News reports about the recent death of 10-time national championship basketball coach John Wooden referenced how he might have coached at Minnesota instead of UCLA. Not so well known is that the Gophers athletic department probably could have had both Wooden and college football legend Bud Wilkinson coaching here in the 1950s.
Wooden, who had been an All-American guard at Purdue, was coaching at Indiana State in 1948. Both Minnesota and UCLA were interested in hiring him away from Indiana State, but Wooden preferred the Gophers job because of his Midwest roots. While Wooden waited for a final offer by telephone from Minnesota, a snowstorm delayed the call. In the meantime, UCLA telephoned and offered him the Brunins job which he accepted thinking the Gophers had lost interest.
Wilkinson had grown up in Minneapolis, played on national championship teams for the Gophers in the 1930s and started coaching at Oklahoma in 1947. He won conference titles year after year and his teams were national champions three times in the 1950s.
Despite his success at Oklahoma sources have said that Wilkinson was very interested in leaving the Sooners in the 1950s and returning to his home town and alma mater. The interest, according to the same sources, wasn’t mutual.
A de-emphasis on athletics was part of the campus scene at Minnesota after World War II. The University of Chicago had left the Big Ten Conference in the 1930s and some Minnesota officials wanted a similar fate for the Gophers, according to University sports historian Mike Wilkinson (no relation to Bud Wilkinson).
Mike Wilkinson said University of Minnesota president James Morrill was outspoken about his dislike of big-time college athletics. In the early to mid-1950s there was huge public interest here in bringing back Bud Wilkinson to coach the Gophers, a program that won five national championships in the 1930’s and 1940s but had become mediocre.
The public pressure necessitated that Wilkinson receive an interview but it was supposedly an awkward meeting with Morrill. Sources have reported over the years that Wilkinson was kept in the president’s reception area for a couple of hours, a not so subtle message regarding the administration’s lack of interest in him. When Wilkinson and Morrill finally met, the president told the home town hero that he probably wouldn’t want to come here because of the intent to de-emphasize athletics, according to Mike Wilkinson.
Bud Wilkinson returned to Oklahoma where he enjoyed several more years of legend making football including a winning streak of 47 straight games. By 1960 the Gophers had climbed back to the top of college football with a national championship season under coach Murray Warmath, an unpopular choice to coach Minnesota when he started here in 1954 and a coach who had nowhere near the resume of Wilkinson.
Interestingly, when the Gophers received their first bowl invitation in school history in 1960 there were faculty leaders on campus who proclaimed this should be Minnesota’s first and last Rose Bowl.