I.
Here's a pleasurable thing I do sometimes, when I am despairing about the state of the universe: I go to YouTube, I search for highlights of the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, I run the video through to about seven or eight seconds, and I freeze the frame. At that point, I can see what's coming, and I can also witness the forces of nature driving things toward their inevitable conclusion. I can view the constellation of Oklahoma defenders lurching toward the top of the screen, attempting to defy physics and veer back in the other direction; I can see that a Boise State receiver has just caught a short pass on fourth-and-eighteen with under ten seconds left in the game and his team trailing by a touchdown, which makes no rational sense; and I can also see a second receiver circling around precisely five yards behind him in the opposite direction like a hungry wolf.
To my astonishment, every single time, when I press play again, Boise makes it work.
I can just observe the whole thing fixed right there in front of me, and even though I've watched it dozens of times, I can still say to myself, There is no fucking way they're going to make a hook-and-lateral work on the final play of the game, are they? Sometimes, I'll leave it there for several minutes and just stare. It is a hell of a stop-motion, like one of those great old Sports Illustrated panoramas of some iconic moment chronicled in midstream. And to my astonishment, every single time, when I press play again, Boise makes it work. The first receiver flips the ball to the second (lupine) receiver, and the second receiver's momentum carries him past the flailing Oklahoma defenders and along the sideline, and they tie the damn game. And then it gets even better: In overtime, trailing by a touchdown and facing another fourth-and-oblivion, Boise State executes a halfback pass for a touchdown, and then they go for two points and run a variation of an ancient gambit called the Statue of Liberty, the quarterback setting up to pass and then handing the ball off behind his back to win the game, 43-42.
Three sleight-of-hand plays, all of them in desperate situations, do-or-die, the upset of the century on the line. And every time I take in those roughly eighty-one seconds of highlights-the tension, the shock, the joy, the sheer absurdity-I ask myself, What kind of person wouldn't want to see something like that happen again?
II.
For much of my childhood, my favorite book was a compilation of gridiron odds and sods aimed at young adults called Strange but True Football Stories. If I am being honest, I probably hearken back to Strange but True Football Stories more often than any other football book I have ever read: Every time something weird and improbable occurs, I recall a chapter of SBTFS and recognize that the tropes of this sport are endlessly recyclable.
John Heisman, Georgia Tech's coach from 1904-1919. (Getty Images)
Chapter 2 of Strange but True Football Stories (written by Larry Fox) is entitled "When Disaster Struck Cumberland," and it tells the now century-old story of a team of young men from a small college in Lebanon, Tennessee. In the spring of 1916, the school received a letter from the football program at Georgia Institute of Technology, asking whether they might be interested in playing in Atlanta on October 7 of that year. Their reward: a five hundred-dollar guarantee. As the recruitment rules were almost nonexistent back then, Cumberland's football manager, George E. Allen, endeavored to pick up several ringers from Vanderbilt University during a stopover in Nashville on the train ride down. But Allen was unaware that Vanderbilt had a big game coming up (I suppose Phil Steele's annual football preview magazine was not widely distributed yet), and three of Cumberland's players "got lost" in the city and never made it back to the train (which I think is young-adult-book parlance for "went on a bender"). The only recruit Allen could dredge up was a local newspaperman who played under an assumed name, because these were the days when newspapermen still had pride.
Cumberland made it to Atlanta with sixteen players, and used fourteen of them. Georgia Tech, under John Heisman, was about to commence a thirty-three-game winning streak. The Yellowjackets led 63-0 after one quarter, and 126-0 at halftime. They gained 978 yards, and had thirteen different players score touchdowns. The final score was 222-0, but it could have been worse: The clock in the final two quarters was cut down to get it over with as quickly as possible. George E. Allen took his five hundred dollars and spent most of it "showing his players the sights of Atlanta" (which, I think, is young-adult-book parlance for "pissed it away on hooch and showgirls"). Eventually, Cumberland's Bulldogs took the Pullman back to Lebanon, having set the standard for a hundred years' worth of early-season blowouts of undermanned programs. Many of them, including quarterback Charles Edwards, were reluctant to ever speak of it again.
