(03-09-2014 08:31 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Bo Hagan was the worst hire in Rice athletics history. He made Greenspan look like a stellar AD and Jerry Berndt look like an outstanding football coach. What's worse is that Berndt and Greenspan were hired as the best of a bad bunch when we could not attract top-notch candidates, but Hagan was hired instead of Ray Graves of Florida and Tommy Prothro of #2 UCLA.

If you didn't live through it, you simply have no idea how bad it was.

Bo hired the worst asst coach[fb] in Bob Bossons. Steve Goldman from the Conover years is a close second.

All that happened in 1966 soon after Rice had gone to court to change the Rice will to enable the enrollment of blacks. Rice wound up not really behind anyone else in the SWC in starting to recruit blacks. The big Texas Arkansas game in 1969 had no blacks involved. UH started recruiting blacks about a year ahead of the SWC. The big difference was when A&M recruited several of them in 1972 instead of one or two at a time.

(03-09-2014 04:01 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-09-2014 12:45 PM)son of SID Wrote:  

(03-09-2014 08:31 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Bo Hagan was the worst hire in Rice athletics history. He made Greenspan look like a stellar AD and Jerry Berndt look like an outstanding football coach. What's worse is that Berndt and Greenspan were hired as the best of a bad bunch when we could not attract top-notch candidates, but Hagan was hired instead of Ray Graves of Florida and Tommy Prothro of #2 UCLA.
If you didn't live through it, you simply have no idea how bad it was.

As I recall,Graves took the job but called back soon after to stay at Florida

Both of them did (Prothro obviously to stay at UCLA, not Florida). The press conference to announce Prothro was set and then cancelled. IIRC, Graves was at the airport to catch the flight when he changed his mind. Prothro actually got here before changing his. In today's terms, that would be the equivalent of having Urban Meyer and Les Miles as finalists to replace Bailiff.

I am not as convinced as some that Graves would have been the right hire. At Florida he recruited an amazing collection of talent but his teams always somehow seemed to underachieve, kind of the Ron Zook of his day. He wouldn't have been able to recruit the same talent at Rice, given our admissions requirements, and I'm not sure he would have ever coached a team up to play above its talent level.

Prothro's interest was on several levels. One, he had just finished #2 in the nation and was still very much second fiddle to John Wooden at UCLA. Two, UCLA had played Rice the previous fall and Prothro was on record during the interview process as saying that he would like the opportunity to coach the young talent he saw on display here (talent that Hagan managed to coach to 4-6, 0-9-1, and 3-7 records over the next 3 years). Three, he had built UCLA by developing a talent pipeline out of the Golden Triangle area (All-American Mel Farr, among others) and believed that by moving even closer he could exploit that pipeline more effectively. That would, or course, have meant that Rice got into the business of recruiting African-American athletes in a major way at about the same time as UH and SMU, instead of waiting. I have to believe that being one of the leaders instead of one of the laggards in that effort would have meant substantially greater success on the field and court over the next few years, and would have been much better from an ethical standpoint. I don't know, but I cannot help but wonder if some problem in that area didn't somehow enter into his ultimately not taking the job.

(03-09-2014 10:28 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  forget RG. he's gone. let's look to the future.

Look to the future, yes, but let's also remember and learn from our mistakes. Especially the egregious ones.

Well, I guess I have managed to hijack this thread back to the 60's.

First, Heisman was obviously NOT the worst hire in Rice history, but it does perhaps show that winning at Rice was never an easy proposition, and that mere numbers do not equate to quality of coaching.

Neely, IMO, was beginning to go downhill. He took the team to the Sugar Bowl after the 1960 season, then after that to the new Bluebonnet Bowl after the '61 season, then his high water mark after that was 6-4 in '63. Bo sure didn't help things, but he inherited a program on the decline. Yes, he was part of that decline.

I remember hearing we were the front runner for Jerry LeVias. That one recruit could have made a big difference. I don't remember the year.

I don't know much about basketball, but we had more students at games then than now, out of a much smaller student body.

I always thought Hat came here with the intention of finishing his career here. Getting a GOOD coach who wants to spend the rest of his life here is a good thing. Getting a GOOD AD who wants to stay here until 65 is a good thing. Getting coaches and ADs of any age who don't want to work is a bad thing. Wanting to end one's career here and wanting to work are two different things.

I think we are entering into an era of coaching hirings. It will be interesting to see how JK goes about it. But if a big time guy in his late 50's want to end his career here, I am fine with that. A so-so guy, not so much.

