College football: then and now
In my dusty attic I keep a stack of college football yearbooks, individual game programs, my personal football scrapbook (kept in 1939), and other similar paraphernalia dating mostly from the 1930’s and 1940’s. (This is the same dusty attic in which I found the Emily Post book Etiquette, which was the subject of my previous posting “Proper manners: then and now” on 11/16/06.)
Thumbing through the pages of Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 and the Street & Smith’s Football Yearbook for 1940, so many differences between college football then and now come to the eye.
Race/ethnicity of players. Each of these publications has numerous photographs of individual players as well as action photos of games from 1939. In the Illustrated Football Annual, with two possible exceptions, every player was white and none had ethnic names other than some denoting Polish ancestry. (The two possible exceptions as to all white players—their black-and-white photos weren’t conclusive—were one Lou Montgomery, a back at Boston College, and Jerry Courtney, a back at Syracuse.) The Street & Smith Yearbook did better: it pictured Jackie Robinson, who was a back at UCLA before he went on to fame as the first black to break the baseball color barrier in 1947 when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The latter publication also went on to mention a Kenny Washington, a halfback, also at UCLA, who had graduated after the 1939 season. It went on to refer to Washington as a “great Negro halfback whom Western critics agreed was a finer back than any other in the West,” and to Robinson as “another Negro star of 1939…” Also pictured was a black player, an Archie Harris, a back at Indiana, of whom it said that he “gets praise for defensive play.” Today, it appears from watching football on TV, that more than half the college and professional players are black.
The Street & Smith Yearbook also described a pictured player at Oklahoma as an American Indian, saying about him: “Palefaces took land from his forefathers, and winning it back, yard by yard, for the Oklahoma team is Jack Jacobs.” It is hard to imagine such a comment in today’s politically correct world.
Size and weight of players. I guess that the average lineman (offensive and defensive) on the NCAA-IA teams (the major schools) today weighs somewhere between 230-260 pounds; of course, this average includes the few scrawny ones who weigh around 215 along with the behemoths of well over 300 pounds. The backs probably average well over 200, probably 210-220.
Let’s look at the weights of the No. 2 and the no. 3 teams in the country in 1939 as ranked in the Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 (more about the ranking system below). I don’t know who the no. 1 team was because my copy of the publication has the last few pages missing—the alphabetical listing stops with Southern California--so the no. 1 team must have been somewhere between S and Z. No. 2 was Cornell, whose 16 lineman averaged 191 pounds (the heaviest was 222) and 12 backs averaged 182 (the heaviest 205). No. 3 was Southern California, who had 17 linemen at an average 199 (the heaviest 221) and 12 backs who averaged 184 (the heaviest 197). A tackle at Harvard was of such spectacular weight that he was described as “Gargantuan Vern Miller, 265 pounds of beef on the hoof…”
Endicott Peabody III, a former governor of Massachusetts, was an All-American guard at Harvard in 1941, at a hefty 185 pounds—in fact, he was given the nickname of “Chub.” During the Jimmy Carter administration in the late 1970’s he had an appointed post in Washington (I forget just what it was), at which time I chanced to be seated next to him at a luncheon there. I told him that I remembered his football career, and brought up the difference in the weight of college players during his time and those of the current time; he told me that his son had tried out for the Harvard team when he weighed about 200 pounds, but was cut because he was too light.
Uniforms. Helmets were less round back then, they were more like crowns, and had no face masks (except for the occasional player who had had a broken nose or other facial injury). Jerseys were long-sleeved, unlike the short sleeves of today, and rarely had any markings other than the player’s number on the front and back—there were no school names, no players' names, no numbers on the sleeves. There were no school initials or other adornments on the helmets. Players didn’t wear gloves. And players on a team wore the same socks, usually white anklets or, less often, knee-length socks along with the white anklets. But all of them on the team wore the same—unlike the sloppy mess today of some teams whose players wear short, ugly, black anklets that barely come over the shoe top, while others on the same team wear white or black knee-length socks without accompanying anklets.
Officials. In the old days there were four officials: referee, umpire, head linesman, and field judge—about the same basic positions as today, except that now there are also line, back, and side judges. The officials wore the same striped shirts back then but didn’t have numbers on them. Of course, there were no instant replays whereby the officials could review their calls.
Other differences. Back then there was no electronic real-time communication between the coach, an assistant coach in the upper stands to call plays, and the quarterback. In fact, at one time there was a penalty for “coaching from the sidelines.”
Before there was TV, radio broadcasts of games required more skillful announcers and imaginative listeners.
Football stadiums were often named after wealthy alumni who had financed their construction, or enlargement. There were no corporate-named fields.
