Was the weekend a little lackluster without Kansas football, or was it just me?

Yes, there were some wild upsets in college football and Major League Baseball had some exciting play-off races, but something seemed off.

Can you imagine life without Jayhawk football every weekend?

At first glance this seems like a pointless question, but according to kuhistory.com, at one time it came very close to being a reality.

In January 1910, the future of football at the University of Kansas was hanging by a thread. A proposal to eliminate the sport was put in place by J.W. Gleed, a member of the Board of Regents. William Allen White, a regent at the time and the person for whom the School of Journalism is named, seconded the motion.

The Regents defeated the motion, but agreed that some changes needed to be made to the sport. The debate surrounding football continued for the next several months.

A large majority of students and alumni fought to keep football at Kansas, but they were going against some solid arguments for elimination.

Problems during the 20 years of football before 1910 included: The death of an opposing player from Doane College in Nebraska after injuries suffered during a game in Lawrence; rumors of alcohol and drug use by players of opposing teams before games; ineligible player activity at the University; the firing of Coach Harold S. Weeks, who was accused of having a relationship with a freshman girl in 1904; and the breaking of conference rules by the University when it spent more than $400 on training tables for players.

It was apparent that Jayhawk football needed help if it was going to survive. The conference and local citizens were aware of it.

A cartoon in the Feb. 7, 1910 issue of the Kansas City Star shows a man, who represents Kansas, holding a woman, representing football, over a cliff and the other members of the Missouri Valley Conference running to save her.

In the end, the conference came through, adopted new rules and the threat to remove Kansas football faded.

But by using the butterfly effect and our imagination, let’s discuss what life would be like without Kansas football.

When hope seemed dim for Kansas football in 1910, word leaked out that the team would use spring practices to get ready for a possible shift to rugby. The Kansan even wrote an article attempting to interest students in the game.

So Kansas, hypothetically, could have been a rugby powerhouse. But when football was allowed to continue, rugby faded out of the spotlight. Today, rugby is a club sport at Kansas, and it’s far away from being one of the top two athletics revenue makers.

The University would be vastly different without the revenue and publicity football brings in. The commercials played for the University during televised games attract students from different cultures and geographical regions. There is no denying that sports play a factor when some students make a college choice. Recent achievements such as an Orange Bowl victory and a National Championship in basketball undoubtedly had an effect on this year’s enrollment jump.

Without football, Kansas probably wouldn’t be a member of the Big 12. It would have more than likely stayed in the Missouri Valley Conference when the Big 8 formed, and would have become a 20,000-plus school that focused strictly on basketball, such as Southern Illinois University.

As a mid-major it would have been tough for even a school such as Kansas to achieve the kind of success it has in basketball. Gonzaga University is one of only a few mid-major schools to become a consistent threat and even it has not reached the Final Four. Others, such as George Mason University, make the Final Four for a year, but have no consistency. Since 1966, the only school to win a NCAA basketball championship from a non-major conference was the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1990.

Kansas might have become a FBS Conference (D1-AA) football school. Kansas’ fans would have gotten to watch a structured play-off system, similar to the NFL, instead of the chaos that is the BCS, so there would have been one bright spot if that had occurred.

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a FCS school or having no football team at all.

However, in my opinion, Saturdays wouldn’t be as fun without Todd Reesing’s seven-second scrambles, Dezmon Briscoe’s spectacular catches, Daymond Patterson’s big returns, Mike Rivera’s hard hits, Darrell Stuckey’s game-breaking plays and the fans waving the wheat. That’s why I am grateful to those students, faculty and alumni who fought to keep football alive at the University nearly a century ago.