Dreaming of Heroes

ISBN 978-1-543987-43-0

Printed in USA

For Mom. I finally got to meet your Dad, and he is as amazing as you always said.

Contents

Prologue

From the Black Forest to the Ohio Valley

Evolution

Demographics and Destiny

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry

Relationships

The Breakout Season

The Fixers

Opportunity Shining

Proselytizing

The Yearling

Varsity

The Underdogs

Hamilton Fish’s War

Rockne’s Boswell

The Rematch

In the Army Now

The Crash

After the Fall

Beyond the Golden Age

The Colonel

Afterword

Author’s Note

About the Author

“Most of the USMA’s greats have legends created about them long after their departure. – Cy was a legend while still a cadet.”

Brig. General Charles W. G. Rich, Commandant of Cadets,

The United States Military Academy at West Point

August 1958

Prologue

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania—May 30, 1957

At the time of his death in March of 1953, Jim Thorpe, a Native American, was widely recognized as the greatest American athlete of the twentieth century, ahead of such luminaries as Red “The Galloping Ghost” Grange and even the larger-than-life Babe Ruth. And yet, much to the dismay of his third wife and now widow, Patricia, Thorpe’s own home state of Oklahoma would not erect a monument to honor its famous son.

Sensing an opportunity to boost the local economy, the small Pennsylvania town of Mauch Chunk offered to change its community name to “Jim Thorpe,” erect a monument to the town’s new namesake, and provide his final resting place.

Four years later, a group of five people stood together next to the great athlete’s new resting place. Each held a metal cylinder roughly 12 inches tall and packed with soil from different corners of the Earth to spread upon Thorpe’s new grave.

The first cylinder was held by Sadie Feder, an Indian princess from Oklahoma City and a former classmate of Thorpe’s, who brought soil from the original Thorpe family farm in Prague, Oklahoma.

The second was held by John Lobert, a former teammate of Thorpe’s from when he played professional baseball for the New York Giants. He spread a sample of soil from the famed Polo Grounds in New York where they had both played.

The third was in the possession of Leon Miller, a member of the faculty of the Community College of New York, who obtained and distributed soil from the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden, where Thorpe had won the first pentathlon and decathlon of the modern Olympic era in 1912.

The fourth was carried by Peter Celac, a backfield teammate of Thorpe’s from the Carlisle Indian School football team. His canister held soil from the Sac and Fox parade grounds in Oklahoma, the tribes of which Thorpe had been member.

And finally, sticking out a bit like a sore thumb, was a U.S. Army colonel in full military dress. The officer, who was currently stationed at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, had no obvious connection to Thorpe other than that his cylinder held soil from a Carlisle, Pennsylvania, football field where Thorpe had first played football as a student at the infamous Carlisle Indian School.

Thorpe himself had never served in the military, so one could be excused for wondering why there was a representative of the U.S. Army present at the dedication.

The answer, however, was fairly simple. Thorpe had exploded into the national consciousness as the nearly unstoppable backfield player for the Carlisle Indian School football team, then coached by the legendary Glenn “Pop” Warner. Further, he cemented his name with his play in a historic upset over the perennial football powerhouse Army in 1912—against a team that was captained by a young cadet named Dwight Eisenhower, who was now serving as president of the United States. The Army and the president sent a representative out of respect and recognition for that Army game and its importance in Thorpe’s life.

While largely unknown, however, the colonel was well selected. Even though by 1957 his own story had already faded from the public consciousness, Col. Cyril J. Letzelter had been a college football superstar in his own right. He had played an important role in the sport both as a collegiate player and later as an assistant coach for the mighty Cadets of West Point. And importantly, unlike many others who made their mark on football at West Point and moved on to other things, Letzelter had remained with the military for his entire adult career. It also undoubtedly helped that Col. Letzelter was conveniently nearby, billeted to the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks.

FOURTEEN MONTHS LATER Col. Cyril Letzelter died suddenly of a heart attack at the comparatively young age of 51, just months before an anticipated promotion to brigadier general befitting his new post as the executive officer to the Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Unlike the 1920s and 1930s, when his sporting exploits were covered in newspapers from coast to coast; this time his death registered like most others—in his local and hometown newspapers, and in the alumni magazines and newsletters of the organizations of which he was a member.

