JRN 362 - Lecture Thirteen

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Thirteen

Review
• The NFL matured in the mid 1930s to
the late 1950s, becoming a fully
acceptable and profitable half of the
football kingdom.

Review
• The league crowned its first true
champion in scheduled title game
between division winners, and rule
changes made passing easier.
• That shift gave quarterbacks a
chance to shine, and during this
period, three stood above the rest:
Baugh, Luckman and Graham.

Review
• Meanwhile, a new pro league, the All
America Football Conference,
launched in 1946 to compete against
the NFL and was integrated
immediately.
• Paul Brown, who won a national
championship with Ohio State,
formed the Cleveland Browns of the

Review
• Brown led Cleveland to four AAFC
titles in its four-year existence,
disrupting football with new
approaches to everything from
statistical analysis to play-calling from
the sidelines.

Review
• Segregation in the NFL began in
1933 and ended in 1946 when the
Cleveland Rams moved to Los
Angeles and had to sign African-
American players in order to lease
the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
• The league still would not be fully
integrated until 1962.

Review
• The NFL approached the late 1950s
with great hope for a profitable future
as franchises stabilized, crowds
grew, and television networks
showed interest in broadcasting the
games.

The College Game
• College football learned much from
the NFL and changed rules to reflect
to open the game game.
• In 1945, college football permitted
passing from anywhere behind the
line of scrimmage, paving the way for
the adoption of the T-formation that
had proven successful in the NFL.

The College Game
• But the rules committee couldn’t
settle on platoon football.
• In 1941, rules allowed unlimited
substitution if the player stayed on
the field for a play.
• In 1948, unlimited substitutions could
occur on possession changes.

The College Game
• In 1953, the rules changed again to
outlaw free substitution, allowing
players to enter only once a quarter,
effectively killing two-platoon football.
• It wasn’t until the 1965 season that
two-platoon football was partially
restored.

The College Game
• The person behind the permanent
shift to two-platoon football turned out
to be Fritz Crisler.
• Crisler had been an assistant to Yale
alum Amos Alonzo Stagg at the
University of Chicago.

The College Game
• He coached at Princeton and
Michigan, developing the famed
winged helmet to help quarterbacks
spot receivers downfield.
• But his greatest contribution to the
game turned out to be two-platoon
football.

The College Game
• At a meeting of the college football
rules committee in 1941, Crisler
remarked that the key issue facing
college football as World War II
loomed would be depth as many men
would be called away to military
service..

The College Game
• Crisler recommended a free
substitution rule that would allow a
player pulled from a game with a
minor injury to return.
• The committee then passed a rule
permitting a substitute to enter the
game “at any time.”

The College Game
• That started an ebb-and-flow toward
a two-platoon system, one that
wouldn’t be fully in place until the
1970s.
• Roster sizes grew, as more and more
coaches recruited players for the
increasingly specialized play that two-
platoon football required.

The College Game
• The NCAA didn’t allow unlimited
substitutions until 1974.
• But in other matters, the college
game led to changes in NFL rules.
• In 1927, for example, colleges moved
the goal posts to the back of the end
zone. In 1932, blows to the head and
neck were banned.

The College Game
• As the NFL set itself up for the 1950s,
and college football modernized as
well, the NCAA still refused a playoff
or championship game.
• The bowl games and a poll instead
served as proxies for national
championships.

The College Game
• The Rose Bowl was the first
collegiate bowl game.
• It was first played in 1902 on New
Year’s Day, with Michigan and
Stanford participating. It was called
the Tournament East-West Football
Game. It was not held again until
1916.

The College Game
• In 1916, bowl officials named the
contest between east and west the
“Rose Bowl,” an expression extracted
from Yale’s football stadium, the Yale
Bowl.
• In 1923, the game was first played at
the Rose Bowl itself, a stadium based
on the Yale Bowl.

The College Game
• The Rose Bowl was the only college
bowl game of note until the 1930s,
when promoters in the south decided
to tap into the popularity of the game
to lure tourists during the New Year’s
holiday period.

