College football is a unique, amateur-based institution with passionate fans who fill stadiums that are often larger than those in the professional National Football League. The University of Michigan plays in the largest stadium in North America, aptly nicknamed the Big House. In fact, among the largest stadiums in the world, college football venues occupy every position from third (the Big House) to tenth (Bryant–Denny Stadium at the University of Alabama).

Five of these eight stadiums are in the American South, where racial segregation gripped college football until at least the mid-1960s. Integrated teams from Northern schools were not allowed to field black players on Southern campuses or in bowl games until 1948 (the Cotton Bowl Classic), 1955 (the Orange Bowl), and 1956 (the Sugar Bowl, which resegregated until 1965). Alabama’s coaching legend Paul “Bear” Bryant faced death threats in 1959 for agreeing to play the integrated Penn State Nittany Lions in the Liberty Bowl.

One of the most interesting, though apocryphal, stories regarding integration involves Bear Bryant. Legend has it that Bryant purposefully scheduled the University of Southern California’s (USC’s) integrated team, the Trojans, to kick off the Alabama Crimson Tide’s 1970 season in Birmingham, Alabama. Reportedly, Bryant recognized that USC’s black players would help the Trojans dominate the segregated Crimson Tide, and this allowed Bryant to convince the University of Alabama to recruit black players. However, the legend fails to mention that Bryant had already recruited his first black player, Wilbur Jackson, who attended the USC game but could not play as a freshman.

Although this legend is apocryphal, it is appealing because it makes economic sense. In 1971, economist Gary Becker published his seminal work on the economics of discrimination, arguing that firms that discriminate earn lower profits. My research extends this idea to college football by examining whether poorly performing teams, potentially seeking to improve their win rate, choose to integrate. Bryant’s 1970 Alabama team exemplifies a team looking to raise its win rate. In 1969 and 1970, Alabama had relatively poor seasons, winning only 6 games each season (6–5 in 1969 and 6–5–1 in 1970), the worst records by a Crimson Tide team in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, the first year that Alabama fielded an integrated team, the school rebounded to win 11 of 12 games and finish fourth in the Associated Press poll of top college football teams.

I used data on the winning percentages and average Associated Press ranking for every major college football team playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Southeastern Conference, and Southwest Conference between 1964 (the passage of the Civil Rights Act) and 1975. I also used data on all other major college football teams from states that were part of the Confederacy or along its border during the Civil War. Only schools from border states had integrated by 1964: the University of Maryland, the University of Missouri, and West Virginia University. These schools integrated an average of 6.5 seasons before schools located in former Confederate states.

My findings reveal that the average team integrated in 1969, and the last teams to integrate were Louisiana State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Mississippi in 1972. Furthermore, worse teams were more likely to integrate than better teams. Specifically, a 10-percentage-point increase in a team’s winning percentage decreased the probability that the team would integrate two years later by 8–9 percent. A likely explanation for this trend is that poorly performing teams integrated to attract talented players. Becker argues that firms lower their profits by discriminating. My findings suggest a related idea: Firms with low profits stop discriminating, or discriminate less, in a bid to increase profitability.

Future research should continue to study college football to better understand the process of integration and the costs of discrimination. For instance, did the integration process for non-Southern college football teams follow a similar trend? Were there positions that dominated the integration of college football in the South? What led to the use of the first black quarterbacks, a position facing a potentially higher discriminatory barrier? Answers to these questions can further illuminate our understanding of an important American institution and the economics of discrimination.

Note
This research brief is based on Benjamin Posmanick, “Remembering the (College Football) Titans: Integrating College Football in the South,” Journal of Sports Economics 26, no. 8 (September 2025): 936–52.