@Texas-Hawk-10
Why were there so many coaching changes in football?
What was it that made KU leadership unable to recognize what they had in Kennedy, or Yost?
Why was KU able to find continuity in track and basketball, but not football?
KU was among the early public universities to build a large football/track stadium, whereas KU waited half a century to build a big arena for basketball. Did the discontent over what many called Phog’s Folly–the building of Memorial Stadium–lead to distrust and fragmented support of football? If so, why didn’t the same happen to track? And was basketball better off being forced to live within its means for so long?
It’s a fascinating issue.
The Big Ten conference football schools were not rocked by the Populist Party movement the way Oklahoma and Kansas were.
I’ve wondered if if the brutal crack down on Populism in Kansas had some effect, but Oklahoma football has prospered.
Still, the states of Oklahoma and Kansas were constituted differently, and Kansas was the rail hub and OKLAHOMA was not, so the crack down was done differently in each state. Oklahoma was a company state created by the Mellons to pump oil in a quid pro quo for leaving Texas to the Rockefellers and Brits. Thus in Oklahoma it was the Mellons vs the Populists with the Mellons holding all the cards. But Kansas had a more complex legacy from the complexity of its birth, and Kansas was the rail hub. Populists got greater control of Kansas, and Kansas being the rail hub of the nation, the crack down had to be both more severe and no local autonomy of institutions could be permitted. In modern words, Kansas had to be destabilized and convulsed to make sure it never again became independent of the military and railroads and private oligarchy of that time, when USA was migrated to an imperial empire with the Spanish-American War of 1898. The states of that era that formed the Big Ten and that became football powers, nor the state of Oklahoma, that produced many great football programs, were never convulsed and subjugated as Kansas was.
Did football require a more sovereign, cohesive and affluent local oligarchy than Kansas possessed at that time to build sustained success in what was a vastly more expensive sport to be successful at than basketball?
It’s conspicuous that Neither KU , nor KSU ever produced a great football program until the modern era with Bill Snyder. It was like there was something lacking in Kansas high school sports and in Kansas’ two university’s commitment to the capital intensive sport of football. KSU never got a modern stadium till the late 1960s. KU built one early but it became a controversial white elephant for several decades.
Is it just luck of the draw on coaching hires, or something rooted in culture and history? Kansas flourshed and picked and held the right coaches in a low overhead sport, but not in a high overhead one.
Interesting subject.