III.
College football has never been very kind to the underdog, and I imagine some of this has to do with the fact that it is, and always has been, an unrepentant oligarchy.1 "Dear Oligarch," a friend once opened a letter to Walter Camp. (True story.) It used to be that this oligarchy was centered around geographic regions; now it's based on rough (and often nonsensical) geographic conflagrations of teams called conferences. Certain well-bred patrician conferences- the SEC, the Big Ten, the Pac-12, the Big 12-are "automatic qualifiers" for the major bowl games, and the rest, the dregs, the bourgeoisie, are "non-AQs." To elevate from one category to the other is perhaps the only way to ensure a lasting place in college football. But this is not easy to do, because the entrenched powers never want to give ground, and because non-AQs cannot play the same volume of quality opponents as AQs (which eliminates them from any kind of serious contention), and because when a non-AQ actually gets good, the incentive for an AQ to play them diminishes (which makes it even more difficult to prove that a non-AQ belongs). It becomes a circular debate: The AQs insist that the non-AQs aren't worthy because they "didn't play anyone," but they refuse to play the non-AQs themselves, because they aren't worthy of playing.
And yet it still happens that, every so often, a certain determined and enterprising school/coach manages to elevate a wayward program from the lower class. This has been true for decades, and it will remain true for as long as big-time college football offers both money and prestige to the schools that partake of it. And as proof, I refer you to chapter 15 of Strange but True Football Stories, which is titled "The Praying Colonels."
IV.
Chapter 15 of SBTFS takes us back to the cusp of the Roaring Twenties, to a place called Centre College, a private liberal arts school in Danville, Kentucky. Centre College had only three hundred students, and in 1919, several happened to be Texans, including a quarterback named Alvin "Bo" McMillin and a center named James "Red" Weaver. They matriculated to this tiny school based on a calculated decision by the school's alumni base; they came because Centre College was a distinguished institution that had produced two vice presidents and a Supreme Court justice and eight U.S. senators and ten governors and twenty college presidents, but Centre College had never produced an All- American football player, and some people who mattered wanted to change that.
So an alum named Robert "Chief " Myers was hired to coach the team, and he recruited five players he had led to an undefeated season the year before at a high school in Fort Worth, Texas, including McMillin and Weaver. Then he dispatched a letter throughout the state of Kentucky, which read, in part, "We want nice boys who are willing to take an anvil in each hand and fight a shark at the bottom of the ocean or ride a porcupine without a saddle."2 Was there an era when men in Tennessee rode porcupines with saddles? Let's just pretend there was.
"We want nice boys who are willing to take an anvil in each hand and fight a shark at the bottom of the ocean or ride a porcupine without a saddle."
The pitch worked: Eventually, Myers got so busy with recruiting that he turned over the coaching duties to a former major league baseball umpire named Charlie Moran, who was known as "Uncle Charlie." The story goes that during halftime of Centre's 1917 contest with Kentucky, Uncle Charlie delivered a stem-winder of a halftime speech that ended with a call for one of his boys to say a word of prayer. A lineman named Bob Mathias leapt up and fell into supplication, and Centre won the game 3-0, and became known as the "Praying Colonels."3 An alternate story, forwarded by a sportswriter, goes that Centre earned the nick- name by kneeling in prayer during halftime of a 1919 game against heavily favored West Virginia. At the time, they trailed 6-0; they scored two touchdowns to win 14-6. They went undefeated in 1917, and after the sport took a hiatus for a season so the country could fight World War I, the Colonels again went undefeated in 1919, and were invited to play the Harvard Crimson in 1920.
