More on Marquette Football

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.”

At the same time, an alumni group, led by Milwaukee businessman Johnny Sisk, pledged to raise the money necessary to pay off the athletic department’s deficit and collected $15,000 the first week. (Sisk had starred for Marquette in the 1930’s before moving on to a five-year career as a halfback for the Chicago Bears. He also had a son on the current Marquette team.)

Although the effort to reverse President O’Donnell’s decision received coverage in the New York Times and other national media outlets, the efforts were to no avail, and football did not return to Marquette.

But was it really necessary to terminate the Marquette football program in 1960?

While it was true that the Marquette football team had done poorly in the mid to late 1950’s—a combined won-lost record of 13-50-3 from 1954 to 1960—the program’s prospects were clearly looking up after the 1960 season. Although the 1960 team had finished with a mediocre 3-6-0 record, the season had started on a strong note at 3-1-0 before Marquette’s fortunes were derailed by injuries. Attendance at Marquette games was up in 1960, and the team had secured permission to play home games in Milwaukee County Stadium, the home of the Braves and Packers (when they played in Milwaukee).

Furthermore, there was every reason to think that the Marquette football team would be much better (and draw in greater revenues) in 1961. In spite of its so-so record, the 1960 team was actually laden with talent; only two starters (both interior linemen) from 1960 were graduating; and the team’s two top stars, halfback David Thiesen and end George Andrie, were among those returning.

Even though Marquette dropped football after the 1960 season, four members of the 1960 team—Andrie, end Pete Hall, and halfbacks Karl Kassulke and John Sisk, Jr.—went on to play in the NFL. Moreover, the fact that fullback Frank Mestnik had moved from the 1959 Marquette team to a starting position with the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals in 1960 was proof that Marquette could still recruit from the ranks of the top college players.

Furthermore, 1960 was an unusual time for a college, especially the largest Catholic university in the United States, to drop football. From the onset of the Great Depression through the early 1950’s, a significant number of American colleges and universities discontinued their “big-time” football programs because of financial concerns. Most of the colleges that did so were Roman Catholic schools.

Twenty Catholic colleges dropped “big time” football between 1930 and 1954. Including Loyola of Chicago (1930); Loyola of Baltimore (1933); St. Francis of New York (1935); DePaul (c.1938); St. Joseph’s (1939); Gonzaga and Providence (1941); Creighton and Manhattan (1942); St. Francis of Pennsylvania (1946); St. Louis and Portland (1949); Duquesne, Georgetown, Mt. Saint Mary’s, and Niagara (1950); Loyola of Los Angeles and St. Bonaventure (1951); San Francisco (1952); and Fordham (1954).

Several of these schools, especially Fordham and San Francisco, had once been ranked among the top football programs in the United States. (The year in parentheses is the last year the school competed in football, and not necessarily the year in which the decision to eliminate the program was made.)

(Until 1956, the NCAA did not classify its members into divisions, so the category of schools playing “big-time” football was somewhat subjective. After 1956, the NCAA was divided into University and College divisions, which then defined the line between “big-time” and “small college” football. The use of three classifications—Divisions I, II, and III—began in 1973.)

However, relatively few colleges dropped big-time football after 1954. In fact, between 1954 and 1972, only two Catholic colleges gave up football—Marquette and the University of Detroit (1964). Marquette and Detroit (now Detroit Mercy) had played each other for decades, and it is likely that had Marquette not dropped football, Detroit would not have either. (The University of Scranton also dropped football in 1960, but at that time, Scranton played in the “small college” division of the NCAA.)

While 20 Catholic schools did drop football before 1954, there were many others that continued to play football in the NCAA’s highest division after Marquette dropped the sport in 1960. That list obviously includes Notre Dame and Boston College, but it also contains Canisius, Fairfield, Holy Cross, Iona, LaSalle, St. John’s (NY), St. Mary’s (CA), Santa Clara, Seton Hall, Siena, Villanova, and Xavier (OH). There is no particular reason to think that such schools were better able to support football in the 1960’s than Marquette.

While it is true that many of the schools on the previous list eventually did drop their football programs, those decisions came years later. Moreover, none of the schools that subsequently dropped football were as large as Marquette in 1960, and none had such a rich football tradition. None had ever played in a major bowl game, as Marquette had, and certainly none had sent as many as 70 of their former players to the NFL, as Marquette had done.

As Prof. Thomas Jablonsky notes in his Milwaukee’s Jesuit University: Marquette, 1881-1981 (2007), the O’Donnell presidency (1948-1962) is remembered as a period of impressive growth for Marquette, in terms of the size of the student body (to over 12,000), the university’s physical plant, and the quality of its academic programs. However, it is possible that the Marquette football program may have been a casualty of the university overextending its resources at the end of the 1950’s.