It was in the West Point alumni magazine where Letzelter’s longtime friend and the commandant of cadets at West Point at the time, Brigadier General Charles Rich, stepped forward to personally write Cyril Letzelter’s obituary, pronouncing him a “legend” before he had ever stepped foot in the academy. This is obviously high praise from anyone, and even more so coming from one of the generals holding a leadership position at West Point.

This book is about the story behind those words. It’s about the sport of football—about the unique role it played in capturing the nation’s attention in the 1920s and in helping lift people like Cyril Letzelter out of lives destined for punishing work in the coal mines and steel mills of the Ohio Valley and beyond. It is also a window into the evolution of the game and the changes of the nation that occurred between Reconstruction and post–World War I America. In a sense, the game and the country went from unsteady experiments to fast-growing, powerful phenomena over the same period. And the youthful struggle on the gridiron during the period between the wars helped shape what we call the “Greatest Generation”—a generation of young men and women working toward a hopeful future, taking the risks they needed to take to get ahead, and sometimes being manipulated by stronger forces beyond their reach.

It is an American story.

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”

by James Wright

(The Branch Will Not Break, 1963)

From the Black Forest to the Ohio Valley

Long before the sport of football reached the Ohio Valley, the immigrants came. Many of them German and Swiss, they settled in the region in part because its rolling green hills and valleys reminded them of the Black Forest of central Europe they had once called home.

Monroe County, Ohio, located in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, was created by the Ohio state legislature in 1813, early in the presidency of James Madison. Legend has it that the small community of Woodsfield was founded not long after by one Archibald Woods, who supposedly purchased a keg of brandy and offered free drinks to any man willing to help him remove trees from the main street. Within an afternoon, so they say, the road was clear. True or not, the story reflected the spirit of the new, tight-knit community that primarily provided the goods and services necessary for the farmers cultivating the surrounding countryside.

The German immigrants that helped settle Woodsfield came in a series of waves that began around 1820, a little more than a decade after the final collapse of the creaky Holy Roman Empire. The fall of the Empire had launched a period of large political upheaval in the Germanic states that reached its peak in 1848, during the March Revolution. Originally an attempt by the middle and lower classes to liberalize and nationalize the Germanic states, the rebellion ultimately failed, leaving the aristocracies in Austria and Prussia ascendant and liberal reformers fleeing the land.

The Grand Duchy of Baden had been one of the most liberal states during the revolution and was one of the last areas to be brought under control in 1849. After the defeat, the flight of the reformers launched the biggest wave of German immigrants to America between 1848 and 1880. Known as the “Forty-Eighters,” it was this wave of immigration that brought the Letzelters to the United States from their homeland in the tiny Village of Schonau, tucked away in the hills of the Black Forest, not 30 miles from where the modern-day boundaries of Germany, France, and Switzerland all meet.

It was not long after the revolution was crushed that Michael Letzelter made his first trip to America near the middle of the century. He stayed for two years until, confident he could build a life in the New World, he returned home for a time to arrange the relocation of his family. He returned to America for good in 1866—probably later than he had originally hoped, and no doubt delayed by the long American Civil War. His return brought not only himself and his wife but—for the most part—his children and their families as well, settling in Woodsfield.

Like most working-class Germans, Michael had learned a trade that he passed on to his sons. Upon arriving, the family set up a wagon-making and blacksmith shop in the local foundry on the east side of Woodsfield, where they advertised their skills in the complete manufacture of both farm and spring wagons, and their skill in the shoeing of horses. More importantly, they became the exclusive agents selling iron plows designed by the Oliver Iron Plow company. Using a newly patented “chilled” process to construct the plows, the South Bend, Indiana–based company overwhelmed its competition throughout the 1870s and 1880s, helping the Letzelters build a sustainable family business. They were also devout Roman Catholics and became founding members of St. Sylvester’s Parish in Woodsfield, where Michael and many of his children and grandchildren worshiped and are buried.

MICHAEL WENDOLIN LETZELTER was the third of his name, the grandson of the first Michael Letzelter who emigrated to America in the mid-1800s. The sixth of eight children, he was raised in a German-speaking household and, with his siblings, quickly developed bilingual skills enabling him to communicate at home and in the world beyond. He and his two brothers, Charles and Joseph, set their gaze on the future and would eventually move away from the wagon-making tradition of their parents and grandparents, as this new generation embraced the new opportunities offered by the only place they ever knew as home.