Prior to World War II, there were just five bowl games: Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange, and Sun. The first post-WW II bowl was the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, which began on January 1, 1946 (two other bowls also opened that year but didn’t survive). There were no corporate-named bowl games, as there are today.
Teams in the 1930's and 1940's played from the wing formation (single wing right, single wing left, double wing). An exception was Stanford, who in 1940 started the "T" formation, with Frank Albert at quarterback. Around 1950 teams began to shift to the "T" and the shotgun.
Today a player on a team may be in any class from freshman to senior. Not so prior to World War II--then, freshmen at a college had their own team, which played a schedule against freshman teams at other schools; only when they became sophomores were they eligible for the varsity.
There was no two-point conversion back then.
Players didn't have tattoos.
Football teams weren't referred to as "programs."
Low scoring then, high scoring now. Many games during the 1930’s and 1940’s ended with low scores--14-7, 10-3, 7-6 were typical, especially among evenly matched teams; 20, 30, or more points by one team usually were in mismatches where that team was playing a weak opponent. There were even some 0-0 ties (those were the days before the tie-breaker rule). An example is the 7-3 victory of Southern California over Duke in the 1939 Rose Bowl.
Today scores are likely to be double-digit points on both sides—the 42-39 victory of Ohio State over Michigan, the no. 1 and no. 2 teams in the country respectively at the time of their meeting on Nov. 18, 2006 , had a lot of scoring even for today, but wasn’t unusual. Why, then, today’s higher scoring?
Higher scoring is usually indicative of more skilled players on the participating teams. It seems there are better players today because (1) there is a larger pool of high school players that colleges can recruit (just because the general population of the country is much larger); (2) every team today has three platoons—offense, defense, and special teams—whereas teams in earlier periods usually had an eleven-man first-team that played most of the entire sixty minutes of a game, while second and third-team players were used sparingly; and (3) in the earlier years there were almost no black players (except at black colleges), whereas today they are a majority of the team at just about every college in the country.
National Rankings. Today only the top 25 teams in the country are ranked as the season progresses—the rankings are by four different groups, of which the Associated Press rankings are the oldest and the most often referred to as the football season progresses. However, every team in the Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 was given a national ranking for the 1939 season, which was done by an “AZZIRATEM System,” a system about which no information was provided (since the system functioned long before there were computers, it must have required a tremendous amount of manual number-crunching).
As mentioned above, Cornell was no. 2 and Southern California no. 3 in 1939 (because of missing pages, I can’t find no. 1). Duke, which rarely wins a game today, was no. 5 in 1939. Today’s no. 1, Ohio State (as of this writing), was no. 16 in 1939; no. 2 today, Michigan, was no. 17; Southern California is no. 3 today and was the same in 1939; Notre Dame, no. 6 today was no. 8 in 1939.
Florida State was nowhere to be seen in the 1940 yearbooks. The reason, as I learned from the school's website, was that football there had been abandoned in 1905 and was not started up again until 1947.
The highest (worst) ranking in 1939 was Hartwick College’s 529, who lost 6 games and tied 1 (at 0-0) and went scoreless in 4 games and scored only 21 points all season; it has done a little better this year at 4-6. Second worst was Blue Ridge College’s 513, whose record was 2-6; it went scoreless in three of its games and only scored 36 points all season; the school went out of business in 1944. The third worst was N.Y. State University at Buffalo at 503; it hasn’t done much better this year, having won only two of its twelve games. Fourth worst was University of Rochester at 458, who lost all 7 of its games, going scoreless in 5 of them and scoring only 12 points all season; however, it has done considerably better this year, having won 7 of its 11 games. (As mentioned above, I am missing pages with part of the letter S through Z, so there could have been some worse rankings, but, if so, I would just as soon not know about them.)
Former teams that don’t exist today. The following schools fielded teams in 1940 but don’t now (their national ranking in 1939 is in parentheses): Bradley Tech (118), City College of N.Y, now City University of New York (468), Drexel Tech (380), Manhattan College (54), Marquette University (77), New York University (45), Niagara University (319), St. Bonaventure (265), Scranton University (80), University of San Francisco (99), University of Detroit (38), and the hapless Blue Ridge College referred to above. There are probably others that I didn’t catch.
It' good to see that Hartwick College played just as good back then as they do now. --Posted by Nominal Me to Rambling Musings of Mycroft Watson at 11/26/2006 08:56:39 AM
Hey, Nominal Me, Hartwick should be commended for its consistency. My alma mater, University of North Carolina, was 9 wins, 1 tie my senior year (1948 football season); this year they are 3-7. Mycroft
Thumbing through the pages of Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 and the Street & Smith’s Football Yearbook for 1940, so many differences between college football then and now come to the eye.