At that point, Harvard hadn't lost an intersectional contest in forty-four years, and they'd won the Rose Bowl the season before. They were the premier football program in the East, and since the balance of power was still concentrated in the East, Harvard was, at that moment, the standard that all other programs aspired to. They were the epitome not just of establishment academia, but of establishment football. In 1920, Centre managed a 14-14 tie with Harvard at halftime, and then they lost 31-14. When they arrived at Harvard for a rematch in 1921, the Crimson were in the midst of twenty-eight-game winning streak; the game was scoreless at halftime, and in the third quarter, Bo McMillin took a snap and sprinted to his right, until he was almost out of bounds, and then he switched directions, cutting back toward the other end of the field, reaching the ten-yard line and stopping dead near the other sideline. Two defenders surged past him, and McMillin scooted into the end zone, having covered something like a hundred and fifty yards in order to gain thirty-two.
It was the only score of the game. Centre won, 6-0. The firmament of eastern football had been cracked open, and the game found new audiences nationwide. Centre 6, Harvard 0, was ranked in a 1950 Associated Press poll as the greatest football upset of the first half of the twentieth century. In the little town of Danville, they feted the team with an impromptu fire truck parade, and they painted "C-6, H-0" in whitewashed letters everywhere they could, in celebration of Bo McMillin's tricky little run to daylight.
A few years later, buried in expense and unable to keep up, Centre dropped out of the college football rat race. It was a hell of an underdog story, until everyone forgot that it ever happened.
V.
And this is how it happens, even today: An institution of higher learning decides it wants to be good at football, and so it commits resources to football, based on the theory that a successful football team can bring unprecedented publicity to a college, which broadens the pool of potential applicants, which raises the academic stature of the university. Is it a good thing? I don't know if it's a good thing. Theoretically, it sounds like a good thing, until it isn't, until corruption or apathy or other failures of will and/or ethics set in, and Sports Illustrated writes a cover exposé, and then it becomes an insidious thing and a shocking breach of morality and a symbol of the skewed priorities of the American bureaucracy because some five-star quarterback recruit from inner-city Atlanta accepted a five-hundred-dollar handshake from a local used-car dealer.
Usually, success at this gambit requires a visionary coach: So it went with Miami under Howard Schnellenberger (and subsequently Jimmy Johnson) in the 1980s; so it went with Urban Meyer (and subsequently Kyle Whittingham) at Utah in the early 2000s, when the Utes jumped from non-AQ into the AQ Pac-12 Conference; so it went with the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs under Gary Patterson in the mid- to late 2000s, who landed a spot in the Big 12 Conference. All of these programs benefited from coaches who challenged the status quo, who opened up the playbook and devised new schemes and embraced radical thinking and flouted convention. And yet all of these successes engendered such irrational disregard from the fan bases of entrenched programs that they seemed to take it as a personal affront, as if it somehow cheapened their own place in the establishment.
If you win enough or you win at the right moment then the establishment welcomes you into its wood-paneled club.
I will admit, I was guilty of this dismissiveness in my younger years. In 1982, Penn State went 11-1 and Southern Methodist went 11-0-1, and nine-year-old self-interested me would have been appalled if the Mustangs had somehow stolen away the national championship, because clearly they were a secondary institution and did not deserve it the way Penn State did (in retrospect, SMU almost certainly had better pure talent; at the very least, they paid top dollar for it). I'm still not sure if BYU deserved to win the national title in 1984, after going undefeated while playing one of the weakest schedules in the country. I am constantly wrestling with the question of whether a team should be penalized due to forces beyond its control, and in no sport is this more relevant than college football, where the schedule is often completely out of anyone's control, where success depends on the clout of an athletic administration that can talk its way into a better conference or a home-and-home series against a higher-level opponent more than it does the actual results.
And yet it still works, as it did for Utah and TCU, as it did for Miami and BYU. You're an underdog, and then you win, and if you win enough or you win at the right moment then the establishment welcomes you into its wood-paneled club. It is a risk, and there are no guarantees, and there is always a chance that your school will be the one left waiting at the door.