Michael was the middle of the three boys, a young man with traditionally handsome features. He boasted a long angular face with a square jaw, reddish-brown hair, friendly eyes, and a slight curl to his hair when it grew too long. He was no older than the age of eighteen when he met the young girl who would steal his heart and change his life.

Mary Elizabeth Poulton, known as Mollie, was the same age as Michael. Born halfway across the state in the tiny village of Beaver, Ohio, she moved back with her family to nearby Belmont County—the place of her parents’ marriage—in approximately 1890. Many of the Poulton family relatives lived throughout the Ohio Valley, mainly in Woodsfield and Wheeling, and Mollie’s signature books from the era indicate that the family visited relatives often. Michael and Mollie probably first met during these visits, when Mollie’s Catholic family would have attended St. Sylvester’s for their Sunday services.

Precisely when they met is less certain. Mollie was a collector and keeper of signature books, a common practice of the era. The earliest one she received as a gift from her sister Emma in 1890 right before her ninth birthday. Her largest and last known signature book was given to her in 1894. The final inscription in her book was written on February 9, 1899. It read:

A basket of kisses

A peck of love

Give me some in return,

Or I’ll give you the glove.

The author of that final entry was signed: “Mr. M. W. Letzelter.” The remaining pages of the book were left blank as if there were no more signatures she needed to collect.

Their courtship would last seven years. While no specific stories remain, one can imagine a group of young boys and girls enjoying each other’s company over time: Michael, his sister Laura, and their cousin Edith Schumacher teaming up with Mollie, her younger brother Martin (known as Bert), and Laura’s boyfriend, John Caton—all of them near the same age, all of them spending a fair amount of time in Woodsfield.

One can imagine this because in that tiny town, on Tuesday, November 14, 1905, they got married. All six of them.

It must have been a remarkable event for such a small, close-knit community. The proceedings began early in the day when Father T. A. Goebel of St. Sylvester’s Roman Catholic Church in Woodsfield presided over the marriages. The first joined Michael and Mollie in St. Sylvester’s Church. Immediately after that, Father Goebel moved to the Church Rectory, where he married Mollie’s brother Bert Poulton and Edith Schumacher. He then traveled to the Letzelter family home where Michael’s sister, Laura Letzelter, exchanged her vows with John Caton—a service that could not occur on the church grounds because Mr. Caton was not Catholic.

While the marriages were conducted separately, they were celebrated together, with all three couples sitting together for a formal portrait commemorating the rare event. One imagines that an event this unique likely touched the entire community. It also partially explains the need to preside over three different locations, as tiny St. Sylvester’s Church could not hold the entire community.

After the festivities calmed down, Michael and Mollie, as well as Laura and John, settled into the Letzelter family residence at 143 Oak Lawn Avenue in Woodsfield with their recently widowed mother, and they began the process of building their own lives and families together. Within a year, they had their first child, a son, whom they named Cyril Joseph Letzelter.

THE STANDARD PRACTICE of people of German heritage was to learn a trade and pass it down through the generations. The Letzelter family had brought their trade of blacksmithing and wagon making with them to the United States. However, in this new world and new century, Michael and his older brother Charles saw the opportunity to do something different. In the shadow of the Second Industrial Revolution, with new manufacturers and factories popping up all over the valley, they turned their eye toward the growing field of industrial plumbing. Both of them were able to secure coveted apprenticeships with William Hare & Son Plumbers, Gas & Steam Fitters in Wheeling, West Virginia.

The training would take seven years to complete, but upon completion, Michael and Charles would be master plumbers with skills in high demand. Both his training and later work would require much time away in the Wheeling area working on large-scale jobs. While Michael worked, Mollie continued to live with her mother-in-law and began raising their young family. Over time more children arrived. Michael was born in 1908. Twin brothers Charles and Francis were born in 1910, but they were weak. Francis died within a day, while Charles fought for two weeks before expiring. Their youngest son, Richard, came in 1912.

