College Football: Babes in Wonderland

  • Share
  • Read Later

(4 of 10)

Walter Camp, wobbly ball and all, is college football's original immortal. And nobody at Notre Dame is ever likely to forget Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne, who on a grey afternoon in 1913 demonstrated for the first time how deadly the forward pass could be—by demoralizing an unbeaten Army team that outweighed the Fighting Irish by 15 Ibs. per man. Dorais threw, Rockne caught; the Irish soared 243 yds. in the air and upset mighty Army 35-13.

Few & Far Between. The game of football has never been quite the same since—a good thing, too, because it might otherwise not even exist today. Old-fashioned "pig pile" football was a brutal way to spend an afternoon: the casualty toll for the 1905 season alone was 18 deaths and 149 serious injuries, and President Theodore Roosevelt talked about abolishing the sport. The forward pass opened up the game and made it safer. Massed defenses, designed only to stop a crunching ground attack, swiftly became obsolete as more and more teams included the pass among the weapons in their arsenals. Still, brilliant passers, brilliant receivers—and brilliant passing combinations—were few and far between. There was Friedman-to-Oosterbaan, of course. There were Alabama's Rose Bowl champions of 1935, with Dixie Howell throwing to Don Hutson—who later went on to the Green Bay Packers and set five National Football League pass-receiving records that still stand today.

But all through the '20s and '30s and even the '40s—when Notre Dame's Lujack was pitching to Leon Hart and Princeton's Dick Kazmaier was throwing strikes to Frank McPhee—the pass was a sometime thing. In his biggest year, Quarterback Lujack gained 791 yds. on passes, a figure that Terry Hanratty has already eclipsed this year with five games still to go. "The pass was a necessary evil," explains Whitey Piro, a onetime Iowa coach, now a scout for the pro Buffalo Bills. "You passed only when you were in trouble, when you had long yardage to make on third down. But practically no techniques were taught. You just ran toward the goal line and looked back every so often to see if the ball was coming your way." Says Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Dodd, an All-America quarterback at Tennessee in 1930: "When I was playing football, we'd throw maybe eight or ten times a game. Now we throw 20 or 30—or more."

Why? Partly because it's fun. Partly because it's necessary. "If you can't pass, you can't win," says Southern Cal Coach John McKay. But mostly they throw because they know how to throw—and catch—better than anybody ever did before. "Look, I don't want to disparage anybody," says U.C.L.A. Coach Tommy Prothro. "But you list all the great passing combinations in chronological order, and it's almost certain that each one was better than the one that went before. Today's passing game is more refined."

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10