Race/ethnicity of players. Each of these publications has numerous photographs of individual players as well as action photos of games from 1939. In the Illustrated Football Annual, with two possible exceptions, every player was white and none had ethnic names other than some denoting Polish ancestry. (The two possible exceptions as to all white players—their black-and-white photos weren’t conclusive—were one Lou Montgomery, a back at Boston College, and Jerry Courtney, a back at Syracuse.) The Street & Smith Yearbook did better: it pictured Jackie Robinson, who was a back at UCLA before he went on to fame as the first black to break the baseball color barrier in 1947 when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The latter publication also went on to mention a Kenny Washington, a halfback, also at UCLA, who had graduated after the 1939 season. It went on to refer to Washington as a “great Negro halfback whom Western critics agreed was a finer back than any other in the West,” and to Robinson as “another Negro star of 1939…” Also pictured was a black player, an Archie Harris, a back at Indiana, of whom it said that he “gets praise for defensive play.” Today, it appears from watching football on TV, that more than half the college and professional players are black.
The Street & Smith Yearbook also described a pictured player at Oklahoma as an American Indian, saying about him: “Palefaces took land from his forefathers, and winning it back, yard by yard, for the Oklahoma team is Jack Jacobs.” It is hard to imagine such a comment in today’s politically correct world.
Size and weight of players. I guess that the average lineman (offensive and defensive) on the NCAA-IA teams (the major schools) today weighs somewhere between 230-260 pounds; of course, this average includes the few scrawny ones who weigh around 215 along with the behemoths of well over 300 pounds. The backs probably average well over 200, probably 210-220.
Let’s look at the weights of the No. 2 and the no. 3 teams in the country in 1939 as ranked in the Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 (more about the ranking system below). I don’t know who the no. 1 team was because my copy of the publication has the last few pages missing—the alphabetical listing stops with Southern California--so the no. 1 team must have been somewhere between S and Z. No. 2 was Cornell, whose 16 lineman averaged 191 pounds (the heaviest was 222) and 12 backs averaged 182 (the heaviest 205). No. 3 was Southern California, who had 17 linemen at an average 199 (the heaviest 221) and 12 backs who averaged 184 (the heaviest 197). A tackle at Harvard was of such spectacular weight that he was described as “Gargantuan Vern Miller, 265 pounds of beef on the hoof…”
Endicott Peabody III, a former governor of Massachusetts, was an All-American guard at Harvard in 1941, at a hefty 185 pounds—in fact, he was given the nickname of “Chub.” During the Jimmy Carter administration in the late 1970’s he had an appointed post in Washington (I forget just what it was), at which time I chanced to be seated next to him at a luncheon there. I told him that I remembered his football career, and brought up the difference in the weight of college players during his time and those of the current time; he told me that his son had tried out for the Harvard team when he weighed about 200 pounds, but was cut because he was too light.
Uniforms. Helmets were less round back then, they were more like crowns, and had no face masks (except for the occasional player who had had a broken nose or other facial injury). Jerseys were long-sleeved, unlike the short sleeves of today, and rarely had any markings other than the player’s number on the front and back—there were no school names, no players' names, no numbers on the sleeves. There were no school initials or other adornments on the helmets. Players didn’t wear gloves. And players on a team wore the same socks, usually white anklets or, less often, knee-length socks along with the white anklets. But all of them on the team wore the same—unlike the sloppy mess today of some teams whose players wear short, ugly, black anklets that barely come over the shoe top, while others on the same team wear white or black knee-length socks without accompanying anklets.
Officials. In the old days there were four officials: referee, umpire, head linesman, and field judge—about the same basic positions as today, except that now there are also line, back, and side judges. The officials wore the same striped shirts back then but didn’t have numbers on them. Of course, there were no instant replays whereby the officials could review their calls.
Other differences. Back then there was no electronic real-time communication between the coach, an assistant coach in the upper stands to call plays, and the quarterback. In fact, at one time there was a penalty for “coaching from the sidelines.”
Before there was TV, radio broadcasts of games required more skillful announcers and imaginative listeners.
Football stadiums were often named after wealthy alumni who had financed their construction, or enlargement. There were no corporate-named fields.
Prior to World War II, there were just five bowl games: Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange, and Sun. The first post-WW II bowl was the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, which began on January 1, 1946 (two other bowls also opened that year but didn’t survive). There were no corporate-named bowl games, as there are today.
Teams in the 1930's and 1940's played from the wing formation (single wing right, single wing left, double wing). An exception was Stanford, who in 1940 started the "T" formation, with Frank Albert at quarterback. Around 1950 teams began to shift to the "T" and the shotgun.
Today a player on a team may be in any class from freshman to senior. Not so prior to World War II--then, freshmen at a college had their own team, which played a schedule against freshman teams at other schools; only when they became sophomores were they eligible for the varsity.