Through it all Michael traveled to make money for the family, and Mollie stayed home with the children in Woodsfield. As the three boys grew, they became playmates, with older brother Cyril emerging as the natural leader. He was a charming boy who, like most elder siblings, had a strong sense of responsibility. The day his father came home to Mollie exclaiming of Cyril, “Mike, you’ve simply got to do something about this boy,” he was greeted by the sight of a line of baby chicks lined up dead on the front porch. Little Cyril wasn’t being mean, though; he had accidentally killed them when he—trying to be helpful around the house—decided to give the new baby chickens a bath. The results were predictable.

Through his youth, Cyril was an attractive and easygoing boy, always ready with a smile, and always eager to play a pickup game of baseball on the nearby sandlot, or even that new and growing sport—football.

ON OCTOBER 30, 1916, a day before her thirty-fifth birthday, Mollie Letzelter wrote to her husband at the apartment he was keeping in Warwood, West Virginia. It was clear that their life was moving into a new and exciting stage. After eleven years of marriage that saw Mike on the road learning his trade and earning a living, they were finally set to settle down with his own business in a new home near downtown Akron, Ohio—just outside Cleveland and far from Woodsfield and Wheeling.

Mollie wrote longingly of how much they would be able to accomplish together once they were settled down, saying, “Just look how I have worried all these years and I feel like we will get along alright if only you will be with us for good.” She spoke of their need to save “every cent” to make this new endeavor work. She nagged Mike to follow up on debts owed to him by friends and family and reminded him to send the goods needed for the new home.

She also explained to him that they had less than a month before the current tenant vacated the home. They were scheduled to take possession as early as November 23.

In a letter to her sister-in-law, Laura Caton, written the same day, she expressed some slight frustration with Mike for not having already arranged for the goods to be sent to Akron from Woodsfield. But her letter also showed she was in high spirits. She spoke of the fun she and the children were having since they were out of school during this transition period. She talked about how well her parents were treating them and mentioned that if Woodrow Wilson won reelection, her father was taking them all into Akron for a day of fun and a large celebratory dinner. She also spoke of the cold autumn weather and how she was already wearing a sweater given to her by her mother under her coat “for it is so cold when you drive.”

She ended her letter relaying a message from four-year-old Richard to his cousin Rosemma asking her to come visit.

One week later, President Woodrow Wilson was narrowly reelected to a second term, with the state of Ohio providing the crucial votes securing the win. Despite the fact that neither Mollie nor her mother, as women, had the right to vote, she and her parents were undoubtedly thrilled. However, with such a short period of time to prepare for the move, it is unlikely that the celebratory trip to dinner in Akron occurred right away. Rather, one can imagine the frenzied pace Mollie worked to prepare for the big move.

At some point that fall, Mollie had moved north to her parents’ residence at Franklin Township in Portage County, just outside their future home in Akron, where she waited anxiously for the goods Michael was sending from Woodsfield. The date of their relocation was fast approaching.

That November featured unseasonably cold weather—a factor that, along with the hectic pace preparing for the move, undoubtedly contributed to the cough Mollie developed that began to slow her down. The cough was followed by fatigue and then fever, and finally, by November 18, she was feeling poorly enough that she took to bed at her parents’ house and was visited by the local doctor, F. A. Russell. He diagnosed her with bronchial pneumonia.

It would be twelve more years before penicillin was discovered, and decades more before its widespread use to treat bacterial infections. Despite Mollie’s young age and vitality, the disease advanced quickly. Only five days later, at just thirty-five years of age, Mollie died. Her death came so quickly that her beloved Michael never made it back to her bedside.

Ironically, she died November 23—the very same day they were able to take possession of their first home. Their dreams died with her.

Evolution

It was only three years after the Letzelters arrived in the United States that the first organized game of American football occurred between two colleges: Rutgers and Princeton, in 1869. It took place at a turning point for the young nation.

Not only had the country just emerged from a traumatic and bloody civil war, but as the historian Taylor Branch said, the completion of the intercontinental railroad had, for the first time, left no visible frontiers to conquer. That, combined with the emergence of “intellectuals (who) believed that the sporting arena simulated an impending age of Darwinian struggle,” led to a generation of leaders concerned about how best to prepare and toughen the country for the difficulties to come. It was in this environment that the men of the era began to view rugby-like games as a “toughening agent.”