Moreover, the fact that Marquette eliminated football more than 50 years ago does not mean that the sport could not be brought back. Two of Marquette’s fellow members of the Big East Conference–Georgetown and Villanova (which dropped football in 1981)–have subsequently reestablished their football programs at the Division I, Playoff Championship Subdivision (formerly called Division IAA) with great success.

Duquesne, Fordham, and St. Francis (PA) have followed the same route in reestablishing football, and, in addition, at least four Catholic schools—the University of Dayton, Marist, Sacred Heart, and the University of San Diego, which did not play in the “University” Division or Division 1 before the 1990’s—have also moved into the Division I, Playoff Championship Subdivision.

Although the Marquette administration and Athletic Department have long insisted that the subject of reviving the football program is not on the agenda, now may be the time to reopen the question of whether or not it would make sense for Marquette to bring back football in the 21st century.

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Remembering Marquette Football

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.

However, after the BC Game, the Marquette train slid off the rails. A road trip by the heavily favored Warriors to Bloomington, Indiana, to play the winless University of Indiana resulted in a 34-8 defeat.

The return home the following Saturday witnessed a 23-6 loss to Vanderbilt, another winless team. (Although to be fair to Vanderbilt, three of the Commodores losses at that point were to Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida who finished the season ranked #2, #9, and #18 in the AP poll. The remaining loss was to Georgia, which lost only to Alabama, Florida, nationally ranked Auburn, and the University of Southern California in 1960. Even fifty years ago, the Southeastern Conference was a dominant league.)

A subsequent two-week road trip resulted in upset losses to Detroit Mercy and Holy Cross and ended the possibility of the school having its first winning football season since 1953. Sportswriters blamed the downward spiral on the erratic play of the team’s three quarterbacks and its general lack of speed.

In its season’s ending game with Cincinnati, Marquette faced a team with an identical record (3-5), an even longer losing streak (five games versus four), and a nearly identically named coach. (Marquette was coached by Lisle Blackbourn and Cincinnati by George Blackburn, who had already been told that he would not be the coach in 1961.)

Although the Associated Press made Cincinnati the favorite, the Milwaukee Journal predicted a victory for the home-standing Warriors.

Alas, it was not to be. Marquette star halfback Dave Thiesen was injured early in the game, and his replacements could not pick up the slack, as the home team managed only two first downs in the opening half. Meanwhile, Cincinnati raced to a 19-0 halftime lead.

Although the Marquette defense shut out the Bearcats in the third quarter, and the Marquette offense twice drove inside the Cincinnati 10-yard line, the Warriors could not cross the Bearcat goal line. (In an era of one-platoon football, starters played both offense and defense, and if taken out of the game could not return until the next quarter.)

In a more wide-open fourth quarter, both teams put two touchdowns on the board, with the final Marquette touchdown scored by end George Andrie, later an NFL All-Pro with the Dallas Cowboys. The final score was Cincinnati 33, Marquette 13.

Of course, no one on November 13, 1960, knew that this would be the last Marquette football game ever. With only eight seniors on the 1960 squad, and with both Thiesen and Andrie returning, the prospects for a winning season in 1961 seemed quite favorable. On December 1, 1960, the team held its final meeting of the fall and elected captains for the next season.

The fateful announcement came nine days later on December 9, 1960, when the Rev. Edward J. O’Donnell, the president of Marquette since 1948, declared an immediate end to Marquette football. There would be no 1961 season.

When the announcement came without warning, it shocked the Marquette football team, the Marquette campus, and Marquette fans everywhere, some of whom have not recovered to this day.

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What Happens if the Presidential Election Is a Tie?

Suppose President Obama wins all of the electoral votes from (1) all of the Northeastern states except New Hampshire; (2) Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia, and Virginia; (3) all of the states that border on the Pacific Ocean except Alaska; and (4) New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan. Assume also that Governor Romney wins all of the electoral votes in the remaining 30 states. The results? A 269 to 269 tie, in terms of electoral votes.

What would happen then?

If, when the electors vote on December 17, each elector casts his or her ballot for the candidate each supported, the failure of any candidate to achieve a majority of the votes would be certified on January 6 by the President of the United States Senate, who is, of course, Vice President Joe Biden.

Under the terms of the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, the newly elected House of Representatives, which took office on January 3, will then vote to elect a President. Under the 12th Amendment, Congress is required to choose from the three candidates with the highest total of electoral votes from among those receiving electoral votes. Since under this scenario, only Romney and Obama receive electoral votes, the House would have to choose either Romney or Obama.

Under the terms of the Amendment, each state has a single vote, which is determined by how a majority of that state’s Representatives vote. This means that both Alaska and California would have the same one vote, and 26 votes would be necessary to elect a president.

