willing to move from one city to another, and, occasionally, from one league to another, in search of greater profits.   While some relocations have produced litigation and legislative efforts to regulate the movement process, in most situations the decision to move has been left to the team owner.

It now appears that the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association are poised to move to Seattle, a city that lost its previous NBA team, the Supersonics, to Oklahoma City in 2008.  Since the story broke, a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, have reported that the Kings are the most travelled major league sports franchise in American history.  That is true, although at least one other current team can claim to have moved as frequently. Read more »

With the National Hockey League lockout now well into its second 100 days, and with chances of there being a 2012-13 season looking more and more remote, some NHL owners are apparently thinking about expanding the number of teams in the league from 30 to 32. The most frequently mentioned locations for new teams are Seattle and Quebec.

Apparently, the idea is that the labor dispute will be settled eventually, and that current owners could make up for some of their losses by dividing up sizeable expansion fees from the two new teams.

In reality, the best thing for the NHL would be to contract back to 21 teams, the number it had between 1979 and 1991, which is increasingly looking like the league’s golden age.

In 1979, the then 17-team NHL agreed to add four teams from its former competitor, the World Hockey Association. For the next twelve seasons, the league played with three 5-team and one 6-team divisions. The growing popularity of NHL hockey in the early 1990’s led the league to somewhat ambitiously add nine teams between 1991 and 2000. In retrospect, this decision to expand the league into new markets in the southern half of the United States is a major source of the league’s current financial problems.

The league simply has too many teams and too many teams in markets that will not support major league hockey. Read more »

In a comment to my earlier post marking the 52nd anniversary of Marquette’s final varsity football game, Nick Zales asked why Marquette decided to terminate its 78-year-old football program in 1960.

The explanation given at the time was that a competitive football team was too expensive for Marquette to maintain in light of the university’s plans for further expansion. (Plans for a 10-year, $30 million fund-raising campaign to pay for additional campus improvements, higher faculty salaries, and more student financial aid had just been announced.)

In revealing the plan to shut down the football and track-and-field programs at the end of the 1960-61 academic year, President O’Donnell stated that the University Athletic Board had, at his request, voted to terminate the two sports because of the university’s “reasonable unwillingness to accept the financial hardships imposed by these two sports in light of the other needs of the university.” The football team had reportedly lost $50,000 over the course of the fall 1960 season and had run at a deficit for several years.

From the perspective of more than a half century, it is hard to evaluate the wisdom of O’Donnell’s decision. The decision to end football was certainly unpopular with students, alumni, and Marquette fans at the time. Shortly after the announcement, an estimated 3000 students marched from the campus through downtown Milwaukee chanting, “We want football. We want justice.” Read more »

Today (Nov. 13) is the 52nd anniversary of Marquette’s final varsity football game. The tradition-ending contest pitted Marquette against the University of Cincinnati Bearcats before a crowd of 13,000 at the long-disappeared Marquette Stadium at Merrill Park on November 13, 1960.

Marquette had begun the 1960 football season with great enthusiasm. After losing the first seven games of the 1959 season, the rebuilding Warriors won their final three games with victories over North Dakota State, Cincinnati, and Holy Cross. In the three games, Marquette outscored its opponents, 113-46.

The 1960 season began with more successes, as Marquette defeated Villanova 23-13 at home in the season opener and then travelled to the West Coast where it blanked Pacific, 20-0.

However, the winning streak came to an end the next week in Madison when the Warriors fell to the Badgers 35-6. (Marquette played Wisconsin 28 times in football over the years, and, somewhat bizarrely, all 28 games were played in Madison. In those games, Marquette was only 4-24, raising questions as to who did the scheduling in those days.)

Marquette returned to its winning ways the following week when it eked out a 13-12 home victory over arch-rival Boston College. Read more »

Long-time Brewer fans remember front office executive Jim Baumer as the team’s Director of Scouting and General Manager from 1973 to 1977.  Although the Brewers were not successful on the field during Baumer’s time at the helm—Milwaukee finished either last or next to last in the American League Eastern Division from 1973 to 1977—Baumer’s personnel moves laid the groundwork for the Brewer successes of the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s under manager George Bamgardner and General Manager Harry Dalton.