Such was the historical context in which the first intercollegiate football contest occurred. Rutgers (originally known as Queen’s College) and Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey) were just seventeen miles apart and had developed a fierce rivalry; as Wendy Plump described in Princeton Magazine:

On the side of rivalry, however, there was the fact that the town of Princeton had successfully outbid New Brunswick in 1753 for the final location of the College of New Jersey. There was the award of the state’s Land Grant status to Rutgers in 1864, which Princeton had coveted for itself. There was a baseball game in 1866 in which Rutgers was thoroughly annihilated by Princeton. And there was the matter of the cannon wars, in which a disputed Revolutionary War cannon was repeatedly stolen and re-stolen by Princeton or Rutgers students vying for permanent possession. (The cannon today rests on Princeton’s campus, sunk into several feet of concrete.)

Those battles having been settled, Rutgers and Princeton searched for new venues in which to express their growing and heated rivalry. It is generally understood that it was William Gummere of Princeton who suggested a series of three meetings to play football, with Rutgers hosting the first contest. As captain of the Rutgers team, William J. Leggett had the right to set the rules of play, and they adopted the rules of the London Football Association.

Under these regulations, the ball could not be carried at all but needed to be batted and kicked forward with feet, legs, arms, and even the sides of one’s head. Princeton agreed to the terms, and so at 3:00 on the afternoon of November 6, 1869, two teams of twenty-five men took to a plot of land in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and faced off—more than double the number of players in a modern contest.

Neither team scored any touchdowns or field goals that day. In fact, neither type of scoring even existed. Instead, the match was played as a “best of ten” series where each score—getting the ball successfully across the goal—represented a single game. So technically speaking, the first football game was in fact ten games, with Rutgers winning six to Princeton’s four.

Not long after, other games began popping up at colleges across the East, usually with the home team determining the rules of play. A game generally adopted one of two distinct styles: either the European approach used in that first game at Rutgers or a style that featured ball carrying in a Rugby-like competition.

The differing approaches to the game led to the first ever meeting of schools, in October 1873, to discuss adopting uniform rules. That conference featured representatives of Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers, and settled on rules resembling the soccer style of play. The other leading player in the East, Harvard, did not participate. Ultimately, home teams still set the final rules of the game.

This loose arrangement lasted for two years until, in 1875, two athletes from Princeton attended a game between Harvard and Yale. Harvard, as the home team, determined the game would be played rugby-style. They were so impressed with the game that they saw that they returned to their school and introduced the new style on their campus, where it also became popular.

The growing popularity of the rugby style led to another intercollegiate meeting at the Massasoit House in Springfield, Massachusetts, in late November 1876 to adopt new rules based on the code used by the Rugby Football Union from England. One key and unique difference was the replacement of a kicked goal with a touchdown as the primary means of scoring.

Three of the attending schools—Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, went on to form the Intercollegiate Football Association, a very early forerunner to the modern National Collegiate Athletic Association. Yale, a previous adherent to the soccer style and a proponent of larger teams, opted not to join at first. Its resistance lasted three years, until 1879. Yale’s decision to relent was one of the most important moments in the early history of the sport, as it led to the full participation in the IFA of Yale’s Walter Camp, the man who would single-handedly transform the game and eventually become known as the father of modern football.

WALTER CAMP CAME to Yale in 1876 and was an avid sportsman. During his time as an undergraduate, he earned varsity honors in every sport the school offered. When Yale finally joined the IFA, Camp became a regular participant in the numerous conventions held at the Massasoit House, where the rules of the game were continually debated and changed.

Once the IFA adopted the rugby-style play, one primary difference between the previous and new styles of play was the ability to carry, or possess, the ball while trying to advance. In rugby football, a player would advance the ball as far as possible until the accumulated effort and weight of the other team forced a player into submission, at which point the carrier would yell “DOWN!” and play would stop. After disentangling themselves, the men would restart play via a “scrummage,” in which both teams would form an interlocking mass of people and appendages pressing against each other. Once set, the ball was thrown into the tunnel created by the players, and a fight for possession of the ball would begin anew.

Not incorrectly, Camp lamented the fact the game looked like little more than a disorganized mob.