(03-09-2014 09:22 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  I remember hearing we were the front runner for Jerry LeVias. That one recruit could have made a big difference. I don't remember the year.

LeVias first played for SMU in fall 1966 (my freshman year at Rice). I presume he was then a sophomore, as freshmen could not play on the varsity teams at that time, and he signed with SMU in Spring 1965.

I find it hard to believe that we were in the running for him, though I wish it were otherwise. (I'd love to see any facts/sources/proof you have, OO.)

Lining up against that notion, consider Hadyen Fry's book ("Hayden Fry: A High Porch Picnic"), in which he says: 1) integrating the football team was a pre-condition for him taking the SMU job in 1962 (p.68), 2) his staff had identified LeVias when he still had two years left at Hebert High School in Beaumont (p.69) and 3) that while there was plenty of competition for LeVias, all were out-of-state schools, most notably, UCLA (p. 70).

In his forward to Fry's book, LeVias himself said (p. vii) that of all the coaches who recruited him, "Fry was the only one concerned about my education." I can't imagine that would have been the case if Rice was competing for him.

Also, this Houston Chronicle from last year mentions what I believe was common knowledge at the time: "SWC coaches had a 'gentlemen's agreement' not to recruit blacks. SMU's Hayden Fry unapologetically broke that in 1965 ..."

In the book "Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980," it seems that even after he left Rice to become AD at his alma mater (Vanderbilt), Jess Neely wasn't lighting any fires to integrate his sports teams. In 1968, he told angry students that none of the potential black recruits they'd identified met Vandy's academic standards (p. 267). (This book has a short description of Rice's "relatively uneventful" athletic integration, but unfortunately p. 203, which might contain some interesting details, is not part of Google's preview.) It's hard to imagine that Neely would have considered taking the initiative to break the SWC coach's 'gentleman's agreement' and pursue LeVias. (Part of me wants to be proven wrong here ... but another part hopes that Jerry didn't prefer SMU over Rice, if given the opportunity.)

FWIW, UT's integration is the subject of this book, "Integrating the 40 Acres: The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at the University of Texas." (See pp. 126-129 for an Austin-centric account of the above eventss)

To tie that back to my earlier post, LeVias was being recruited by UCLA as part of that Golden Triangle pipeline that Prothro had developed. Had Prothro come to Rice, he would have been going head to head with Fry for African-American athletes out of the Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange area. There were a bunch of them that were key contributors to several pretty good SMU teams. It would have been great to have had a few of them in Rice uniforms. From everything I've seen or heard, including comments from Jerry and Rufus Cormier among others, Hayden was pretty strongly committed to the student side of student-athlete. He campaigned pretty actively for the Rice job at one point after he left SMU.

One footnote. When CDC was here, Jerry contacted me and told me he was interested in some kind of role in the Rice program. I thought he would be a great person to get involved and set up a meeting with Chris. I don't really know what happened in the meeting, but the comments afterward from both Chris and Jerry made me wonder if they had attended the same meeting, and nothing ever came of it. I was traveling a lot at the time, and set up the meeting to occur quickly, at a time when I could not attend. In retrospect, I wish I had picked a later date when I could have attended.

I talk to Jerry from time to time. I don't think I've ever asked him whether Rice recruited him. I will make a point to ask next time I see him. I doubt that we recruited him. He would have been a freshman in 1965, when Rice admitted its first African-American undergraduates, and Jess would still have been the coach. I think it would have taken a long time for Jess to have recruited an African-American. He was from a different era.

Well, my source is the notoriously unreliable memory in my skull. So I could be wrong. I would appreciate you finding out the facts from Him, 69, and letting me know.

Interesting that this was the thing in my post that caught attention.

(03-10-2014 11:28 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Well, my source is the notoriously unreliable memory in my skull. So I could be wrong. I would appreciate you finding out the facts from Him, 69, and letting me know.

Interesting that this was the thing in my post that caught attention.

He sent an email saying Rice did not offer him a scholarship. Only SWC offer he got was SMU. I didn't press for info on whether Rice talked to him or not, I would gather that there was probably some contact on some level, but I wouldn't say we were the front-runner.

He did say something interesting at one time. Bear Bryant apparently told him, "If there was any way I could recruit you I would, but I just can't do that here right now and it's going to take me a while to change that." Bear apparently took action to remedy that in 1970. He supposedly scheduled Southern Cal to play in Birmingham, knowing that SC's outstanding group of African-American athletes would dominate Alabama, and that would give him the political leverage to get changes made. They did, and he did. And he supposedly thanked Sam Cunningham on the field at the end of the game.

