Tradition | 5th Down CFB

5th Down College Football

Mark Schipper

Oct 4

The Little Brown Jug that the Michigan Wolverines and Minnesota Golden Gophers Play for is College Football at Its Best

Mark Schipper

Aug 29

Yale's JJ Hogan Was An Early Name, Image, & Likeness (NIL) Star In College Football

The colleges were making lucrative financial deals with elite football players long before Name, Image, and Likeness existed.

Mark Schipper

Jul 30, 2021

Fear Came for College Football: NCAA's TV Takeover Created Conditions for Conference Re-Alignment

By Mark Schipper Within the next four years, whenever the universities of Texas and Oklahoma are allowed to fly from the Big 12 and...

Mark Schipper

Jul 2, 2021

Modern NCAA Conference Commissioner was Forged in Fiery Destruction of the Pacific Coast Conference

By Mark Schipper George Kliavkoff, a major operator in digital-television and a sports-entertainment executive at MGM Resorts...

Mark Schipper

Apr 7, 2021

University of Texas Defied Trends by Stepping Back to Consider Merits in "Eyes of Texas" Controversy

By Mark Schipper The Eyes of Texas, a cultural pillar at the Lone Star State's flagship university, and a song with tenuous linkages to...

Mark Schipper

Mar 28, 2021

Haunted by an Error in First 'Game of the Century,' a Michigan Wolverines' Star Took His Own Life

By Mark Schipper Alone in a hotel a continent away from his estranged wife and three children, tortured by the belief he wore a scarlet...

Mark Schipper

Feb 23, 2021

Paul Bear Bryant's Last Magic was Spent on Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Crimson Tide Football

By Mark Schipper “Forget it, it’s all changed, they took it away from me,” Paul Bear Bryant said, referring to the committee convened to...

Mark Schipper

Feb 11, 2021

The Ballad of Walter Eckersall and the Snake Born Eating its Tail

By Mark Schipper There’s no shattered visage on the ground next to Walter Eckersall’s grave marker at Oak Woods cemetery, but the lone...

Mark Schipper

Feb 1, 2021

Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, Where Big Ten Conference was Founded, Has Closed

By Mark Schipper A strange sort of desolation has settled over the legendary Palmer House in the heart of Chicago’s downtown Loop, the...

Mark Schipper

Dec 11, 2020

Greed Comes for College Football: Knight Commission Recommends FBS Leave the N.C.A.A.

Some time while you're looking out over the television strip-mining operations that blight the otherwise handsome landscape of college...

Mark Schipper

Oct 8, 2020

Auburn and Pat Dye is a Real College Football Story

Auburn University is honoring their old football coach Pat Dye in simple fashion, and that's a beautiful thing.