His first proposal to change the rules was made in 1878—before Yale was even a member of the IFA—suggesting a reduction in active roster size from fifteen to eleven (team size had already been reduced by ten since the first game at Rutgers). His motion failed at first. However, in a pivotal meeting in 1880, this suggestion was adopted, along with several other new innovations that began to transform the game.

The most notable change that Camp successfully pushed in 1880 replaced the “scrummage” with a new “line of scrimmage.” In this new scenario, once the person in possession of the ball yelled “DOWN,” his team would maintain possession of the ball. Rather than a new fight for possession, a player would “snap” the ball with his foot to a “quarterback,” thus restarting play.

This change, combined with the removal of eight bodies from the field, had a dramatic effect on the game. On the one hand, the game was opened up, and new strategic opportunities presented themselves. However, it wasn’t long before contests became little more than an attempt to maintain possession and run the clock down. What had promised to make the game more exciting was having the opposite effect.

It was Camp again who proposed the solution. At the 1882 rules meeting, he successfully argued for “down and distance” rules, where a team would be required to advance the ball a minimum of five yards in three plays.

In the space of three years, Camp’s innovations had transformed the game from an unruly mob fighting for possession and advancement of the ball into a structured game with a line of scrimmage, a system of downs, a center, and a quarterback. While there was much more evolution to come, it is after the 1882 convention that we first begin to see a game that bears a resemblance to the modern game.

Nevertheless, football remained a small, relatively unknown game. As of 1880, only eight universities fielded intercollegiate teams. Growth and continued evolution, however, would come at a much faster pace.

AS THE NEW generations of the Letzelter family, and countless other immigrant families, began to set their roots in the New World, the new sport of football was also starting to take hold in the national consciousness. The game that had fielded eight intercollegiate teams in 1880 had grown exponentially to be adopted by thousands of colleges, high schools, and community clubs.

The University of Michigan had been the first team west of Pennsylvania to be formed in 1879. Two years later it became the first midwestern team to travel east for intercollegiate football, playing games at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

In short order, other teams began to pop up in the Midwest, with programs emerging at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. In 1895, this group of midwestern teams formed the first college football league: the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives—also known as the Western Conference—a precursor to the current Big Ten. In 1902, the first postseason game was played in California, titled the Tournament East-West Game. It pitted Michigan (representing the East) against California’s Stanford University. The annual contest eventually became “the Granddaddy of them All”—the Rose Bowl.

What is less known, however, is that college football’s first intercollegiate conference emerged as a reaction to the growing violence of the game, particularly among the East Coast teams.

IN THE DECADE following the spate of reforms introduced by Walter Camp in the early 1880s, there was little change in the rules of the game itself. However, with the playing field now opened up and arranged around a system of downs and ball advancement, this decade of regulatory stability created the space for the development of new coaching and scoring strategies.

Many still saw football as an opportunity to prepare young men for a world defined by Darwinian struggle and survival of the fittest, so it should come as no surprise that military thinking began to play a role in the approach to the game. Nowhere was this clearer than in the development of one of the earliest and most electrifying of plays: the “flying wedge.”

Lorin Deland was an unlikely suspect to develop football’s most efficient and dangerous play. A Boston lawyer and a chess expert, Deland himself had never even seen a game until 1890. But once exposed to the sport, he became smitten, studying the rules of play and devising strategies for his enjoyment.

Deland had also been an amateur student of military strategy and had spent considerable time studying the tactics of Napoleon Bonaparte. It did not take long for Deland to find parallels to gridiron strategy. “‘One of the chief points brought out by the great French General,” Deland once observed, “was that if he could mass a large proportion of his troops and throw them against a weak point of the enemy, he could easily defeat that portion, and gaining their rear, create havoc with the rest.”

Convinced he had a winning idea, Deland brought it to the coaches of the Harvard football team in 1892, which they then waited to use until the biggest game of the year, against archrival Yale.

Under the rules of the time, opening a half with a “kickoff” required no more than just tapping the ball with one’s foot, thus making it live, and then picking up the ball and pitching it to a teammate. It is also important to note that in 1892, the game was still being played without protective equipment of any kind. There were no helmets, shoulder pads, face masks, or other protections that would become common years into the future.