Because of the 20th Amendment (adopted in 1933), those who vote would be the individuals who were elected to the House of Representatives in November 2012. Unlike the situation in 1800 and 1824, the only two times that the House has actually selected the president, the outgoing Congress no longer chooses the President.

Were the current members of the House of Representative voting, the line-up of Republicans and Democrats would clearly favor Gov. Romney, since the Republican Party currently controls 33 state delegations in the House compared to 15 by the Democrats, with two states evenly divided. Although anything can happen in November’s election, it seems unlikely that the Republican Party will control fewer than 26 state delegations in the new Congress.

The 12th Amendment also contains a quorum requirement that dictates that representatives from at least two thirds of the states (currently 34 states) have to be present and voting for the election to be valid. In theory, one political party could prevent the election of a president by boycotting the House vote, but that strategy would work only if the boycotting party included in its ranks the entire Congressional delegations of 17 states.

That is unlikely to happen; in the current Congress, the Republicans unanimously control only 9 state delegations and the Democrats only 7. Hence, if all the House Democrats were to boycott the election, Romney would be elected by a vote of 43 states to none. Similarly, if all the Republicans were to absent themselves from the House chamber, Obama would win by a vote of 41-0. In either case, the quorum requirement would be met.

While the House of Representatives is choosing the new President, the Senate is charged by the 12th Amendment with electing the Vice-President from the top two finishers. In this election, each Senator gets one vote (and thus, unlike in the House, there is no direct voting by state). The current Senate line-up of 51 Democrats, 47 Republicans, and 2 (Democrat-leaning) independents would point toward the election of Joe Biden over Paul Ryan. Of course, that balance could change as a result of the November 2012 elections.

If by chance the vote splits 50 to 50 between the two candidates, Senate President Joe Biden (who will still be Vice President until January 20, 2013, no matter what happens in the fall election) could then vote (presumably for himself) to break the tie. If the House proved unable to elect a new president by January 20, the new Vice-President would assume the office of President until the House finally made a decision.

It is, however, possible that a 269-269 deadlock on November 6 could be broken before the ballots are counted on January 6, if either an Obama or Romney elector were to decide to cast his or her vote for the other candidate.

Can electors do that? The short answer is yes. Although electors pledge to vote for the candidate that they are listed as supporting on state ballots, nothing in the Constitution requires them to cast their vote consistent with their listing on the November ballot.

Although 29 states and the District of Columbia have laws that appear to require electors to vote for the candidates for which they are pledged, only a minority of these states impose a penalty on electors who vote for other candidates, and only the Michigan and Utah statutes purport to nullify the stray vote and provide for the appointment of a replacement elector. Moreover, it is widely believed by constitutional scholars that such state laws are an unconstitutional interference with the federal election process.

Wisconsin is among the states that have such a statute, which can be found at Wis. Stat. § 7.75. This statute provides only that electors are required to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged unless the candidate is deceased at the time of the vote or that both the president and vice-president are residents of Wisconsin. (The 12th Amendment prohibits electors from casting both their votes for candidates from their own state.) The Wisconsin statute, however, imposes no specific penalty on an elector who violates the terms of § 7.75. Some jurisdictions do impose fines on disloyal electors, and in a few states, the departure is treated as a criminal offense.

This phenomenon—electors casting ballots for candidates other than the one to whom they pledged their support–has happened more frequently in the past than most Americans realize. In 18 of the 55 United States Presidential elections since 1789, at least one elector has either cast a vote for a Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate to which he was pledged or else refused to cast his or her vote altogether.

The mid-twentieth century was a time when electors acted independently with particular frequency. In the eight Presidential elections between 1948 and 1976, defecting electors cast ballots in six different elections.

Even though disloyal electors have been a somewhat regular occurrence, there is very little evidence that electors who have voted for someone other than the candidate to whom they are pledged have done so because they were trying to help a different major candidate secure election.

The only example of an elector doing this came in 1796, when the Constitution’s original plan for the Electoral College was still in effect. Under the original Article II of the Constitution, there was no separate balloting for President and Vice-President. Instead, each elector cast two votes, and the candidate with the largest number of votes became the President and the runner-up became the Vice-President, so long as their vote totals were equal to a majority of the number of electors voting.

(Otherwise, the House would choose the President from the five top vote getters, and after a president was chosen, the losing candidate with the largest number of electoral votes would become Vice-President. There were also provisions that allowed the House and Senate to select a President or a Vice-Present when two candidates tied for the most electoral votes. That, of course, is what happened in the 1800 election.)

In 1796, Samuel Myles, a Federalist elector from Pennsylvania, cast one of his two votes for the Democratic-Republican presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson and apparently did not vote for his own party’s principal candidate, John Adams. Myles’ betrayal of his constituents didn’t end up making a difference as Adams was elected President anyway.

