Michael Oriard walked on at Notre Dame, becoming a two-year letter winner for the Fighting Irish, where he impressed enough to become the fifth-round draft choice of the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970. He played four years in the National Football League before getting cut after the 1974 player’s strike.

But while his NFL career ended, his life was just beginning. Currently at Oregon State University, he’s become a professor and an author, observing and commenting on many topics, including the National Football League and its status as a part of America’s culture.

His most recent book, Brand NFL: Making & Selling America’s Favorite Sport, discussed the explosive growth and success the league has experienced during its era of labor peace.

Zoneblitz.com recently caught up with Oriard to find out how he got where he is and what plans he has for following up on his writings down the line.

Zoneblitz: What reflections do you have on your time as a playing days and how they led you to where you are today?

Oriard: I was extremely fortunate in my football experiences.  As a walk-on at Notre Dame in 1966, I arrived as a student first, a football player second, and that priority never changed for me.  Football was a wonderful formative experience for me in college, as I worked my way into playing time by the beginning of my junior year, became a starter in the fifth game, and then was offensive captain as a senior.

When I was drafted in the fifth round by the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970, I went into the NFL with the idea that it was secondary to my primary commitment to graduate school in English.  I ended up getting cut by the Chiefs at the end of the players’ strike in 1974, but at that point had only my dissertation to finish at Stanford, and then begin my long-term career as an English professor.  I received much of the best that sports can offer, without suffering from the worst.

Zoneblitz: Did you know then that you were going to be a professor?

Oriard: I started at Notre Dame as a physics major, but as these things happen, the professor who most inspired me as a freshman was my English professor.  In the 1960s, a student could more easily choose a major because he loved it without worrying about the job prospects.  I did not switch my major to English with the intention of teaching some day, but by the time I graduated, it seemed like a good idea.  On top of that, I won a Danforth Fellowship (that paid for my entire graduate education) which was for students intending to go into teaching.

Zoneblitz: What led you to teaching?

Oriard: I seem to be consistently answering the next question each time.  The simplest answer is my love of books, particularly novels.  Being a professor of English was an opportunity to live a life of books and ideas.  Writing was not initially a major motive, but I discovered the pleasures and challenges of writing in the course of becoming an English professor.

Zoneblitz: You’re also an author, having written several books, the latest of which is Brand NFL: Making & Selling America’s Favorite Sport. Same question as before – were you an aspiring author when you were still playing the game?

Oriard: Again, I seem to have anticipated the next question.  No, I did not think about writing about football while I was still playing.  When I was a graduate student at Stanford, my Chaucer professor suggested that I seemed a nature for writing a dissertation about sport literature.  Until he mentioned it, I did not know that such a thing existed.

I wrote my dissertation and then later turned it into a book while I was beginning my teaching career at Oregon State University.  But I was a professor of American literature, and I felt a need to prove that I could write about Melville and Faulkner as well as football and baseball stories.  In addition, sport was not a very respectable academic subject back then.  So, I more or less “ran away” from sports and sports literature while writing a long book dealing with major American authors, but writing that book freed me from my defensiveness, and I turned back to writing about football as an important part of American culture.

Zoneblitz: Sports, particularly football, are heavily represented in your books. Is that because you played the game or is there more to it?

Oriard: Having played the game obviously provided an interest and a deep understanding of the sport at some level, but I was also interested in the relationship between literature and culture, and in American culture beyond literature, so football became a natural subject for me once I got over the sense that it was not a “legitimate” subject for an English professor.

Zoneblitz: You clearly still pay attention to the NFL – you’ve written books about it – what do you think of the game today compared with when you played?

Oriard: The players today are bigger, stronger, and faster.  The very best players of my day are probably as good, but the players overall today are better.  But the biggest change is the money and its impact.  Free agency and huge contracts create enormous differences within a team and increase the importance of individual over team performance more than ever.  I can’t help but think that this has made the experience of playing different today.

Zoneblitz: What do you miss about playing?

Oriard: Nothing really.  I quit playing so long ago (1974) that my memories of the experience are no longer as vivid as they were for the first several years.  My football career is simply part of my past on which I look back with satisfaction.  But I don’t miss it.

Zoneblitz: In Brand NFL and in a discussion we had previously you cited 1993 as the most important year in the development of what is today’s NFL – could you give our readers a sense of why?

Oriard: I singled out 1993 as the year when labor peace was finally achieved, creating stability within the league and removing an irritation for fans.  After 1993 the NFL could turn its attention entirely to generating revenue.

Expansion into Jacksonville and Carolina also took place in 1993.  The next year, Fox launched the NFL into a new realm of TV revenues with a $395 million bid (compared to $217 million paid by NBC)–in the next round, all of the networks were over $500 million.  And the rest of the decade saw the stadium-building and renovating boom.  It was in this period that the NFL became the absolute king of professional sports in the U.S.

Zoneblitz: What else keeps you busy these days?

Oriard: I’m associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State, working with a great new dean as we try to cope with the economic downturn that hits higher education along with everyone else.  I’m also continuing to write – I have a companion book to Brand NFL called Football Revolutions: The Transformation of the Big-Time College Sport coming out next summer or fall.