Twenty years ago, I thought a Kansas-Missouri football game in Arrowhead Stadium made sense.
Kansas had seven home games scheduled in 1981, so why not play a game in Kansas City? KU students and faculty would still have their customary half-dozen home games, and so would the downtown merchants.
Bob Marcum, KU’s athletics director at the time, was the ringleader in the radical move. Marcum felt a game in Arrowhead would attract new fans in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
Marcum figured many Kansas Citians, unenamored of driving to Lawrence and battling traffic and parking problems inherent at campus-bound Memorial Stadium, would watch the Jayhawks if the drive was negligible and parking readily available. Arrowhead fit the bill.
However, traditionalists people who believe college football belongs on campus prevailed, and Marcum was rebuffed. Thus, in the 1981 season finale at Memorial Stadium, Kansas edged Missouri, 19-10.
Attendance that day was listed as 47,500, but crowd counts in the Marcum Era were usually inflated. Marcum, for example, had the Kansas-Kansas State attendance that year listed as 51,600, a sellout, even though empty aluminum planks were visible in the ends of the stadium and in the lower rows.
Asked why he had insisted on calling the KSU game a sellout when it clearly wasn’t, Marcum replied: “Because it should be.”
You may recall that 1981 was also the last year Kansas played a post-season bowl game on the mainland. Blessed with a relatively easy schedule, the ’81 Jayhawks compiled an 8-3 record, and Marcum wangled a berth in the Hall of Fame Bowl in Birmingham, Ala., by promising to buy 10,000 tickets.
Marcum ate nearly 8,000 of those tickets, Kansas bowed 10-0 to Mississippi State mainly because quarterback Frank Seurer hurt an elbow in the Missouri game and couldn’t play in Bummer in Birmingham I (B in B II occurred in 1997 when the 34-1 KU men’s basketball team bowed to Arizona in the NCAA Southeast Regional) and Marcum was waving bye-bye to Lawrence.
In January of 1982, Marcum became AD at South Carolina. Marcum didn’t say it in so many words, but the rejection of his Arrowhead Stadium plan no doubt factored in his decision to leave.
“I still think it would help the program to play in Arrowhead,” Marcum said during the waning days of his lame-duck Kansas tenure. “There are a lot of people over there who need to be exposed to college football.”
Marcum vowed he would have pressed to move the game to Arrowhead in 1983, the next year it was scheduled to be played in Lawrence.
Marcum, I suspect, would have been shot down again, though.
The argument that college football belongs on campus remains strong today. So does the predisposition Kansas shouldn’t have to play a home game in Arrowhead Stadium if Missouri refuses to respond in kind.
Fact is, Missouri will shift its bi-annual home game against Kansas to Arrowhead Stadium the same time the Tigers rename their stadium in honor of Bob Stull.
Last October’s KU-MU game in Columbia lured 61,794 fans. That’s about 20,000 more than Kansas can realistically expect for this fall’s Missouri game in Lawrence.
So should Kansas University officials incur the wrath of the traditionalists and others, bite the bullet and transfer the Oct. 20 Missouri game to Arrowhead?
My feelings haven’t changed. A Kansas-Missouri game at Arrowhead makes sense. At least, it makes sense to try it before knocking it. Establish a standard. If the game, for instance, doesn’t lure at least 60,000 people, forget it. Go back to Lawrence.
Then we can all wait another two decades before a new university and athletics administration on Mount Oread decides that whip technology has reached the stage where the Arrowhead horse may not be dead after all.
