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

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

    The Nittany Lions and Trojans have met before — including in 2017 in a thrilling 52-49 victory for USC in the Rose Bowl — but for the first time ever they will play as conference foes, a once-unimaginable arrangement for two schools separated by 2,500 miles.

    The 2024 season marked the debut of the new look, 18-team Big Ten. Nebraska, a traditionally Midwestern conference that previously did not go west of Lincoln, now has members in Los Angeles, Seattle and Eugene, Oregon. Even in a sport that long ago abandoned the idea of ​​regionality, it is a particularly daring experiment.

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    It’s not an entirely groundbreaking idea, though. Sixty-five years before Penn State and USC officially became conference partners, a plan was in place to create a similar marriage.

    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 away from its namesake Atlantic coast, there was almost a coast-to-coast conference in major college football.

    In the late 1950s, Admiral Tom Hamilton had a grand vision for what became colloquially known as the “Airplane Conference,” a twelve-team team that would have brought together five schools from the West Coast and six others from the East. in the middle for an even dozen.

    Despite Hamilton’s diligent efforts, the league never materialized, and in the decades that followed, college football settled into a structure with which so many became familiar and comfortable.

    However, 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 latest, dizzying rounds of reshuffling.

    REQUIRED READING: Big Ten clash between Ohio State and Oregon leads college football predictions for Week 7 for Top 25 games

    What was the airplane conference?

    Like the reconstructed Big Ten generations later, the Airplane Conference came about almost by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the West.

    The Pacific Coast Conference (PCC), the entity that eventually became the Pac-12, faltered in the 1950s, mired in infighting and a series of scandals. Allegations of slush funds and pay-for-play schemes at Washington, USC, UCLA and Cal added to already simmering tensions between the California schools and many of their conference peers in the Pacific Northwest.

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

    Those moves caught the attention of an administrator thousands of miles to the east.

    Hamilton, then the athletic director at Pitt, saw the sudden availability of those five schools as an opportunity to create a super conference that would bring institutions from different parts of the country under one umbrella.

    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 service academies. Several newspaper reports at the time also mentioned Duke, Georgia Tech, West Virginia, Miami, Penn and Holy Cross, among others, but the aforementioned twelve-team model was mentioned most consistently.

    Although the proposed members had no sense of geographic proximity, many of them were linked by powerful football programs. In 1960, nine of the twelve participating schools had at least one claimed national title.

    In his book “The Fifty-Year Seduction,” author Keith Dunnavant noted that Hamilton “proposed the idea of ​​creating the most important, most popular and inevitably most powerful football league in the country, a conference with the power to challenge the fast-growing NCAA . influencing and closing his own deals with television and bowl games.”

    The man pulling the strings of the operation was well suited for the role. Before arriving at Pitt in 1949, Hamilton had been an admiral in the Navy and was 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 that the five former PCC members had founded, better positioning him to realize his vision.

    When word of his brainchild leaked into the media starting in 1958, the proposed competition took on several names. Some called it the ‘Continental Conference’ or the ‘National Conference’. More than fifty years before an entity with the same name would exist, the Associated Press referred to it in one report as the “American Conference.”

    However, it was usually labeled as the ‘Airplane Conference’. The distinction came at a time when air travel had become safer, more affordable and more readily available, easing some of the headaches 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 on anything other than an airplane could be a time-consuming hassle, as Oregon’s Bend Bulletin noted in 1958:

    “For example, for Stanford it was a train ride of more than 24 hours to play the University of Washington in Seattle. The team left Palo Alto Wednesday night to get to Seattle in time for one practice and a Saturday afternoon name play. Members arrived back on campus late Sunday or early Monday thanks to the tight schedule after the game.

    After the four West Coast schools joined the Big Ten earlier this year, they faced questions about the harmful effects that hours-long air travel to the Midwest and Northeast could have on their athletes.

    But what are seen as concerns today were seen as 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 on a plane for road games. As the Associated Press noted in 1958, “The use of air transportation allowed matches to be played without serious interruption to academic schedules.”

    Now that modern technology has removed some of these logistical hurdles, the Airplane Conference made sense for all parties involved.

    For the Western schools, it not only gave them a league to join after the collapse of the PCC, but it also allowed them to collaborate with similar academically prestigious institutions. Notre Dame, Navy and Army were all recruited nationally, and joining a league that would allow them to play games across the country would only cement that status. For Eastern independents like Pitt, Penn State and Syracuse, membership in the Airplane Conference would improve their access to college football’s premier bowl games.

    Even Notre Dame, which cherished its independence and did not want to participate in a local conference, saw the appeal of participating in a national competition.

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

    The motivation for the Airplane Conference went beyond bringing together like-minded universities.

    The discussions between the twelve schools took place at a time when professional football was becoming increasingly popular, especially in areas where many of the Airplane Conference’s potential members were located. As the idea went, creating a superconference with regularly nationally televised games between some of the sport’s top programs would demonstrate the value of college football.

    “I believe this conference can be a real boost to college football by proving that the college game is good too,” Capt. Slade Cutter, Navy athletics director, told Sports Illustrated in 1959. conference of schools with uniformly high academic standards and uniformly good football teams, we can prove that academic excellence and football prowess can go hand in hand.”

    REQUIRED READING: There are more than Big Ten, College Football Playoff implications at stake for Ohio State and Oregon

    How the plans for the Airplane Conference fell apart

    Ultimately, Hamilton’s dream did not become reality.

    While the plan for the Airplane Conference was taking shape, leadership had changed at Cal, USC and UCLA, where the new administrators were not as enthusiastic about the competition as their predecessors.

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

    Without an army, navy, and air force, the aircraft conference concept collapsed, and in September 1961, USC President Norman Topping publicly declared the proposed competition “out of the question.”

    “There is only one way for the Big Five to expand and that is along natural geographic lines, including schools in California, Oregon and Washington,” Topping said. “The animosity between different individuals that led to the dissolution of the old Pacific Coast Conference has all but disappeared. Time has helped heal old wounds and most of the officials from the schools involved are now gone.”

    The time we hadn’t seen each other had soothed the once strong feelings between the PCC expats. The five-member AAWU added Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State, creating what quickly became known as the Pac-8. Hamilton would serve as commissioner of the conference until 1971.

    More than fifty years later, the union he oversaw was decimated – by something that resembled the conference he wanted to found.

    “That 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 real dominant force.”

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