1970's Sports | College Football

A Saturday Tradition Returns.

By middecade, college football fans were filling campus stadiums in record numbers. With the end of the Vietnam War and the onset of an economic recession, football—along with fraternities and sororities—regained popularity among students seeking a return to the traditional collegiate lifestyle. The millions who sat in the bleachers on Saturday afternoons or watched on television had much to root for. During the 1970s college football stood for innovation and high scoring—and many of the garnet new fans were indeed former Sunday armchair quarterbacks who had grown bored with stodgy, defense-minded NFL teams and their two-back offenses and who were looking to the campuses for an alternative brand of football.

Power Backs.

The college game, which throve on trickery and deceit, featured four-back offenses and aerial attacks led by such great passing quarterbacks as Art Schlichter of...