(03-10-2014 11:49 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-10-2014 11:28 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Well, my source is the notoriously unreliable memory in my skull. So I could be wrong. I would appreciate you finding out the facts from Him, 69, and letting me know.

Interesting that this was the thing in my post that caught attention.

He sent an email saying Rice did not offer him a scholarship. Only SWC offer he got was SMU. I didn't press for info on whether Rice talked to him or not, I would gather that there was probably some contact on some level, but I wouldn't say we were the front-runner.

He did say something interesting at one time. Bear Bryant apparently told him, "If there was any way I could recruit you I would, but I just can't do that here right now and it's going to take me a while to change that." Bear apparently took action to remedy that in 1970. He supposedly scheduled Southern Cal to play in Birmingham, knowing that SC's outstanding group of African-American athletes would dominate Alabama, and that would give him the political leverage to get changes made. They did, and he did. And he supposedly thanked Sam Cunningham on the field at the end of the game.

I stand corrected, then.

(03-10-2014 02:34 AM)Almadenmike Wrote:  fall 1966 (my freshman year at Rice).

I had no idea you were so old. That was my second junior year.

(03-10-2014 11:49 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-10-2014 11:28 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Well, my source is the notoriously unreliable memory in my skull. So I could be wrong. I would appreciate you finding out the facts from Him, 69, and letting me know.

Interesting that this was the thing in my post that caught attention.

He sent an email saying Rice did not offer him a scholarship. Only SWC offer he got was SMU. I didn't press for info on whether Rice talked to him or not, I would gather that there was probably some contact on some level, but I wouldn't say we were the front-runner.

He did say something interesting at one time. Bear Bryant apparently told him, "If there was any way I could recruit you I would, but I just can't do that here right now and it's going to take me a while to change that." Bear apparently took action to remedy that in 1970. He supposedly scheduled Southern Cal to play in Birmingham, knowing that SC's outstanding group of African-American athletes would dominate Alabama, and that would give him the political leverage to get changes made. They did, and he did. And he supposedly thanked Sam Cunningham on the field at the end of the game.

Made me interested in looking the game up and I found a video on the subject.
It's a real shame that bigotry and censorship prevented many good young men from playing their beloved sport nearer to their homes in the south for so long. It is good to be reminded how a group of people can use tyranny and intimidation to silence people and opinions they don't like in areas they like to congregate. Wish we'd get over it and just all get along. Maybe someday, we'll overcome all that. Still, the history lesson is important, and I appreciate the posters here who remind us to be grateful for the pioneering efforts of those who came before us. Here it is:
(Parliament Warning: Contains Politics and political names)

(03-10-2014 11:28 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Interesting that this was the thing in my post that caught attention.

It was a fascinating digression.

(03-10-2014 12:01 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(03-10-2014 02:34 AM)Almadenmike Wrote:  fall 1966 (my freshman year at Rice).

I had no idea you were so old. That was my second junior year.

"Old" I am ... as my children frequently remind me. :-)

Michigan State did pretty well with the Golden Triangle pipeline which included players who played in the Tie one for the Gipper game for no.1 with Norte Dame.

(03-10-2014 05:52 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  To tie that back to my earlier post, LeVias was being recruited by UCLA as part of that Golden Triangle pipeline that Prothro had developed. Had Prothro come to Rice, he would have been going head to head with Fry for African-American athletes out of the Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange area. There were a bunch of them that were key contributors to several pretty good SMU teams. It would have been great to have had a few of them in Rice uniforms. From everything I've seen or heard, including comments from Jerry and Rufus Cormier among others, Hayden was pretty strongly committed to the student side of student-athlete. He campaigned pretty actively for the Rice job at one point after he left SMU.

One footnote. When CDC was here, Jerry contacted me and told me he was interested in some kind of role in the Rice program. I thought he would be a great person to get involved and set up a meeting with Chris. I don't really know what happened in the meeting, but the comments afterward from both Chris and Jerry made me wonder if they had attended the same meeting, and nothing ever came of it. I was traveling a lot at the time, and set up the meeting to occur quickly, at a time when I could not attend. In retrospect, I wish I had picked a later date when I could have attended.

I talk to Jerry from time to time. I don't think I've ever asked him whether Rice recruited him. I will make a point to ask next time I see him. I doubt that we recruited him. He would have been a freshman in 1965, when Rice admitted its first African-American undergraduates, and Jess would still have been the coach. I think it would have taken a long time for Jess to have recruited an African-American. He was from a different era.