There was no two-point conversion back then.
Players didn't have tattoos.
Football teams weren't referred to as "programs."
Low scoring then, high scoring now. Many games during the 1930’s and 1940’s ended with low scores--14-7, 10-3, 7-6 were typical, especially among evenly matched teams; 20, 30, or more points by one team usually were in mismatches where that team was playing a weak opponent. There were even some 0-0 ties (those were the days before the tie-breaker rule). An example is the 7-3 victory of Southern California over Duke in the 1939 Rose Bowl.
Today scores are likely to be double-digit points on both sides—the 42-39 victory of Ohio State over Michigan, the no. 1 and no. 2 teams in the country respectively at the time of their meeting on Nov. 18, 2006 , had a lot of scoring even for today, but wasn’t unusual. Why, then, today’s higher scoring?
Higher scoring is usually indicative of more skilled players on the participating teams. It seems there are better players today because (1) there is a larger pool of high school players that colleges can recruit (just because the general population of the country is much larger); (2) every team today has three platoons—offense, defense, and special teams—whereas teams in earlier periods usually had an eleven-man first-team that played most of the entire sixty minutes of a game, while second and third-team players were used sparingly; and (3) in the earlier years there were almost no black players (except at black colleges), whereas today they are a majority of the team at just about every college in the country.
National Rankings. Today only the top 25 teams in the country are ranked as the season progresses—the rankings are by four different groups, of which the Associated Press rankings are the oldest and the most often referred to as the football season progresses. However, every team in the Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 was given a national ranking for the 1939 season, which was done by an “AZZIRATEM System,” a system about which no information was provided (since the system functioned long before there were computers, it must have required a tremendous amount of manual number-crunching).
As mentioned above, Cornell was no. 2 and Southern California no. 3 in 1939 (because of missing pages, I can’t find no. 1). Duke, which rarely wins a game today, was no. 5 in 1939. Today’s no. 1, Ohio State (as of this writing), was no. 16 in 1939; no. 2 today, Michigan, was no. 17; Southern California is no. 3 today and was the same in 1939; Notre Dame, no. 6 today was no. 8 in 1939.
Florida State was nowhere to be seen in the 1940 yearbooks. The reason, as I learned from the school's website, was that football there had been abandoned in 1905 and was not started up again until 1947.
The highest (worst) ranking in 1939 was Hartwick College’s 529, who lost 6 games and tied 1 (at 0-0) and went scoreless in 4 games and scored only 21 points all season; it has done a little better this year at 4-6. Second worst was Blue Ridge College’s 513, whose record was 2-6; it went scoreless in three of its games and only scored 36 points all season; the school went out of business in 1944. The third worst was N.Y. State University at Buffalo at 503; it hasn’t done much better this year, having won only two of its twelve games. Fourth worst was University of Rochester at 458, who lost all 7 of its games, going scoreless in 5 of them and scoring only 12 points all season; however, it has done considerably better this year, having won 7 of its 11 games. (As mentioned above, I am missing pages with part of the letter S through Z, so there could have been some worse rankings, but, if so, I would just as soon not know about them.)
Former teams that don’t exist today. The following schools fielded teams in 1940 but don’t now (their national ranking in 1939 is in parentheses): Bradley Tech (118), City College of N.Y, now City University of New York (468), Drexel Tech (380), Manhattan College (54), Marquette University (77), New York University (45), Niagara University (319), St. Bonaventure (265), Scranton University (80), University of San Francisco (99), University of Detroit (38), and the hapless Blue Ridge College referred to above. There are probably others that I didn’t catch.
It' good to see that Hartwick College played just as good back then as they do now. --Posted by Nominal Me to Rambling Musings of Mycroft Watson at 11/26/2006 08:56:39 AM
Hey, Nominal Me, Hartwick should be commended for its consistency. My alma mater, University of North Carolina, was 9 wins, 1 tie my senior year (1948 football season); this year they are 3-7. Mycroft
posted by Mycroft Watson at 1:17 AM
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
3 Comments:
It' good to see that Hartwick College played just as good back then as they do now.
Hey there, funny thing. My name is Jerry Courtney. In your blog you actually write about my great uncle, my grandfathers brother, Jerry Courtney. He was white by the way. The funny thing is in the same paragraph you mention Jackie Robinson going to the Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball team. Well Jerry Courtney went on to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers Football team before they were taken over by the NFL. I collect data on my two great uncles of that era. Jerry Courtney and George Courtney (one of the few real middle light weights of his time.) Anyway thanks for your information in your blog. Good luck.
Jerry Courtney
My Town Agent Inc
Charlotte, NC
jerry@mytownagent.com
What words... super, a brilliant idea
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