Woodling: K.C. idea polarizes city, KU
A quarter of a century after Bob Marcum first made the suggestion, Kansas University will play a football game at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo.
“I think it’s great. I really do,” Marcum told me Wednesday when he heard the Jayhawks would play Oklahoma in October at the home of the Chiefs. “I’m glad they’re doing it.”
Marcum, now athletic director at Marshall University, was KU’s AD in 1980. That year he concocted a football schedule for 1981 that for the first time in school history would contain seven home games. Therefore, since the Lawrence community and city businesses would have their customary six home games in ’81, Marcum threw up a trial balloon about playing that seventh game at Arrowhead against Missouri.
That balloon did not fall gently to earth. It crashed. The flak was intense.
College football belongs on campus, traditionalists trumpeted, and many others agreed. Then when Missouri refused to play its home game against Kansas in Arrowhead the following year, the notion died for another decade or so.
“We thought Arrowhead would be a great place,” Marcum said, “but it just didn’t get done.”
In 1992, KU athletic director Bob Frederick reported that Chiefs’ officials had approached him and Mizzou AD Dan Devine about playing their annual Border War at Arrowhead.
“They make a good case,” Frederick told members of the KU Athletic Corp. board that year. “Their point is it could take the proportion of an Oklahoma-Texas game, or an Auburn-Alabama game.”
Frederick also noted the negatives.
“It takes the game away from the university campus and away from the students,” he said. “It also has an enormous (financial) impact on the local community.”
Again, a KU-MU game at Arrowhead crashed in flames.
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