The Room was strung with chicken wire, hung so low from the ceiling that players had to stay crouched under the mesh. From January through March, they were sent in there four days a week, one- on-one, to fight 'til the last man standing. Never mind no one could actually stand.

The idea was to turn players into guerrilla warriors, and coaches - particularly an assistant named Bill Parcells - had all kinds of creative ways of making that happen. After a series of exhaustive physical drills on a mat, the capper had two players against each other, under the wire, for three minutes.

Twenty-eight players had enough of that stuff and quit, and those who stayed, "kind of lost interest. I'd put myself in the latter category," Griffin said.

FSU finished 0-11 the season after chicken wire was exposed, then 1-10 after that. It was one of the darkest eras for the school's football program.

Passionate To Help

Griffin now is an attorney for Foley & Lardner in Tampa, but he has rekindled his interest in football. He is one of five members of the NCAA Division I-A Infractions Appeals Committee, which means he helps stand in judgment over schools that violate the rules.

He has never forgotten those days under the chicken wire in Tallahassee, and how it colored his college experience.

"I'm passionate about student-athletes being allowed to be student-athletes," he said.

He is in a position to help that happen.

Griffin is Tampa through and through. He played for Billy Turner at Hillsborough High before going to FSU in the years immediately before Bobby Bowden arrived. He was among those who helped bring the Hall of Fame Bowl here from Birmingham, and later served as Outback Bowl Association chairman for eight years.

Along the way, he graduated first in his class in 1976 at FSU, and first in '78 at FSU's college of law. He also is one of the lawyers for Al Gore who appealed the Florida election results, but that's another story.

The contacts he made in football helped him earn an invitation last year to the NCAA appeals committee. He is called into the game if a school disputes a penalty handed down by the infractions committee - and yes, Gator fans, he would recuse himself if FSU was involved.

Keep Perspective

The idea is to keep some resemblance of sanity in the world of big-time college sports, particularly football. The stakes have gotten so high that many schools forget why they exist in the first place. For Griffin, it keeps coming back to chicken wire, and coaches who were out of control.

When he was going to school, off-season workouts weren't regulated like they are today, nor were there scholarship limits. Coaches would sign as many players as they could, then field a team through attrition.

"Trying to go to school and go through that at the same time was just the hardest thing I ever had to do," Griffin said.

The NCAA regulations manual is about as thick as the Manhattan yellow pages, but it basically comes down to intent. If schools are trying to police themselves and play by the rules, they'll usually be fine. When they don't, there are ways of dealing with them.

It's not so much about getting retribution on outlaw schools. It's more about giving the majority of athletes the chance to be students first. After all, that's why they're in school.

Theoretically, anyway.

"When you get these briefs and you hear the arguments, what comes home to you very quickly is the breadth of your impact on the school, the coaches, and especially the student-athlete," he said. "What you decide has a great determination with what goes on in their lives.

"But the point of the whole process is to look at the big picture. What do we have to do to assure the process remains even keel and college athletics remains the way we want it to?"

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