There was a time when college football’s best played against the NFL’s finest. Could it happen again?
The Chicago Charities College All-Star game was a preseason game between college all-stars and NFL champions. But could such a proving ground happen in today's game?
Imagine this: A college football player lauded as one of the best in the country gets roped into a collective of other top college players just as good for an All-Star team.
Except these players won’t prove their mettle against other college athletes; they’ll prepare to face the reigning Super Bowl champions.
Sound preposterous?
Well, from 1934-1976, this was the case for many of college football’s best athletes courtesy of the Chicago Charities College All-Star Game.
The annual All-Star game, also formerly known as the Chicago Tribune All-Star Charity Game, featured not just the full preseason roster of an NFL team that won the league championship but also played many of its starters. The Eagles played in the event in 1949, 1950, and 1961, and actually lost the 1950 game.
It was an event that offered an honest proving ground for college players to see if they could handle the rigors of playing in the NFL against the league’s top team.
Imagine being a college player and trying to stop Hall of Fame receiver Tommy McDonald, who scored three touchdowns for the Eagles in the 1961 game.
What about the Steel Curtain of the Pittsburgh Steelers, against the likes of guys like Ernie Holmes and “Mean” Joe Greene? It happened in 1975 and again in 1976, the last year of the event.
But as NFL players got bigger, faster, and stronger, the annual preseason spectacle lost its allure. Once considered an even playing field with college’s best lining up against the cream of the NFL, the game began turning into a contest of men against boys.
Fast-forward to today’s college game and NFL, you’ll see that the parity in size, strength, and speed between top college products and NFL players is debatable.
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Thanks to advances in sports science, training methodologies, and as of recently, players simply being allowed to play longer college seasons, the idea that a return of an annual game between college’s best and Super Bowl champions is at least a conversation starter, right?
One argument for the water cooler talk would be the NCAA’s recent “5 in 5 rule,” which will allow Division I athletes up to five years of eligibility as long as their academic year arrives no later than the start of their 19th birthday.
This rule would guarantee that top college athletes could play through their 24th birthday, which already felt like the norm due to the COVID-19 year. Earlier this month, a trickle effect began to occur within many college conferences as NFL players who recently signed pro contracts weighed the option to return and play a fifth season of college ball.
Also, the age range between a college team and today’s NFL franchise isn’t too wide. Take just last season and look at the Indiana team that ran the table en route to a national championship. Average age? It was 23.1, and 18 of those players cracked the 53-man rosters of NFL teams this season, according to 247 Sports.
The average age of the Seattle Seahawks roster that won Super Bowl LX? Just 26.1.
While there’s precedent for a pro-am like the Chicago Charities College Game to make a return or even have a similar offshoot sprout up, a number of college coaches believe it will never happen — and it has nothing to do with a more level playing field when it comes to athletic abilities.
“I think the college kids would be very enthusiastic, I think the NFL guys would be like, ‘Why are we doing this?’” said Temple coach K.C. Keeler, who remembers the old Chicago Charities College All-Star Game well, but contends it has no place in today’s football. “Nowadays, [NFL teams] aren’t even playing their starters in the first preseason game, right? And now you’re talking about a whole game against a bunch of [college] guys who want to prove themselves.
“But this isn’t about athleticism, it’s about money. One injury can change the trajectory of a player’s career in both pro and college ball. I think just looking at the logistics of pro football, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that would be willing to match up these days and risk it all against college kids who have that ‘I’ll show you’ mentality.”
A similar thought process came from Villanova coach Mark Ferrante, who also took a larger look at the state of both college football and the country during the heyday of the annual exhibition.
“My gut tells me that it would be much harder for a college all-star team to beat an NFL Super Bowl champion,” said Ferrante. “And the reason I say that is, even though the college teams are keeping older guys and all the extra years of eligibility that really came through [because of the pandemic], that’s kind of going to get erased [as those eligibility years phase out].
“Also, I’d like to see the age rosters of those 1940s and 1950s teams. Because, I bet you a lot of those college guys, might’ve actually been the same age or even a bit older than the pro guys they were playing against back then because of [World War II].”
To Ferrante’s point, it’s also harder for a college kid today to crack an NFL roster. There are a little more than 18,500 Division I players competing for 250-plus spots in the NFL draft.
“It’s still under 2% of college guys that make it to that level,” Ferrante said. “And we’re talking about the best of the best, not that it wasn’t the best back then, but it’s just different and dare I say harder to get to the NFL now than it was then.”
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But the proving ground for college players in the Chicago Charities All-Star Game was apparent back then, with the Eagles feeling the brunt of it. In 1950, the Eagles lost to a collective of college players, one that featured former Villanova standout Ralph Pasquariello.
A star fullback for the Wildcats, Pasquariello was coming off an MVP performance a year earlier in the 1949 North-South Shrine Game where he scored the game-winning touchdown.
Pasquariello was drafted later that year in the first round (ninth overall) by the Los Angeles Rams. The Eagles’ loss was one of just nine times a college team defeated an NFL champion.
But the notion that a college group would beat an NFL champion today — even with a closer-to-equal playing field than we’ve seen between college and professional football in recent years — would be tough to imagine. Between lucrative name, image, and likeness deals in college and blockbuster sponsorship deals in the NFL, both coaches say there’s too much money to be made.
“Listen, it would be something really cool to see all these young players who are going to be 22- or 23-year-old seniors go up against NFL stars, but I just don’t think it’s viable,” Keeler said. “Everyone has a time frame now to make as much money as they can. Also, they’re getting rid of more and more [contests like these].
“I mean, look, they just got rid of the Pro Bowl. Why? The impossibility of suggesting that you can play at three-quarters speed and not get hurt when you’re tackling guys to the ground. That’s just not how this game works anymore.”
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