Every time John Cooper’s name comes up it reminds me of one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of Kansas University football.
Most of you know Cooper as the head football coach at Ohio State. After all, he was the Buckeyes’ boss for the last 13 years. Others of you know that Cooper was an assistant coach at Kansas University from 1967-71.
Cooper was, in fact, a member of the most successful coaching cadre in Kansas University history the 1968 staff that helped KU post its last conference football championship. Other Pepper Rodgers’ aides who went on to successful head coaching careers were Dick Tomey (Arizona), Terry Donahue (UCLA), Dave McClain (Wisconsin) and Don Fambrough (Kansas).
Cooper, as it turned out, lasted the longest, although not that much longer than Tomey who retired following the 2000 regular season.
Anyway, back in 1967, while in his first year on Mount Oread, Cooper probably wondered if he’d ever survive an embarrassing penalty administered by the Big Eight Conference office.
Cooper wasn’t a rookie coach in ’67. He’d been an aide at Oregon State and UCLA he came from Westwood with Rodgers so he knew the ropes. For certain, Cooper knew the official signing date.
And yet, midway through the ’67 season, Cooper was prohibited from recruiting for one full year. What law had Cooper broken? None. At least nothing was ever revealed in public.
Cooper was slapped and Kansas was docked 15 scholarships a third of the maximum 45 allowable at the time because a person “acting in Kansas University’s interests” had signed three student-athletes to letters of intent two days before the signing date.
Who would do such a thing?
Uh, would you believe Pepper Rodgers’ father?
Yep, Franklin Rodgers Sr., it was later revealed, had been prohibited from acting in the school’s interests for a full year as well. Surely that has to be the only documented case in NCAA history in which the father of a head coach has been penalized for a recruiting violation.
Something else you have to remember about those times is that KU coach Rodgers and Kansas State counterpart Vince Gibson were Sunflower State embodiments of the Hatfields and McCoys. Never has such outright enmity between KU and K-State football coaches been so well documented.
Everyone around here accused Gibson of turning the Jayhawks in. Gibson countered that he had NOT ratted Kansas out, that he had merely informed KU officials that he had proof of the elder Rodgers’ indiscretions on tape and that Kansas had reported itself.
Gibson also was quoted as saying he felt sorry for Cooper, that Cooper was a fine football coach blah, blah, blah.
Cooper not only survived the unusual incident involving Rodgers’ father, he went on to become head coach at Tulsa, Arizona State and Ohio State. Once or twice in the ’70s and ’80s, Cooper was rumored as a candidate to become the Jayhawks’ head coach. It never happened.
In retrospect, Cooper weathered worse storms at Ohio State than he did here. If he were a cat, he would have used five or six lives in Columbus where two losses in a row is tantamount to tar and feathers.
Former Kansas coach Glen Mason, who played at Ohio State and hopefully knows better than to return there as head coach, once told me that Ohio State “is a great place to coach and a great place to play when you’re winning. Expectations are very high, and when the expectations aren’t met, it’s brutal.”
Still, Mason may be the leading candidate to replace Cooper. So it goes in a business with the highest highs and lowest lows in America.
