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Before there was the coast-to-coast Big Ten, there was the Airplane Conference

Posted on by Kennedy
Before there was the coast-to-coast Big Ten, there was the Airplane Conference

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Under the Southern California sun, Penn State and USC face off Saturday afternoon in a matchup of two of college football's most decorated and storied programs.

The Nittany Lions and Trojans have met before – including as recently as 2017 in a thrilling 52-49 win for USC in the Rose Bowl – but for the first time ever they are playing as conference opponents, a once-unimaginable setup for two schools 2,500 miles apart .

The 2024 season marked the debut of the new-look, 18-team Big Ten. A traditionally Midwestern conference that once took place west of Lincoln, Nebraska, now has members in Los Angeles, Seattle and Eugene, Oregon. Even in a sport that has long since given up on the idea of ​​regionality, it is a particularly daring experiment.

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However, it's not a completely groundbreaking idea. Sixty-five years before Penn State and USC officially became conference partners, there was a plan to bring a similar marriage together.

Long before the Big Ten stretched from New Jersey to California, the Big 12 had members in three different time zones, and the ACC had two schools 3,000 miles from the league's namesake Atlantic coast, there was almost a coast-to-coast conference of major colleges. Football.

In the late 1950s, Admiral Tom Hamilton had a grand vision for the so-called “Aircraft Conference,” a twelve-team organization that would have brought together five schools from the West Coast with six more schools from the East and the Air Force in the middle for an even dozen .

Despite Hamilton's diligent efforts, the league never materialized, and over the next few decades, college football settled into a structure that so many became familiar and comfortable with.

But the story of its rise and fall shows that the entire concept of what a conference is and what it can symbolize was nearly turned on its head long before the final, dizzying rounds of realignment.

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What was the aircraft conference?

Like the reconstructed Big Ten generations later, the Airplane Conference was born almost by exploiting vulnerabilities in the West.

The Pacific Coast Conference (PCC), the organization that eventually became the Pac-12, was in crisis in the 1950s, marked by infighting and a series of scandals. Allegations of slush funds and pay-for-play schemes at Washington, USC, UCLA and Cal heightened already-simmering tensions between the California schools and many of their Pacific Northwest conference mates.

Eventually the situation became untenable. After the 1958 football season, Washington, USC, UCLA, Cal, and Stanford left the PCC, and by 1959, what was once the most powerful conference in the Western United States had dissolved.

These moves caught the attention of an administrator thousands of miles east.

Hamilton, Pitt's athletic director at the time, saw the sudden availability of these five schools as an opportunity to create a superconference that would bring institutions from different parts of the country together under one roof.

Under his plan, the new body would include the five former PCC members; Notre Dame, Pitt, Penn State and Syracuse, all of which were Eastern independents at the time; and Army, Navy and Air Force, the three largest military academies. Players like Duke, Georgia Tech, West Virginia, Miami, Penn and Holy Cross, among others, were also mentioned in various newspaper reports at the time, but the 12-team model mentioned above was mentioned most often.

While the proposed members lacked a sense of geographical proximity, many of them were connected by strong football programs. By 1960, nine of the twelve participating schools had at least one national title.

In his book “The Fifty-Year Seduction,” author Keith Dunnavant noted that Hamilton “pushed the idea of ​​creating the most important, popular and inevitably most powerful soccer league in the country, a conference with the power to challenge the burgeoning NCAA influence.” and make his own television and bowl game deals.”

The man who pulled the strings during the operation was well suited for the role. Before coming to Pitt in 1949, Hamilton was a Navy admiral and a football coach and athletic director at Annapolis. In 1959, he left Pitt to become commissioner of the Athletic Association of Western Universities, the conference founded by the five former PCC members that better positioned him to carry out his vision.

As the media learned of his idea beginning in 1958, the proposed league adopted several different nicknames. Some referred to it as the “Continental Conference” or “National Conference.” More than 50 years before there was a facility with the same name, the Associated Press called it the American Conference in a report.

