MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Once upon a time, college football was played for fun.

It was fun for the players to play it, the coaches to coach it, the fans to watch it. It was arguments over polls, a game without replays where every call was final, where a national championship was argued over and not played for.

Fans were involved.

It was Roger Staubach being a dodger not from Brooklyn. There was a new “in” offense every few years, from the Split T to the Winged T to the Wishbone to a period where the Heisman Trophy belonged to running backs not quarterbacks.

Do you know that from 1973 to 1983 every season the award went to a running back? The names conjure up images of greatness and what college football really was — John Cappelletti, Archie Griffin (twice in a row), Tony Dorsett, Earl Campbell, Billy Sims, Charles White, George Rodgers, Marcus Allen, Herschel Walker and Mike Rozier.

After a year off for maybe the most fun winner of all, quarterback Doug Flutie, maybe the greatest running back ever ran off with the award, Auburn’s running back Bo Jackson.

Maybe you had to be there and maybe today’s game offers better athletes, bigger athletes, but there really is no comparison to the joy and interest produced by the game as it once was and as it is today.

One of the symbols of the fun that college football was before agents and transfer portals, before the financial report mattered more than the box score before players were staying in school because they could make more money there than by heading off into the life college was supposed to prepare them for before all that a part of the aura was the spring football game was a strong part of the attraction of the game.

It came when college fans were starved for football. Teams were being formed, new coaches introduced, college basketball at a halt and a long summer without collegiate sports lay ahead.

Spring games now are falling by the wayside. Recently, Texas joined a growing list of canceled spring games. Others aren’t holding real spring games, changing them into something of a football fair with anything but a football game taking place.

West Virginia, by the way, is one of them. The March 5 affair is being called a “showcase”, which promises to be more of a glorified practice, sort of a midweek afternoon TV game show with Rich Rodriguez in the role of Peter Marshall and the players turned into a panel of Charles Nelson Reilly, Paul Lynde, Cliff Arquette and George Gobel.

It isn’t the fans are tired of the games. Last year Ohio State’s attendance for its spring game soared past 80,000 by 12 people, Alabama drew 72,358, Penn State an estimated 67,000, Nebraska 60,452 and Georgia 55, 601.

One understands that football remains fun at those schools. Last year, WVU announced an attendance of 18,540 fans after the 2023 spring game, played on a cold, wet day, had a crowd estimated at 2,000 or below.

In 2016, the Mountaineers even experimented with playing the game at the Greenbrier, but more than a success it showed that the game was going onto life support.

These days, with football following the movement of society as a whole, at WVU they are weighing their options.

They, like so many other schools, feel it opens the door to tampering and scouting their players.

“There is tampering and it is rampant,” coach Rodriguez said in his pre-spring press conference. “You don’t see tampering in the NFL because you’ll lose draft picks and you will get fined. In college, you don’t see anyone get in trouble for tampering.

“I can see their point. I’ve got this guy that’s really good. If he goes out there and shows out and somebody offers him half a million dollars and takes him from your program. If they don’t directly tamper, they’ll do it through a high school coach or do it through somebody in the community or through an agent or something.”

This, of course, is a real problem but not really with the spring game.

Don’t you really think with what goes into recruiting, with the internet and ratings services and websites specializing in recruiting and recruits that the other schools know about your players?

What’s more, no coach will show anything but vanilla with schemes and play calling and star players are used mostly in cameo roles, just showing off for a series or two for fear of injury.

What will this year’s spring showcase involve?

“I want our fans to watch our players, but a true spring game where you’re going to really see a guy show out and all that, we’re probably not going to have that,” Rodriguez admitted. “We’ll have a little bit of scrimmage and play a little football, but I am worried about it because there’s not as much structure to keep tampering away.”

If you hadn’t noticed, the days of innocence in the sport are over.