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Nippert Stadium: The 1980s

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, uncertainty was the mood around Cincinnati football. The Bearcats were 10 years removed from conference membership and no closer to building a winner or clearing the myriad financial hurdles that plagued the program. After a winning 1977 campaign, Ralph Staub’s Bearcats trudged to a 9-24 record from 1978-80 while Nippert Stadium attendance figures sunk to 40-year lows. And yet, for Bearcats faithful, the ’80s would only be scarier.
kernjc@ucmail.uc.edu (Jac Kern) | Wed, Oct 30, 2024

Nippert at the Breaking Point

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, uncertainty was the mood around Cincinnati football. The Bearcats were 10 years removed from conference membership and no closer to building a winner or clearing the myriad financial hurdles that plagued the program. After a winning 1977 campaign, Ralph Staub’s Bearcats trudged to a 9-24 record from 1978-80 while Nippert Stadium attendance figures sunk to 40-year lows. And yet, for Bearcats faithful, the ’80s would only be scarier.

Taking the reins from Staub on the heels of a 2-9 campaign was Mike Gottfried, an Ohio native and associate head coach on Tony Mason’s miracle 1976 squad that went 9-2.

Gottfried’s tenure opened ominously in 1981. The Bearcats led 13-3 late in an ugly matchup with I-AA Youngstown State when the wheels blew off. “Suddenly,” the Enquirer wrote the following day, “It was as if some cruel god reached down from the sky and wrested first the football and then the game from UC’s avid hands.” The Penguins scored twice in the final three and a half minutes to stun an opening-day crowd of 8,304 fans at Nippert.

Blowout road defeats to top-ten teams Penn State and Pittsburgh over the next two weeks surely didn’t help ease the pain either. And yet Gottfried weathered the storm, using a 5-1 stretch across the middle of the season to salvage a 6-5 winning record.

In December 1981, the NCAA passed a new proposal featuring more stringent guidelines for I-A (now FBS) qualification. The NCAA was operating under pressure from the College Football Association (CFA), a group formed in 1977, consisting of 63 football programs from most major conferences, who had begun negotiating their own TV deals and wanted higher barriers to entry for college football’s most prestigious level.

Under the new amendment, programs could qualify for I-A status in one of four ways:

  • Having a stadium that seats 30,000 fans and averaging 17,000 fans per home game in any of the previous four seasons
  • Averaging 17,000 in home attendance over the past four seasons combined
  • Averaging 20,000 in home and away attendance over the past four seasons combined
  • Being a member of an “allied conference” of which more than half the members meet the attendance criteria

Numerous programs were certain for disqualification (including East Carolina, Marshall, and Appalachian State) while a second group was believed to be borderline (including Boston College, Ohio, and Rutgers).

Since Nippert’s capacity at the time was just 26,500, Cincinnati would not be able to qualify under the first stipulation, but they were in luck. They were members of the Metro Conference, which did not sponsor football but which contained six members, each of which played football and met attendance criteria. UC was notified in December that they’d qualify for I-A competition under the conference rule.

But in February, the NCAA notified the university that its classification for the 1982 football season was undetermined and asked for an audit of UC’s attendance figures.

By August, the NCAA had pivoted, ruling that the Metro would not qualify as an allied conference because it did not sponsor football. “The NCAA apparently meant something different than it said,” quipped the Cincinnati Post. To make matters worse, the Bearcats’ qualification under the third metric––20,000 home and away attendance over four years––had been adjusted. UC’s submitted attendance of 20,216 fans was now 19,394, apparently due to revised attendance figures from Penn State, Temple, and Southern Mississippi.

Effective September 1––just ten days later and three days before the season’s first game––the Bearcats would be demoted to I-AA. The NCAA said it would––following the 1982 season––”consider” waiving the normal three-year waiting period for re-application to I-A.

Predictably, Bearcats officials were furious. “I strongly believe that the council has misinterpreted the clear language of the NCAA’s own rules,” said UC president Dr. Henry R. Winkler in a statement. Gottfried, who was settling in for his second season and had just turned down a “lucrative offer” from UTEP, wasn’t happy either. “I am hurt,” he said. “I have to talk to our players tonight, and I will emphasize to them that we haven’t lost anything yet. This won’t change what we intend to do this season.”

