An extremely astute reader sent me an email this morning about last Friday’s post, which featured this photo:
He pointed out something very smart that had never crossed my mind: you can at least loosely date some pictures by the athletic logos. Here, for example, he noted that the two Rs on the bumper were the helmet decals from the Bo Hagan era, which had ended in the fall of 1970. (Just as an aside, this wouldn’t work very well at many other schools. I’m not certain why, but Rice has changed athletics logos at a pretty steady pace over the years while it’s a rare event in most programs.)
I’ve always felt kind of bad about Bo Hagan. He had been Jess Neely’s backfield coach since 1956 and then succeeded him as head coach in 1967. Not an easy gig under any circumstances, but times were changing pretty quickly in college football and he was probably destined to have an uphill battle one way or another. Rice definitely struggled on the field in these years and Hagan ended up with a 12-27-1 record. Here he is with football player Roger Roitsch:
Hagan’s last season wasn’t actually a total disaster–Rice went 5-5–but the fans weren’t in a patient mood. A campaign to fire Hagan arose, complete with petitions, letters to the editor . . . and bumper stickers. Here’s a picture that I already had scanned and saved in my laptop. Zoom in and you can see the stickers plastered all over the bill board:
I didn’t use this in a post before because, as I mentioned, I feel softhearted about Bo Hagan. But then today I got that email. And then just a few minutes later, as I paged through at an old Wiess College scrapbook, this turned up:
