Saturday's Children

Monday’s child is fair of face

Tuesday’s child is full of grace

Wednesday’s child is full of woe

Thursday’s child has far to go

Friday’s child is loving and giving 

Saturday’s child works hard for a living 

With 22 players on the field divided into two platoons, football is essentially comprised of two separate teams merged in one. Invariably, a football team will be made up of men with drastically different personalities and ambitions, each coming together to play a complex game that requires specific responsibilities for each position that if not performed adequately enough will have a negative impact on the success of his teammates. Additionally, the few coaches who are hired to guide and organize these men into the best position for victory are the difference in the players successfully operating in a team environment or forcing it to fall apart.

The practices and subsequent result of the games make a football season an emotional journey for those involved, ranging from the highs of victories and the feelings of worthlessness in defeat. Saturday’s Children, written by Giles Tippette, observes the emotional journey of the 1971 Rice University Owls football team, a program at the bottom of a competitive conference, with a few stand out players and a new highly regarded coach, that despite exhaustive efforts to win, always fell just short of achieving the goal on their way to a 3-7-1 record. Tippette set out to tell the tale of the young men who played college football and the middle-aged men who pushed them to their limits, providing an interpersonal portrait of desire, commitment and loss.

Among the men he writes about are names that may sound familiar to those who grew up watching football in the 70s. There’s the star middle linebacker Rodrigo Barnes, the eventual former Raiders and Cowboys special teams contributor, who was well aware of his own amazing talents on the lackluster Rice Owls defense to the point of challenging his coaches’ authority by setting his own pace for practices and at times disregarded team travel rules, for he knew they needed him to win.

Then there are the likes of men such as Stahle Vincent, a running back who single handedly carried the offense throughout the 3-7-1 season, but never let his individual success fool him into believing he had a reason to celebrate in an abysmal year for Rice football. Tippette also documents the journey of men who are yet undetermined where their passion and desires lie in life, such as the Englishmen kicker Allen Pringle, who had a natural ability for kicking the football, but quit because it didn’t make him happy, as seemingly nothing did.

But from the opening chapters, the reader will quickly realize that Tippete’s principal subject, head coach Bill Peterson, is at the focal point of this disappointing journey. Having come to Rice from Florida State University where he pioneered the pro style passing game in college football, Peterson was the prototypical coach who hollered from the beginning to end of practices and drove his players into the ground. Appearing to be not one for much patience, Peterson’s stubbornness and his undiplomatic approach to handling quarrels among his assistant coaches led to some poor execution on the field. As Peterson chomps on his cigar and accepts no room for error, he comes off in the book as a poor man’s Vince Lombardi, a coach that projects a hard ass image but didn’t have the deep rooted empathy for his players that Lombardi did. And though he was regarded as an offensive genius in college football, he couldn’t put together a coherent game plan based on the team’s running strengths, still preferring to pass the ball when he didn’t have the quarterback to do so.

By documenting the character traits of various players, Tippette shows that the game of football, inherently emotional due to the violence and spectacle of the gameplay, is much more personal for the younger player that suits up on game day, whether it’s the one who plays for sheer pride and passion, or for the one working towards the dream of playing pro ball.

Tippette shows how these emotions gain the best of all those involved, as many who are striving to outperform their own individual expectations are confronted with the fact that perhaps they aren’t the All-American player they viewed themselves to be. When writing about the transition from being a high school standout to playing on a Division I football team, Trippette writes,

…suddenly you find that you can be stopped. And you are no longer the Friday-night hero in front of loving crowds in your own home town. Now, you are one of Saturday’s children, and you are playing with all your heart and all your strength and you still are getting beaten, and it must confuse you and make you wonder about yourself. 

Giles elaborates on this sentiment further by examining how a vast team sport like football can cause a player to take the game so personally:

It would be difficult to explain how one team can beat another team and yet each player takes it so personally…It’s hard to understand how a third string tackle, who doesn’t even get to play, can feel his team’s loss as a personal inadequacy within himself. How he can feel he’s failed and is not worthy. Or how a man who’s played his best, and been his team’s best, can feel that he’s not good because his team has lost.

As each loss begins to mount for the Owls, from the close heartbreaking defeats to rivals University of Houston and Texas A&M, to the utter domination at the hands of LSU and USC, the young men feel dispirited, questioning why they continue to play, getting into fights on the practice field and developing an inferiority complex despite playing mostly competitive football before the time expiration solidifies them as losers.

It's through their eyes that Tippette also creates a commentary about college football, not necessarily one that completely condemns it as a corrupt system as many other pundits have done since college football’s inception, but he doesn’t shy away from the professional and underhanded nature of the game either. Players are expected to juggle school, two a days practices, film breakdown sessions, workouts and are expected to study the playbook in their spare time.

The players, however, are not just pawns on a coach’s chessboard, Tippette says, as many, if not all, of them “know what they are getting into, and he gets in with the idea of getting out all he can.” Many of the players, despite the rare victory, never appear to be down for long as they take the field again and put forth their best effort. Many are aware that they will not play beyond college. Others know this is only a means to an end, but must perform to get noticed by NFL scouts.

Following the 1971 season, Bill Peterson would leave Rice with four years left on his contract to coach the Houston Oilers in the NFL, amassing a 1-18 record in his only professional football gig. Rice would not have a winning season again until 1989, and many of the assistant coaches, each with head coaching dreams of their own, would depart Rice and enter the conventional workforce where their dreams would never materialize. Some of the players went on the NFL, while others still on the Owls team the following year achieved a 5-5-1 record under their new head coach Al Conover, who served as the offensive coordinator under Peterson. That would be Conover’s best season, however, as he would step down after the ‘75 season after three consecutive losing seasons.

The title of the book, which is derived from the poem written at the top of the page, seems on the surface to reference the players, but it may be much more. Tippette shows that though college football is a game, it’s not a game in the same way swimming or golf or tennis is. It’s a business, even though everything about it feels childish, grown men playing a ball game, coached by middle aged men who have spent their entire lives with the game. Each one has their own dreams of achieving a head coaching position or making an NFL roster or being a local hometown hero, the same way kids dream of greatness and success. Even for a writer like Tippette, who though he sought out to be simply an observer of the team, got close to many of these men who played the game he loved, like a young fan watching the football hero on television.

Tippette states in his preface that “football is a very hard game; it’s hard on everyone, coaches, players, secretaries, office staff, trainers, fans. A season of this type of strain generally brings everyone down their fundamental beings.”

If Tippette is correct, then Saturdays Children isn’t just referring to the players or coaches. It refers to the entire system of college football.