The College Game
• In January 1935, the list of bowl
games grew economic power of the
games including:
• Orange Bowl, Miami, Florida.

The College Game
• Sugar Bowl, New Orleans, Louisiana.

The College Game
• Sun Bowl, El Paso, Texas.

The College Game
Two years later, Dallas hosted the
Cotton Bowl for the first time.

The College Game
• The new bowl games drew fans from
the frigid north
• The New Year’s Day schedule
provided the time necessary for fans
to make travel plans at the end of the
season; after all, they had to take
trains – or drive on pre-Interstate
roads.

The College Game
• Conferences, which had formed in
the 1900s – 1920s wielded their
power by determining the bowl game
or games in which its members could
play.
• The Southeastern Conference, for
example, limited its teams to the
Rose and Sugar bowls, at first.

The College Game
• And teams playing in the southern
bowl games understood they would
be playing against segregated teams
in front of segregated crowds.
• That’s why many of the bowl games
featured southern teams.

The College Game
• The Orange Bowl illustrates the rapid
growth and power of the bowl games
from the mid 1930s onward.
• In the first game on Jan. 1, 1935, a
small Eastern college, Bucknell,
played Miami University.

The College Game
• Bucknell won that first game, 26-0, in
front of few people at Miami Stadium.
• In 1936, Catholic University, defeated
the University of Mississippi, 20-19.
• A year later, Duquesne beat
Mississippi State.

The College Game
• The city of Miami built a large new
stadium to host the Orange Bowl.
• Meanwhile, the SEC voted to permit
its teams to play in the Rose Bowl
beginning in 1938, and that spelled
doom for the smaller eastern teams.

The College Game
• On Jan. 1, 1938, Auburn of the SEC
beat Michigan State of the Big 10, 6-
0, in front of 19,000 at Miami’s new
Orange Bowl Stadium.
• A year later, the bowl attracted the
two best teams in the nation:
Oklahoma and Tennessee, both 10-
0.

The College Game
• To lure Oklahoma to Miami, the
Orange Bowl Committee’s Earnie
Seiler went to the Norman, Oklahoma
campus.
• Seiler plastered posters of palm
trees, beaches and young women
around the university.
• Oklahoma went to Miami for the Jan.
1, 1939, game.

The College Game
• In one of the most violent college
football games of the era, Tennessee
held Oklahoma to 81 total yards to
win, 17-0.
• Officials assessed 242 yards in
penalties and ejected several players
in a game nicknamed “The Orange
Brawl.”

The College Game
• The reason for the extraordinary
fierceness of the game is difficult to
fathom, given that the national
championship wasn’t on the line.
• There was only one mechanism to
determine the best team at the time:
a poll of the nation’s sportswriters, as
compiled by the Associated Press.

The College Game
• The AP became the unofficial arbiter
of the national championship in 1936,
when sportswriters selected
Minnesota.
• But the poll generally took place
before Jan. 1 until 1968, rendering
the bowl games nothing more than
exhibitions before that year.

The College Game
• Texas Christian and its star Heisman
winner Davey O’Brien ended the
1938 season as the No. 1 team after
the previous top team, Notre Dame,
lost to USC on Dec. 3.
• Tennessee was ranked second,
unbeaten Duke third and Oklahoma
fourth.

The College Game
• Yet none of the teams played each
other in bowl games, as Tennessee
decided to play Oklahoma rather than
TCU in the Sugar Bowl.
• 10-0 TCU met 8-0-1 Carnegie Tech
in the Sugar Bowl instead.

The College Game
• In the Sugar Bowl, TCU won, 15-7.
• 7-0-1 Duke played 7-0-2 USC in the
Rose Bowl and lost, 7-3.

The College Game
• In that lone match between unbeaten,
untied teams, 10-0 Tennessee beat
10-0 Oklahoma but didn’t win the
national championship.
• The debate over a playoff thus began
and it would persist until the next
century.