However, it was most commonly referred to as the “Aircraft Conference.” The award came at a time when air travel had become safer, more affordable and more readily available, helping to alleviate some of the problems colleges faced in transporting their teams to away games. Even in a league like the PCC, which was limited to the three West Coast states, traveling by anything other than an airplane could be a time-consuming hassle, as Oregon's Bend Bulletin noted in 1958:

“For Stanford, for example, it was a 24-hour-plus train ride to play the University of Washington in Seattle. The team left Palo Alto on Wednesday evening to get to Seattle in time to complete a practice and compete on Saturday afternoon. Due to tight scheduling after the game, members returned to campus late Sunday or early Monday.”

After the four West Coast schools joined the Big Ten earlier this year, they faced questions about the detrimental impact hours of air travel to the Midwest and Northeast could have on their athletes.

But what are considered concerns today were considered solutions in the late 1950s. Instead of taking a long train ride from one Western city to another, the former PCC schools could simply spend a few hours each way playing games on the road. As the Associated Press noted in 1958, “The use of air transportation allowed games to be played without serious disruption to the academic schedule.”

Because modern technology overcomes some of these logistical hurdles, the aircraft conference made sense for everyone involved.

For Western schools, this meant not only being able to join a league after the collapse of the PCC, but also aligning themselves with similarly prestigious institutions. Notre Dame, Navy and Army all recruited at the national level, and joining a league where they could play across the country would only strengthen that status. For Eastern independents like Pitt, Penn State and Syracuse, membership in the Airplane Conference would increase their access to college football's preeminent bowl games.

Even Notre Dame, which valued its independence and didn't want to be part of a local conference, saw the appeal of being part of a national league.

“If all the schools mentioned organized, we would certainly be interested,” Notre Dame athletic director Ed Krause told the San Francisco Examiner in November 1958.

The motivation for the aircraft conference went beyond bringing together like-minded universities.

The discussions between the 12 schools came at a time when professional football was becoming increasingly popular, particularly in areas where many of the Airplane Conference's potential members were located. It was assumed that the creation of a superconference that would feature regular, nationally televised matchups between some of the sport's best programs would demonstrate the value of college football.

“This conference, in my opinion, can be a real boost to college football by proving that the college game is good too,” Captain Slade Cutter, Navy athletic director, told Sports Illustrated in 1959. “By forming a conference of schools with uniformly high academic standards and uniformly good football teams, we can prove that academic excellence and football strength can go hand in hand.”

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How the plans for the aircraft conference failed

Ultimately, Hamilton's dream could not become a reality.

While the Airplane Conference plan was being developed, leadership had changed at Cal, USC and UCLA, where the new administrators were not as interested in the league as their predecessors.

The three service academies presented their own challenges. In December 1959, General Gar Davidson, superintendent of the Army, said that attending such a conference would bring “new pressures that serve no purpose.” Several media outlets reported at the time and in subsequent years that the Pentagon had vetoed the idea.

Without the Army, Navy, and Air Force, the Aircraft Conference concept failed, and in September 1961, USC President Norman Topping publicly stated that the proposed league was “out of the question.”

“There is only one way the Big Five could expand, and that would be along natural geographic boundaries that would include schools in California, Oregon and Washington,” Topping said. “The animosity between various persons which led to the break-up of the old Pacific Coast Conference has almost disappeared. Time has helped heal old wounds and most of those responsible for the schools involved have now disappeared.”

In fact, the time apart had softened the once hard feelings between the PCC expats. The five-team AAWU was joined by Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State and what soon became known as the Pac-8 was born. Hamilton served as commissioner of the conference until 1971.

More than 50 years later, the league he led was decimated by something resembling the conference he wanted to create.

“This conference could have changed the face of college football,” Tom Hansen, Hamilton’s former assistant and longtime Pac-10 commissioner, told Dunnavant in his book. “Tom had the vision to create something that could have been a truly dominant force.”

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