Baumer was the man who signed Robin Yount to his first Brewer contract, and he oversaw the signing and promotion to the majors of Jim Gantner and many other less well-remembered Brewers of that era.  As General Manager, he also secured the services of Sal Bando and Cecil Cooper for the team.  However, Baumer was not around to enjoy the fruits of his efforts, as he was dismissed by owner Bud Selig after the unsuccessful 1977 season.   Read more »

Although the settlement of the NFL lockout is being widely reported as a victory for the locked out referees and football fans in general, a closer examination of the settlement makes it appear that the NFL may have bested the union after all, the 112-5 vote in favor of the new agreement notwithstanding.

Rather than a situation where the NFL gave into the referees after being embarrassed by the incompetence of the replacement officials, it looks like the existing referees were willing to sell out their future colleagues in exchange for job security over the next eight years.

The lockout was never about the compensation received by the officials, and it was only secondarily about the lucrative pension rights that referees had under the previous collective bargaining agreement. What the lockout was about was the NFL’s desire to regain control over the hiring, firing, and deployment of officials, something that it had essentially bargained away under previous agreements.

Read more »

The addition of a second wild card team to the Major League Baseball playoffs, combined with an unusually large number of close division races, has created a blistering array of possibilities, even though there are, as I write this on Sunday morning, only four days left in the regular season.

The possibilities are greatest in the American League where eight teams are still in contention for the three division championships and the two wild card spots, and no team has clinched a place in the post-season.  (In contrast, in the National League, four of the five post-season qualifiers have been established.)

Not only is it possible that all three American League Divisions could end with ties for first place, it is also possible that as many as four teams could end up tied for the two wild card positions.

Read more »

Former Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens owner Art Model died last Thursday (September 6). From the response to his death, it appears that he is still remembered as the owner who moved the Browns to Baltimore, and who thus became the most hated man in the history of Cleveland (at least until LeBron James orchestrated his departure for Miami). Although Modell maintained a home in Cleveland from 1961 to 1995, he never returned to city again in his life, at least in part because of fear for his safety.

When Modell announced on November 6, 1995, that he had entered into a deal with Maryland authorities to move the Browns to Baltimore, the Browns were still one of the NFL’s most passionately supported teams. Although the Browns under Modell’s ownership (1961-1995) were never able to replicate the success that they achieved in the 1940’s and 1950’s (seven league championships), the team remained one of the National Football League’s strongest franchises right up to 1995. Read more »

I appreciate Gary Werkheiser’s comments on my earlier blog post, “Punishing Paterno.” Mr. Werkheiser’s observations can be found here. He is concerned that I too uncritically accepted the conclusions of the Freeh Report, the result of the investigation conducted by former FBI Director and federal judge Louis Freeh at the request of the Pennsylvania State University Board of Trustees.

There is no doubt that the NCAA penalty stage of the Sandusky-Paterno-Penn State affair developed with remarkable speed. It was that very fact that prompted me to publish the original blog post and to offer a similar recommendation on the SportsLaw Blog. I thought it was important to point out that punishments directed only at future football players and coaches would not adequately penalize those who were most responsible for the Penn State disaster. Nothing that Mr. Werkheiser mentions in his comment provides a reason to alter my original judgment regarding the culpability of Penn State Head Coach Joe Paterno.

Mr. Werkheiser, incidentally, is not just an ordinary Penn State alumnus, but is a leader of the Los Angeles Penn State alumni chapter and has been actively involved in fund-raising on behalf of Penn State and its Alumni Association. He earned a degree in accounting from Penn State in 1981, and, on his LinkedIn page, he describes himself as a “successful real estate professional, investment advisor and event producer.”

Mr. Werkheiser’s argument can be divided into three parts. Read more »