The End Of An Era?

Michael Weinrab looks at where college football is in 2012 through the lens of where it was in 1966:

I don't think it is hyperbolic to state that the aftereffects of the 1966 season sent college football lurching ever so slowly toward modernity; in its own way, it may have even helped to change America. When the top two teams in the country tie one for the Gipper, it is bound to induce a certain measure of angst among a general populace that had long ago built this game into something more than an extracurricular exercise among academic institutions. It would take 30 years, but overtime rules would eventually be adopted, Notre Dame would slough off its self-imposed ban on playing in bowl games, and the Big Ten would relax its restrictions on which teams could play in the Rose Bowl — and it only took 50 years, but here we are, on the verge of something that resembles an actual playoff.
But 1966 wasn't just an argument about Notre Dame and Michigan State and what it means to win a championship when no one wins at all; this was also an argument about the South and what it was failing to become.
"With their size and strength … the Irish and Spartans were the wave of the future of college football," wrote Allen Barra in The Last Coach, his biography of Bear Bryant. "Alabama, with its undersized, all-white team, was a relic of the past."
That year, the Crimson Tide were the only undefeated, untied team in America. Yet, for reasons that encompassed the social and physical and historical, they were considered an inferior product. They lost the Argument. They finished third in the polls.

The golden era of OSU-Michigan wouldn't have looked as impressive as it did if the SEC had integrated sooner, and more Big Ten teams had played in bowl games.  Demographically, the Big Ten was much stronger then than they are now, but without segregation, the SEC would have been plumb full of talent.  Imagine Alabama, Florida and Georgia in an era of no scholarship limits.  As it was, the Buckeyes and Wolverines struggled after 1968 playing against the Pac-10 in the Rose Bowl.  A match-up in the 60's with an integrated Alabama team would have been a real challenge.

Again, here is the cover of Street & Smith's in 1963:

That was a good question.  Not winning national championships forced the change.