Little Miami of Ohio had every reason to be proud of what it achieved (again) last season in a football game at Northwestern of the imposing Big Ten Conference.  On Sept. 13, The Redhawks of the Mid-American Conference won for the fourth time in as many tries against the Wildcats.  All the more impressive, the games were on Northwestern's home field.

As a Northwestern alumnus and one-time member of the Wildcats athletic staff (1953-73), I'm uncomfortably aware of the Miami hex over my school.  I also know that among the Miami victories, two paid later dividends for Northwestern.  This one did not, unless one considers an invitation to the Motor City Bowl a dividend.  The invitation to an unknown post-season game does not qualify, especially when you lack a winning record.  Losing the game to another Mid-American team, Bowling Green, only reinforces that assessment.

In their first encounter in 1955, Miami won, 25-14, over a team in its first and only year coached by Lou Saban-- the same Saban who years later became president of the New York Yankees in baseball.  Coincidentally, the man who hired him at the Yankees, George Steinbrenner, had been a Saban line coach when Miami first beat Northwestern.

The reason Saban was available for baseball was that Northwestern chose to learn from the defeat, and replaced him with the unknown who coached that first Miami victory over the Wildcats, Ara  Parseghian.  Ara then led Northwestern to national distinction-- his 1962 team was ranked No. 1 in the nation at mid-season-- before leaving for Notre Dame after the 1963 season.

It was more of the same in the next meeting in 1995, but even more shocking because defeat came after Coach Gary Barnett's Northwestern had beaten Notre Dame the week before.  As in 1955, the Miami loss turned into a dividend for the Wildcats, supplying the wakeup call that found them winning all their conference games and playing in only their second Rose Bowl game.

It may seem hard to find anything positive about this season's loss to Miami by the embarrassing margin of 44-14.  I can.  It verifies what I long have felt:  that Northwestern has far overstayed its time in what has become a commercially overemphasized big time sport that demeans my university more than it helps it. 

Unfortunately, most fans are like those who fill 100,000-seat stadiums at state universities in Michigan and Tennessee.  They are oblivious to the academic mission, and consider football the most important campus activity.

At Oregon, the most generous alumnus, Phil Knight, owner of Nike, has insisted on influencing non-athletic policy.  He was angered when, at the behest of students, the UO became part of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), which monitors the relationship between U.S. corporations and their overseas employees.  Knight's reaction was to renege on the $10 million pledge he'd made for last year's expansion of the school stadium, a $90 million project.

The UO administration privately pleaded with the State System of Higher Education for a way to restore the Knight largess.  The System responded by writing new contractual guidelines that made the WRC linkup illegal.  President David Frohnmayer was able to say bye-bye to the consortium, and within weeks, Knight came waddling back to the Ducks with his bags of gold.

Northwestern, where I first worked in athletics, is a private school.  But in a million dollar sports market, it also has to go begging to donors.  Its major benefactor when it remodeled Dyche Stadium was a man of corporate wealth who happened to be president of its Board of Trustees.  Soon after the exchange of money, the 70-year old original name of the stadium was dropped so that the focus of attention would go to the newly named playing surface:  Ryan Field.

I'm grateful for Pat Ryan's generosity.  But not for the terms. Was it payback?  Obviously.  But that has become part of the new culture of publicly rewarding the donor.  One incensed alumnus (me) visited the Evanston campus to place a curse on Northwestern football:  that the Wildcats would not return to the Rose Bowl (they were last there in 1996) until the Dyche Stadium name is reinstated.

Vanderbilt, the Northwestern of the Southeast Conference, has cut back its spending on big time sports in a move that others who are tied to that level of athletics eventually will have to follow, or else go bankrupt. The Vanderbilt chancellor said:

"This is a return to the basic principles of why we started playing games at universities in the first place-- for a confluence of mind and body and spirit."

Those are words I've long waited to hear from the presidents who have served Northwestern since I enrolled there in 1951.  It's not an easy stance to pioneer.  But, for the good of the schools, and the good of the game, others can bring a new level of honor to campus by following Vanderbilt's courageous and wise lead.


George Beres, a Eugene, Ore. writer, was Sports Information Director at Northwestern University before moving to the same position at the University of Oregon.