Take a gander at this pic, readers. This shows our athletically challenged school playing in the gosh darn ORANGE BOWL. That’s one of the New Year’s Six! For you non-football fans, that means it’s a BIG GAME. We played in this game against Kentucky, an SEC team. That’s amazing! A team from the premier college football conference playing us in one of the biggest games of the year!
We won that game 21-13, FYI. Even before that year, we defeated the perennial powerhouse LSU Tigers (a team with 3 national titles and the 12th most wins of any division I program) twice in the Sugar Bowl. We go from that to having no team at all in less than 45 years. I don’t know about you guys, but that seems nuts to me.
So, when I was perusing my classmates’ blogs, seeking inspiration, I found that my classmate (and suitemate) Jason also picked the fascinating topic of Santa Clara football for his archival research.
He did a great job examining the image of the Sugar Bowl program from 1938 and explaining why the football team ceased to exist. He describes the disbandment by saying, “From my research, funding was discovered to be the main issue but if the school didn’t want to put more money into the football program then maybe this shows why they weren’t successful.” In my research, however, I have found that the reasoning for Santa Clara’s expulsion of the sport from campus was a little more complicated than that. The decision came directly after a legislation from the NCAA forced all schools to compete at the same level across all sports. Since our pigskin wielders were DII and every other Broncos team competed in Division I, the school had a choice to make. They could either promote football to DI or get rid of them. They chose the second and least popular option, as many similarly situated schools did.
Side note: Kinda weird how Johns Hopkins has DI lacrosse but they’re DIII for everything else, huh?
