Bubba Smith, the former NFL defensive lineman who died this week at the age of 66, was a very good professional football player who made two Pro Bowls and won a Super Bowl ring. But he was a great college football player, and also a greatly influential college football player.
It’s Smith’s influence on the game of college football that is explored in the HBO documentary Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football, which HBO is re-airing on Monday at 7 p.m.
Smith grew up in Texas and was widely acclaimed as a dominant high school football player, but the major colleges in Texas wouldn’t offer him a scholarship because he was black.
“I just wanted to go to Texas,” Smith says in Breaking the Huddle. “I called Darrell Royal and asked, ‘Coach, can I come to the University of Texas?’ He said, ‘Uh, Bubba, I could probably get you a scholarship . . . but I don’t know when the football program is gonna integrate.’”
Segregation in the South forced Smith to choose Michigan State, where he became an All-American, and great African-American players like Smith eventually made Southern schools realize they couldn’t compete on the highest levels of college football unless they integrated. That may be Smith’s most important legacy.