(01-30-2019 01:52 PM)UTEPDallas Wrote:  JRSec,

Don Haskins got death threats after winning the NC in 1966. He said there were times he wished his Texas Western team never beat Kentucky. But he opened a lot of doors for black basketball players and Adolph Rupp of all people recruited the first black player right after. Some schools had one or two black players but a team never had five black starters. Haskins said Disney put it like he planned it to make a political statement but he only started his best five players and they happened to be black. Haskins was lucky he lived on the other side of Texas which wasn’t segregated and it was used to diversity being a border town and a major Army base. It also helped UTEP was the first college in Texas that was integrated so they were years ahead of most colleges.

I remember that. The guy was saying Jim Crow prevented the Big 10 from wanting to come South to play. Those threats were because of the post season and Rupp. And there were schools even in the South that were ahead of the curve on integration, but very few. Alabama public schools were integrated by 65 with the real push coming in 67 & 68. SEC schools lagged that by 3 to 4 years depending on the school. Scheduling changed after the OU/UGa vs NCAA case. When schools could play as many times on TV as they wished and dates for TV were no longer managed between the NCAA & ABC that's when networks really started wanting more cross conference play for the sake of viewer numbers.

I'm certainly not justifying the decisions of schools back then, but I am saying that by 83 Bo Jackson and Herschel Walker, and those who had gone before them, had pretty well killed, or were killing, Jim Crow for SEC football. But Jim Crow didn't prohibit scheduling OOC games, the TV contract did since most AD revenue was coming from ticket sales for local games.