However, Adams’ margin of victory over Jefferson was only three electoral votes, so it is easy to imagine a scenario where Myles’ vote could have made a difference. (Jefferson, as runner-up in the presidential election, became the Vice-President.)

The most common reason from casting a vote for a different candidate appears to have been a desire to express disapproval of the elector’s own party’s choice of a candidate for either President or Vice-President. In nine different elections–1808, 1812, 1828, 1832, 1836, 1896, 1956, 1976, and 1988—one or more electors voted for a different member of their political party, rather than the party’s official candidate.

On two occasions, 1832 and 2000, electors simply abstained from voting for their party’s candidate (or anyone else). In 1820, William Plumer, a Democrat-Republican elector from New Hampshire, declined to vote for his party’s candidates, incumbent President James Monroe and Vice-President Daniel Tompkins. Plumer instead voted for his friend, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams for President and United States Ambassador to Britain, William Rush as Vice-President, even though neither Adams nor Rush were candidates for those offices. Although Plumer later claimed that he did this so as to ensure that George Washington remained the only man unanimously elected President of the United States, it seems more likely that the former Federalist Plumer was dissatisfied with the continuation of the so-called “Virginia Dynasty” through which the Democrat-Republicans had controlled the presidency since 1801, and instead cast his votes for his fellow former Federalists, Adams and Rush.

In two elections, deviations resulted from the deaths of candidates for President (Horace Greely in 1872) or Vice-President (James Sherman in 1912) after the November election but before the day of the Electoral College vote. (A majority of electors still cast their votes for the deceased candidates in both elections. Both Greeley and Sherman lost their respective elections, so the actual division of their votes was unimportant.)

The variety of motives of dissenting electors can be seen in the elections since 1948. That year, elector Preston Parks of Tennessee cast his electoral vote for South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, a fellow conservative Southern Democrat, who had announced his candidacy for the Presidency under the banner of the National States Rights Party. (Parks had already been appointed a Democratic elector before Thurmond announced his third party candidacy, and Thurmond did carry several Southern states.)

Similarly, in 1956, Democratic elector W. F. Turner of Alabama cast his vote for a personal friend Walter Jones, who was an Alabama Circuit Court judge for President and Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge as Vice-President, as a way of protesting the supposed liberalism of Democratic Party nominees, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

In 1960, Oklahoma Republican elector Henry D. Irwin cast his ballot for Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, who was otherwise not a candidate, to protest his dislike of Richard Nixon. (A number of Democratic electors from the South, who were elected as “uncommitted” Democratics, also voted for Byrd, a prominent conservative Democrat.)

In 1972, Roger MacBride, a Virginia elector, cast his Republican ballot for the Libertarian candidate John Hospers, apparently in protest of the economic policies of the Nixon Administration. In 1976, Mike Padden, a Republican elector from Washington State, cast his ballot for Ronald Reagan, instead of his party’s nominee, Gerald Ford, apparently to express his belief that the Republican Party might have won the 1976 election had it nominated Reagan rather than Ford.

In 1988, Margaret Lynch, a Democratic elector from West Virginia, switched her votes so that she voted for Vice-Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen for President and Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for Vice-President. Lynch’s effort was apparently intended to express her dissatisfaction with Dukakis as a candidate. Finally, in 2000, Democratic Elector Barbara Lett-Simmon of the District of Columbia refused to cast her ballot for anyone, as a form of protest over the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore which effectively awarded the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.

Except for the example of Samuel Myles back in 1796, none of the other elections shed much light on what might happen to break a 269-269 deadlock in 2012. Of course, an elector that decided to vote for someone other than Romney or Obama would not change the outcome. For example, if a Republican elector from Florida decided to cast his vote for Mario Rubio, rather than Romney, Obama would have one more electoral vote than Romney, but he would still lack a majority of the votes, so the election would still go to the House of Representatives, which could now choose between Obama, Romney, and Rubio.

What, if anything, might prompt an Obama or Romney elector in 2012 to switch his or her vote to the other candidate?

One possibility is that an elector might feel that the candidate who received the largest percentage of the popular vote should be president, especially if the gap between the two candidates was more than one or two percentage points. So, for example, if Romney received 53% of the popular vote and Obama received only 46%, with 1% going to minor party candidates, an Obama elector might feel obligated to vote for Romney. Most likely, much of the public would herald such a decision (especially the 53% of the population that voted for Romney).

Another possibility is that some sort of backdoor political deal might be arranged so that an individual elector or his or her state might benefit by the vote switch, although this would have to be done quite delicately in order to avoid a public relations disaster of the first order. Americans would not take kindly to the idea that the presidency had been purchased.

Is any of this likely to happen in 2012? Probably not, but in less than a week we will know for sure.

 

 

 

Continue ReadingWhat Happens if the Presidential Election Is a Tie?