Iowa college football on TV: The earliest years
Iowa college football on TV: The earliest years
Notre Dame, Nebraska and the DuMont Network all played roles
A summer of conference realignment means that college athletics starting in the 2024-25 season will be unlike any that came before it. All of it is driven by a force that has shaped college athletics since the end of World War II — television. With the future so in flux, it’s worth taking a look at the beginning.
2023 is the 75th anniversary of the first over-the-air broadcast of an Iowa Hawkeye football game and the 70th anniversary of the first that Iowans could watch. The earliest games aren’t even listed in Iowa’s official media guide.
Neither Iowa nor Iowa State was the first team from Iowa on the then-very-small screen. That honor belongs to the University of Dubuque, whose game Sept. 17, 1948, against St. Louis University was shown on KSD-TV in St. Louis.
One station at a time, 1948-54
“Experiments in televising the Notre Dame-Iowa game Sept. 25 and the Notre Dame-Army game on Nov. 8 at Notre Dame were pronounced highly successful by television engineers,” the South Bend Tribune said Nov. 21, 1947. According to the Chicago Tribune on April 4, 1948, the games were transmitted to the Notre Dame infirmary.
All but three Illinois home games, and the entire home slates of Northwestern and Notre Dame, were televised in Chicago during the 1948 and 1949 seasons.1 That included Iowa at Illinois on Nov. 6, 1948 on WGN, the first over-the-air broadcast of Hawkeye football. Iowa State at Illinois on Sept. 24, 1949, was one of the three exceptions because Notre Dame and Northwestern both had home games that day.
All three of Iowa’s road games in November 1949 were televised. The Nov. 5 game at Minnesota was on two stations in the Twin Cities, KSTP and WTCN (later KARE). The Nov. 12 game at Wisconsin was on WTMJ in Milwaukee. The next game, a season finale against the future national champion, would be the one that got the most attention.
The DuMont Network televised five Notre Dame games in 1949. Trade publication Broadcasting • Telecasting called the deal “the first full home-schedule of football games to be televised on a national network.” One of those was a 28-7 Fighting Irish win over the Hawkeyes on Nov. 19, shown on stations from St. Louis to New York City.2 The South Bend Tribune had a feature about the telecast. DuMont also televised four Big Ten conference games and one non-conference game in 1949.3
A schedule built from Chicago Tribune television listings indicates that 24 college football games were broadcast in Chicago in 1949. Eight of nine teams in the Big Ten Conference4 were shown there at least once that season, and the other, Purdue, had been on twice in 1948. Home games for Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio State and Wisconsin were shown on stations in Detroit, the Twin Cities, Columbus and Milwaukee, respectively.
The Big Ten, confronted with this innovation, banned live telecasting of all home football games for the 1950 season.5 The conference “concluded that the entire future of intercollegiate athletics is endangered by TV,” the Associated Press reported April 17. In 1950, 9% of American households had a television.
Iowa’s next televised game was on KTTV6 in Los Angeles. It was against USC on Friday, Sept. 29, 1950, at 10:30 p.m. Iowa time. Due to the fear that TV would cut into attendance, the Cedar Rapids Gazette explained a financial backstop:
A crowd of 50,000 was set as normal for the Iowa-Southern Cal game. If the actual attendance is 40,000, the sponsor will have to pay the price of 10,000 tickets into the receipts. These receipts are part of the regular gate, split 50-50 by the home and visiting team. If the gate falls below 40,000, the sponsor is not liable for any more. He is pledged against only the first 20 percent drop.
Iowa beat USC, 20-14, in front of more than 45,000 spectators and hundreds of thousands of viewers in the Los Angeles media market. By the end of the Truman administration, Iowa had been on TV in one national broadcast and five local ones. However, no one in Iowa had been able to watch.
Iowa State’s first football game on television was also in 1950. WOW in Omaha broadcast all of Nebraska’s home games for two years7, including a 20-13 victory over ISU on Nov. 18.
Starting in 1951, the NCAA took complete control of scheduling, and the flourishing garden of local broadcasts was trampled.
Iowa State’s second football game on television — and the first viewable in central Iowa — was only on WOI. The Cyclones beat Missouri 20-14 on Oct. 20, 1951. Iowa State would not be on TV again until 1957.
During the 1953 season, 19 games were on NBC, including Indiana-Iowa on Oct. 24 as part of a “panorama” that switched among four games. (That strategy was judged to be a failure and the next set of four games was regionalized.) The next national broadcast of Hawkeye football — and the first complete game that Iowans could watch — was Sept. 25, 1954, against Michigan State on ABC. By then, the Big Ten had renounced its 1950 position and wanted as many of its games on TV as possible.
Everybody hated the NCAA’s monopoly on televised football — except the NCAA. In early 1955, half a dozen proposals were floated, including “a return to unrestricted telecasts which the small colleges claim would ruin attendance at their games.”
The final plan was split between national and regional broadcasts. The NCAA limited teams’ appearances and carved up the nation geographically by conference.
Of course, there was one state where this was a problem.
TO BE CONTINUED…
This created the first case in the Midwest of multiple games being televised in the same market at the same time: Kansas State at Illinois and Purdue at Notre Dame on Sept. 25, 1948.
With affiliations in flux at this time, in Chicago, the Iowa-Notre Dame game was bumped to WBKB (now WBBM) while WGN showed Northwestern-Illinois.
DuMont’s coverage of California-Wisconsin on Oct. 8, 1949, was partially pre-empted by the World Series.
Yes, you read that correctly. The University of Chicago dropped football in 1939 and left completely in 1946. Then the Western Conference had nine teams for a few years before adding Michigan State. However, due to advance scheduling, the Spartans didn’t play a full conference football slate until 1953.
That ban included Northwestern’s opener against Iowa State.
Los Angeles Times, Sept. 29, 1950. The 506sports.com archive provided a jumping-off point for much of this research, and the archives at newspapers.com helped with the rest.
The University of Nebraska had a deal to televise football games before television existed in the state of Nebraska.
My other work can be found on my website, Iowa Highway Ends, and its blog.
I am proud to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. If you’re interested in commentary by some of Iowa’s best writers, please follow your choice of Collaborative members: