Navy Friday, aka 100 Years

A hundred years.  

For almost everyone in the world, that’s more than a lifetime ago.  As the old Longfellow rhyme goes, hardly a man is now alive who remembers the 1^st of November, 1913.  Needless to say, the world was quite different then.  Woodrow Wilson was President, running hither and yon implementing segregationist policies.  Prohibition was an up and coming idea.  And Fielding Yost of Michigan was organizing a regional boycott of a small school in northern Indiana because he hated Catholics. 

Noted nativist, bigot, and hilljack Fielding H. Yost
was unavailable for this article, having been dead for quite some time.

The boycott, as I covered earlier, began with a cancellation of the 1910 Notre Dame-Michigan game at the 11^th hour.  This infuriated the members of that Notre Dame team who had been looking forward to that game, most notably a Freshman from Chicago named Knute Rockne. The dream of playing the premier team from the West was dead. 

Another thing about the world of 1913.  This was a time when the schools that constituted The Establishment were still very, very good at football.  Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia all competed for national championships in the sport.  And on par with these Ivy League schools, a destination for many scions of prominent Eastern families, was the United States Military Academy at West Point.  It’s hard to wrap our heads around it nowadays, but Army produced over thirty All-Americans, three national titles, and three Heisman Trophy winners in its history.  From the turn of the century to the 1950s, they were one of the nation’s premier football teams. 

One of several Army national championship teams

Enter Notre Dame.  A small Catholic school hardly anyone in the country could find on the map, its new coach decided to fight Yost’s blackballing the only way he could.  He scheduled the very best teams in the country outside of Yost’s sphere of maleficence.  And as the capstone of this suicide schedule, he negotiated a deal with Army to travel across the country to upstate New York.  Once again, I say, things were very different then.  Nowadays, Notre Dame goes on road games carrying a semi trailer, emblazoned everywhere with the Notre Dame logo, full of equipement along for the ride.  In 1913, the players packed their own sandwiches and travelled by train, eighteen football players traveling with fourteen pairs of football cleats to share among themselves. 

But on this trip they carried a secret, revolutionary weapon.  Football coaches had only recently allowed players to advance the ball by throwing it downfield from the quarterback to an end or receiver.  Most schools stayed away from this newfangled football weapon.  Like the unfrozen caveman lawyer, the forward pass confused them.  A subset of them used it only as a last resort, to move the ball downfield while down big at the end of games.  And an even tinier subset of schools implemented pass plays where the receiver would run downfield, then stop and wait for the ball. 

That freshman from 1910 and his roommate Gus Dorais changed all that.  As lifeguards at Cedar Point Ohio that summer, they practiced throwing a football back and forth to each other on the shores of Lake Erie.  It must have looked absurd to the beachgoers: footballs were not to be used that way.  Everyone knew that.  But they progressed from throwing to each other while standing still to throwing towards a target running downfield.  It was new, revolutionary, and as far as they knew, Gus and Knute were the first ones to think of the concept. 

Plaque in their honor, Cedar Point, Ohio. 

Coach Harper kept this new passing concept under wraps for the entire season.  Army, preparing for its upcoming game against their archrivals at the Naval Academy, was prepared for the usual football technique: line plunges, counters, end arounds, maybe even a reverse if the offense was feeling especially frisky.  Army wasn’t worried, though.  Their line outweighed Notre Dame’s line by fifteen pounds per man.  Back then, when an athlete over 200 pounds was notable indeed, this was a big, big difference.

Instead, Dorais opened up the passing attack, tossing a pass eleven yards for a first down.  Then another, then another, and then a forty-yard touchdown pass.  The Army was utterly confused.  Not knowing how to defend the run and the pass at the same time, Notre Dame switched back and forth at will, throwing the ball until Army dropped back to stop the pass, and then smashing them in the face with fullback dives until Army moved up to stop the run.  Final Score, Notre Dame 35, Army 13. 

It’s fair to say on that one fall day, a hundred years ago, everything about college football changed in three hours.  The forward pass was no longer a novelty or some bit of newfangled nonsense: every team in the country would have to learn how to use it and defend against it or lose horribly.  The days of football-as-rugby were dead and gone.  Meanwhile, the headlines in New York and across the country shouted the coming of a new day and a new team:

Yes, Catholics.  For those were the days of the WASP establishment, when the Ku Klux Klan would burn crosses on the lawns of Catholics who would move out of ‘their’ neighborhoods and into one of ‘our’ neighborhoods.  Notre Dame became more than a little Catholic school in a little town in a state somewhere in the middle of the country.  It became a badge of honor for Catholics across the country to cheer for Notre Dame, a school they’d never seen in a state they’d never been to.  Their team wasn’t the local university that shuffled admissions to make sure the right sort got in and the wrong sort got left out.  Their team was the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.  A team fighting, to paraphrase the fictional Buster Kilrain, not for equality, but for the right to prove they were better men than many of their foes.  

   And in support of this idea and this passion they turned out in droves.  The Subway Alumni became Notre Dame’s staunchest supporters away from home.  While Army fans arrived for tilts against Notre Dame in New York City in Cadillacs, De Sotos, Dussenbergs, and touring cars, Notre Dame’s fanbase arrived in droves via subway, a deluge rising from the tunnels below the Polo Grounds after a trip across New York from immigrant tenements across the country.  All, once again, for a school they’d never seen, in a place they’d never been to.  Of course, it didn’t stay that way forever.  Soon the children of these Subway Alumni began to go off to college.  And more and more of them as the years went by went off to that little place in a little state far away. 

                That place isn’t so little anymore.  

    It has eight thousand undergraduates, a colossal endowment, hundreds of alumni clubs across the country, and dozens of study abroad programs around the world.  But the road to becoming that big a presence, that caliber of a university, and that big of a force for good in the world, began one hundred years ago today on a football field in upstate New York. 

                Everyone, here’s to 171 years of Notre Dame, 126 years of Notre Dame Football, and 100 years, to the day, of Dorais to Rockne and the Forward Pass.

                Now let’s honor them by stomping on Navy.