Editor's note: Each Friday throughout the remainder of July, West Virginia University is celebrating the 150^th anniversary of college football. WVU has been playing the sport since 1891 and is currently the 14^th winningest program in NCAA history. This week, we examine the impact television has had on the game and its role in helping Mountaineer football become a nationally recognized brand.

Jet air service and television transformed college football from a regional game mostly consumed on local radio in the early 1950s into a coast-to-coast national phenomenon by the end of the decade.
            
TV's beginning in college football was modest, to say the least. 
 
It happened on Sept. 30, 1939 when NBC televised Waynesburg (Pa.) College's game against Fordham played at Triborough Stadium on New York City's Randall's Island to approximately 1,000 television sets tuned in to station W2XBS (later WNBC) in New York City. Bill Stern was the only announcer and one high camera was used to shoot the action.
            
Other games were televised throughout the 1940s, but it wasn't until after World War II when more television sets were being purchased and advancements in technology enabled cities to be linked that more college games were being broadcasted. Two college programs ahead of the curve in establishing its television presence were Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania.
            
In 1950, Notre Dame made a $185,000 deal with DuMont for the broadcasting rights to its football game that year, while Penn sold the television rights to its home games to the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) for $150,000.
            
This caused considerable consternation within the NCAA because many universities contended that television was going to severely impact attendance. During the 1951 NCAA convention, a group of schools led by the University of Pittsburgh wanted tighter controls of TV to protect their gate receipts, and the solution was to hand over the organization's television rights to the NCAA on an exploratory basis.
            
The NCAA had not fared well in its recent quest to clean up the sport in 1948 and was eager for an opportunity to reestablish its power. In what later became known as the "Sanity Code," the NCAA issued a series of directives aimed at ending the practice of awarding scholarships and extra benefits given to prized athletes, a common practice at many major universities, especially in the south for years.
            
Two years later, in 1950, the NCAA issued each member a questionnaire to see how the code was being adopted and seven schools - Villanova, Maryland, Boston College, Virginia, Virginia Tech, The Citadel and VMI - chose to answer it honestly by indicating that extra benefits were still being awarded to its athletes. A move to have the "Sinful Seven" - as the media dubbed them - expelled from the NCAA was taken up by the rest of the institutions. The measure failed, and the NCAA lost considerable power and prestige following the vote.
            
But presiding over an association-wide television contract was another opportunity for the NCAA to get back some of its juice. Walter Byers, the NCAA's newly appointed executive director, successfully negotiated a one-year television contract with NBC in 1951 that paid the organization $1.14 million to broadcast one college football each Saturday during the season.
            
Notre Dame and Penn, which had already negotiated lucrative local deals, challenged the NCAA's authority to negotiate exclusively for the entire membership. The other schools, fueled by their attendance concerns, voted overwhelmingly to approve the restricted television plan negotiated by the NCAA, thus giving the organization sole negotiating rights for television. If Penn and Notre Dame, or any other schools attempting to negotiate their own TV deals, did not abide by the new directive, the rest of the membership was simply prepared to cancel their games with them. Penn and Notre Dame ultimately ended their challenge and by doing so, this gave the NCAA enormous power it had never-before enjoyed.
            
The NCAA remained college football's sole negotiating agent for television until 1984 when Oklahoma and Georgia successfully sued the organization, claiming its television practices were in violation of the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts. The Supreme Court agreed in a near-unanimous decision, returning the rights to individual institutions, which chose to negotiate their TV rights collectively at the conference level.
            
Prior to 1984, the NCAA had a longstanding policy of capping the number of games each institution could appear on national television each year. This was done to protect the smaller schools and limit the number of times schools such as Notre Dame, Michigan, USC, Ohio State, Texas and Oklahoma could be shown on national TV. On many occasions, the NCAA instituted split telecasts to maximize its television opportunities for member schools.
            
"A major example that we used in the case," explained Chuck Neinas, then the College Football Association's (CFA) executive director, was Oklahoma and Southern Cal, which were both rated in the top five, but to satisfy the NCAA's requirements, a traditional black college game involving Alabama A&M was shown on just two stations, and a Southern Conference game, was shown on three stations and yet they all got the same money."
            
This was a common practice born out of the original television plan crafted by Byers in 1951.
            
"Walter Byers controlled all of that," former West Virginia athletic director Leland Byrd once recalled. "You only had one network that was carrying the games. (By the 1970s) they had four regionals and a game of the week. You only had about five choices at that particular time.
            
"In the East, for example, Pitt and Penn State were the superpowers at that time and they got almost all of the television spots," Byrd said. "The best we could do was get one game on with either Pitt or Penn State. It was the same thing with Syracuse and Boston College. If they got one then that was about it. Until ESPN came along, there was not a whole lot you could do about it."
            
Even back in the 1950s, when telecasts were restricted to just one game per week, the exposure college football received from national television coverage still made a tremendous impact on the interest and appeal of the game. In fact, television had the opposite effect on attendance than what was originally feared in the early 1950s - overall attendance rising from 17.3 million at 621 four-year colleges in 1955 to 20.4 million in 1960, according Byers in his 1995 book Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletics.
            
In the meantime, individual bowls were permitted to negotiate their own television deals and that's how other networks became involved with college football. ABC first televised the Sugar Bowl in 1953 and continued to air it until 1958 when NBC claimed its rights. CBS in 1953 got its foot in the door with the Orange Bowl and continued to broadcast the game throughout the 1950s.
            
Later in the decade, some of the minor bowls such as the Sun (CBS), Gator (CBS) and Liberty (NBC) also established TV deals.
            
West Virginia's first-ever appearance on national television happened on Jan. 1, 1954 when it faced Georgia Tech in the Sugar Bowl. Harry Wismer and Johnny Lujack handled the call, and although WVU lost the game in disappointing fashion, 42-19, the exposure Art Lewis' program got from the broadcast helped it immensely.
            
Lewis once demonstrated the immense value television had on his West Virginia program in this humorous exchange the coach had with a fan, captured by Dick Hudson in 1962. 
 
Hudson, writing in the Charleston Daily Mail, described a telephone call Lewis received from a disgruntled West Virginia fan upset with the way the team played down in New Orleans.
            
"Were you there?" Lewis asked.
            
"No, I couldn't get away."
            
"Did you hear it on the radio," Lewis said.
            
"No."
            
"Well, maybe you saw it on television," he continued.
            
"Yes, I saw it on TV over at my wife's folks …"
            
"Well tell me," Lewis interrupted, "how many other West Virginia coaches or teams have you ever seen on national television?"
            
Only one other WVU game played in the 1950s made it on regional television against Penn State in Morgantown on Oct. 31, 1959. The next national appearance didn't happen until Oct. 19, 1963 when WVU played host to Pitt during the state's Centennial celebration.
            
Late sports information director Eddie Barrett said Mountaineer Field's new press box - constructed at a price tag of $150,000 - came as a result of CBS agreeing to air the Pitt game.
            
"We brought the Pitt team down the river on the showboat and they weren't going to let it under the Smithfield Street Bridge because two of the towers were too high, but we had CBS cameras there to film it all," Barrett once recalled. 
            
Throughout the 1960s, West Virginia was only on television three more times - once against Utah in the 1964 Liberty Bowl on ABC, once on a regional basis against VMI in 1967 on ABC, and once more against South Carolina in the 1969 Peach Bowl on the Mizzlou Network.
            
It wasn't until television was deregulated in 1984 that the rest of the country began seeing Mountaineer football on a more regular basis. 
 
Today, every WVU football game is televised and a high percentage of them are televised nationally.