Five days later, the Bearcats were granted a temporary restraining order, restricting the NCAA from reclassifying the football program. The Bearcats would play four of their five 1982 home games at Riverfront Stadium, a venue with a capacity of 59,000. In the worst-case scenario, the Bearcats would be able to argue that one of their home sites exceeded the 30,000-seat mandate.

In October, a Hamilton County judge granted the university a second restraining order through the remainder of the 1982 season. In January, the university presented to an NCAA body, which determined that the program now qualified for I-A status, but since it did not compete as I-AA in 1982, it would have to do so in 1983 before returning to I-A on January 1, 1984. “Is it punitive?” asked Director of Athletics Mike McGee. “If we are I-A, and we are, then what other way could you look at it?”

By the time the dust settled, the Bearcats accepted their I-AA status for 1983 but decided to act as a I-A program in every other manner, playing by I-A rules and granting the maximum number of scholarships allowed by I-A programs. They just needed a head coach. Gottfried––who had navigated the outside noise to a second 6-5 record––had left for Kansas.

In came Watson Brown, then the 32-year-old offensive coordinator at Vanderbilt. In his first game in charge of the “I-AA” Bearcats, he did the funniest possible thing, leading Cincinnati into Happy Valley and scoring a 14-3 upset over the defending national champion Nittany Lions. “Frankly, I would have been very upset if we lost,” Brown said after the game.

(Appalachian State is occasionally credited with being the first FCS/I-AA opponent to beat a ranked FBS/I-A team with its 2007 win over #5 Michigan, but Cincinnati, with its stunner over #20 Penn State, was technically the first.)

Watson left for Rice––after just 11 months on the job––following a 4-6-1 campaign, and McGee took the AD job at Southern California the following July.

It stands to reason that part of the cause for so much turnover in Cincinnati’s football program and administration stemmed from its lack of investment in facilities. By 1984, the Bearcats were splitting time between Nippert and Riverfront, and the games that were played on campus revealed a stadium in severe disrepair. UC officials had taken to roping off holes in the stands and patching others with metal sheeting. In a September 1984 game against Youngstown State, a woman slipped on the patchwork and poked a hole through the concrete with the heel of her shoe. By November 1984, things were so untenable that UC closed off Shank Pavilion indefinitely while it waited for an inspection and repair estimates.

The school invested $250,000 to make the stadium safe again while continuing to consistently play home games at Riverfront. The facility would be re-inspected in five years.

Unsurprisingly, the team’s success on the field suffered through the turmoil surrounding the program. Dave Currey, the coach charged with shouldering the load during the most difficult period in UC football history, went 19-36 during his tenure, which stretched from 1984-88.

The cherry on top came on November 3, 1988, when the NCAA slapped UC with a three-year probation stemming from four years of infractions committed by the football and men’s basketball programs. The punishment, the most severe of which was a scholarship reduction, came at a time when the football program could ill afford any more challenges.

It was rock bottom in Clifton.

Enter Tim Murphy, a 32-year-old who had spent the previous three years as the head coach at Maine but spent 1981-84 as an offensive line coach at Boston University under new UC athletic director Rick Taylor.

Murphy was a visionary. Saddled with a seemingly insurmountable hole to dig out of, the second-youngest coach in America submitted an 11-page report to Taylor that summer, outlining his plan for the future. “It’s going to take time,” he warned. “But tradition has to start somewhere.”

Part of Murphy’s plan included a new, on-campus stadium, at the site of Nippert. “A lot of people say you can’t build a stadium here or you can’t get good student-athletes here or you can’t win here,” he told the Enquirer. “Well, you can. You can.” But the university had just opened the Shoemaker Center next door to Nippert, so football stadium funding would be nonexistent. And the university’s five-year safety agreement on Nippert would expire following the season, at which point the beckoning call of Riverfront would be almost financially impossible to resist.

The 1989 Bearcats, who entered the season with just 63 scholarship players, and played in a ticking time bomb of a stadium, went 1-9-1, as major decisions about the program’s future loomed.

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