With the 4th of July days away the Pigskin Stew blitzes across America to celebrate the uniquely American sport—College Football. Other American sports from baseball to basketball have gone international, but football remains our sport. And on the college level the pageantry is most unique. This sport reflects specific experiences and passions of each school. Individual traditions grew alongside the game independent of oversight from a centralized league office. . . . . . . . In 1966, following a 51-0 loss to Notre Dame, USC coach John McKay said, “I told my team it doesn’t matter. There are 750 million people in China who don’t eve
For college football June is high school football camp season, and what that means has changed from just 8 years ago, and is vastly different than what it meant when the first camps began in the late 1960s. In the late 1960s Penn State was the pioneer of high school football camps hosting a multi-day overnight camp at a campground near the Allegheny National Forest in northwestern Pennsylvania. The campers were housed in “rustic” accommodations (cabins). The camp was the first of its kind; designed to teach high school players the fundamentals of the game. There was no media coverage at the camp breathlessly awaiting commitments from top recruits. In the 1970s the camp moved on campus. Other
Part of recruiting is taking in a high school game either on a Friday night or afternoon in the fall, or in the South on a Friday Night Jamboree at the end of Spring Practice. For a college coach that means a quick bite right before the game or a meal in the stadium. Many of the in-stadium meals are cooked up and served by booster clubs or local church organizations looking to make some money. At Warren G Harding High School (Warren, OH) in the late 1990s the ribs sold at the game were as legendary as the long line of football players that have come out of that high school. Everyone in town, when you mentioned you were going to see a game would ask “Have you had the ribs?” When we were recr
