The whole SWC was late to integrate. The 1969 game of the century with Texas against Arkansas was played without a single black player. The first recruit class with a large number of blacks in the SWC was A&M's in 1972. UH had also recruited many in the late 1960s but did not play in the SWC until 1976.

Neely probably did not want to do what Royal did at Texas which was to bring in a hundred freshman and run off the ones he did not want. The ones that were run off were denied to other SWC schools and went to schools like Stephen F. Austin etc.

(10-16-2017 04:57 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  Neely played One Platoon Football. In those days, if you asked what position a player played, the answer would be something like "center and linebacker" or "wingback and safety". So perhaps Neely thought he could get by with a core squad of 15-20 top notch players. If your top 20 can beat their top 20, who cares how many others are standing on the sideline? We had 22 scholarship freshmen my freshman year, 1963.

The problem, of course, is depth, and we did have some really key injuries back then, career-enders. Of course it is fashionable now to say injuries do not count, but if you lost 4 of those top 20, that was a big blow.

There were other things that contributed to the fall of football. One thing was that we were late to integrate the university and team.