The College Game
• The winner of the Heisman Trophy
became a national celebrity by the
end of the 1930s.
• The first winner in 1935 was Jay
Berwanger of the University of
Chicago, as noted earlier.

The College Game
• Yale’s Larry Kelley (left) of Yale won
in 1936 followed by Clint Frank, also
of Yale, in 1937.
• They would be the only winners of
the trophy from the school that
served as the cradle for American
football.

The College Game
• The 1939 Heisman Trophy winner
was Nile Kinnick of Iowa, described
by Pudge Heffelfinger as “one of
those halfbacks who come along
once in a blue moon.” He perished in
1943 when his plane went down
during a World War II training flight in
Peru.

The College Game
• Other college stars such as Dave
Schreiner of Wisconsin were killed in
action.

The College Game
• Beginning in 1944, college players
began to return from combat to
resume their studies and rejoin their
teams.
• Army, naturally, was the strongest of
them all.

The College Game
• In both 1944 and 1945, Army won the
national championship behind
running backs Glenn Davis and Doc
Blanchard.
• Known as Mr. Inside, Blanchard won
the 1945 Heisman.
• Known as Mr. Outside, Davis won the
Heisman in 1946.

The College Game
• In 1946, No. 1 Army met No. 2 Notre
Dame in one of several “game of the
century” contests in college football.
• The game, at Yankee Stadium in
New York, featured four Heisman
winners: Davis and Blanchard from
Army; Johnny Lujack and Leon Hart
from Notre Dame.

The College Game
• Many of the players were war
veterans, as were many in the crowd.
• The game thus marked a collective
homecoming of America from World
War II, underscoring the position of
football in American culture as the
haze of the war lifted.

The College Game
• “ … it was postwar America; the boys
had come back home. In a sense, the
game really represented that
transition. America had returned to
normal; Notre Dame had its football
team back and its coach back.” –
Notre Dame athletic director Jack
Swarbrick in 2010 before the teams
met again in New York.

The College Game
• The two teams played to an epic 0-0
tie that America listened to on radio
from coast-to-coast.
• Army and Notre Dame, two great
institutions that cultivated national
followings in the 1920s, had united
the nation in peace, prosperity &
football to come.

The College Game
• But the institutions that refined the
European game of rugby into the
American game of football decided to
leave the game behind.
• In 1954, Yale, Princeton and Harvard
– the original Big Three – joined five
other eastern colleges in forming the
Ivy League, which began play in
1956.

The College Game
• All eight would deemphasize sports
and no longer seek to play against
the best teams in the nation.
• An era had ended.

The College Game
• Also in 1954, Pudge Heffelfinger died
at the age of 86.
• A three-time All-American,
Heffelfinger played for Walter Camp
at Yale College in 1888, 1889, 1890,
and 1891.
• He signed the first pro football
contract in 1892.

The College Game
• Before he died, Heffelfinger wrote his
autobiography.
• In the book, he wrote that football had
changed little in the more than sixty
years since he first played at Yale.

The College Game
• “What do you mean the modern
game? In some form or another we
did about everything that is done in
football today. Of course, we didn’t
forward pass because it was against
the rules. We had laterals but they
weren’t used much. Our system of
defense was fundamentally the same
as it is today.”

The College Game
• But Heffelfinger criticized the
momentum toward making
permanent a two-platoon system
even though college football returned
to single platoons in 1953.

The College Game
• “I have always maintained that
modern coaches use too many men,”
he wrote. “Football is essentially a
team game, and how in the name of
Billy Blaze can you develop unity of
performance by using thirty or forty
players to a game.”

The College Game
• Even before the founding institutions
of the East decided to leave big-time
football, another key school in
football’s history had already left the
game.
• The University of Chicago, which won
seven Big Ten titles under Amos
Alonzo Stagg, stopped playing in
1939.

The College Game
• The power in college football shifted
to the south, southwest and west as
the first great teams faded from
prominence in autumn and the
founding generation of the game
passed on.

JRN 362 - Lecture Thirteen

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JRN 362 - Lecture Thirteen