The bid: Starks, Krause, Kernan, and a hundred people

1991 – 1992

The South Bend bid began in the local chapter. Bill Starks and Edward "Moose" Krause of the South Bend chapter of the National Football Foundation led the proposal effort, and they took the idea to Mayor Joe E. Kernan. Kernan carried it to Project Future, the city's economic-development department, whose executive director Patrick McMahon collaborated with over a hundred people to craft the city's proposal. The proposal slated a $14 million facility in the downtown, and of the sites explored — a site near the Indiana Toll Road among them — the top choice was a location near Century Center, the city's convention center on the St. Joseph River. On July 13, 1992, William Pearce, chairman of the National Football Foundation, announced that South Bend had won. The beaten finalists named in the announcement record were Atlanta, Houston, the New Jersey Meadowlands and New Orleans.

Two counts of the competition stand in the record, and both are printed at their sources. The Foundation's search, as its history tells it, began with the thirty-five cities holding local chapters, South Bend among them. The mayoral record, as the Tribune's account of Kernan's tenure carries it, remembers the win as a selection over eighty-nine other cities — the wider field of places that sought or were sounded for the Hall across the whole competition. The figures describe different rounds of the same contest, and the record keeps them separate rather than merging them into one number. The civic meaning of the win, in the mayoral record, is told whole in the Government record of this history and cross-referenced there; what belongs here is the shape of the bid itself — a chapter-led approach, a mayor who took it up as an economic-development prize, a hundred-person proposal shop, and a downtown site beside the convention center the city already owned.

Sources:

1. College Football Hall of Fame, institutional history — the chapter-led bid of Bill Starks and Edward "Moose" Krause, the approach to Mayor Kernan, Project Future and Patrick McMahon's hundred collaborators, the $14 million proposal, the Century Center site as top choice, and William Pearce's announcement of July 13, 1992, with Atlanta, Houston, the Meadowlands and New Orleans named.
2. South Bend Tribune, mayoral record of Joe E. Kernan, as carried in Government — the selection over eighty-nine other cities, and Kernan's central part in winning the Hall.