It was in this context that Harvard introduced its secret new play. As the second half began, Harvard took to the field and immediately divided into two groups of five, each on opposite sidelines. Upon team captain Bernie Trafford’s signal, the players began to move in unison, well before the ball was even put into play. As described by football historian Parke H. Davis in his 1911 book on the sport:

Each unit sprang forward, at first striding in unison, then sprinting obliquely toward the center of the field. Simultaneously, spectators leapt to their feet gasping.

Restricted by the rules, Yale’s front line nervously held its position. After amassing twenty yards at full velocity, the “flyers” fused at mid-field, forming a massive human arrow. Just then, Trafford pitched the ball back to his speedy halfback, Charlie Brewer. At that moment, one group of players executed a quarter turn, focusing the entire wedge toward Yale’s right flank. Now both sides of the flying wedge pierced ahead at breakneck speed, attacking Yale’s front line with great momentum. Brewer scampered behind the punishing wall, while Yale’s brave defenders threw themselves into its dreadful path.

And so it was that on the last Saturday before Thanksgiving in 1892, 21,500 spectators saw the game reach heretofore unseen levels of brutality. The strategy of Harvard was to focus all the momentum and energy of the flying wedge on a single Yale player, Alex Wallis, and mow him down. And mow him down they did. In an era where the average advance of a single play was two yards or less, Harvard’s Brewer gained 20 yards. Overnight, college football transformed.

“It was a play that sent the football men who were spectators into raptures,” according to the Boston Herald. The New York Times feigned excitement while expressing alarm over the increasing level of violence, “What a grand play! . . . a half ton of bone and muscle coming into collision with a man weighing 160 or 170 pounds. . . . A surgeon is called upon to attend to the wounded player, and the game continues with renewed brutality.”

Upon the advent of the 1893 season, “mass-momentum plays,” as they were called, were all the rage as teams across the east adapted the flying wedge for all purposes. Lorin Deland himself had used the off-season to develop 60 new momentum plays. The carnage was so great that newspapers began including injury reports as part of their regular football coverage.

After a full season of increased violence and injury, leaders both athletic and academic realized that changes needed to be made. Once again, the game turned to Walter Camp, now the head of the “Big Four” Football Rules Committee. Camp at first was reluctant to make significant changes, preferring to create only a “fair catch” rule to protect a punt receiver. But more important to Camp was the game he had helped to create.

Finally seeing not only the danger the play posed to individual players but the threat it posed to the sport itself, Camp decreed the wedge an unsportsmanlike diversion from the traditional “rugby style” in which the game had its roots, and he proposed a series of new rules. The first new rule adopted for the 1894 season required the kickoff to travel at least 10 yards before it is in play unless touched by the opposing team.

While this eliminated Deland’s original play, it did nothing to prevent other mass-momentum plays on both sides of the ball. So, after the 1894 season, the so-called Big Four met once again—this time with Princeton and Yale calling to adopt rules requiring at least seven players to remain stationary prior to the snap.

Harvard—the father of the mass-momentum play—was strongly opposed, as was Penn. The stalemate between the teams led to the dissolution of the Intercollegiate Football Association, and the teams once again reserved the right to play under their own preferred sets of rules.

Without a leadership entity in the east, a group of midwestern schools took the initiative to discuss the creation of a regional league that could address issues of violence and eligibility, as some schools were beginning to use non-student, semi-professional players. The result was the creation of the Western Conference in 1895.

Seeing the establishment of this new, upstart league to the west, Harvard and Penn quickly softened their opposition to rule changes and reformed the Big Four in 1896, and they agreed to the adoption of the seven-man fixed line. While mass-momentum plays could—and would—still be designed and executed with those players able to move, the flying wedge was dead, and the first intercollegiate conferences were born.

BY THE AUTUMN of 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt was facing a growing crisis in the world of intercollegiate football. The Progressive Era was fully underway in America, and the new “muckraking” style of journalism that helped usher in the era was a constant voice for change. The same crusading eye that had focused on poor working conditions, child labor, and consumer safety had recently set its sights on the corrupting influences present in the growing new industry of organized sport in America.

The small, strange collegiate game that boasted only eight programs at the end of the 1880s had undergone explosive growth over the previous two decades. By the turn of the century, there were an estimated 5,000 college, high school, and club teams operating across a 3,000-mile span of the United States. And as the popularity of the new sport grew, it was discovered to be a tremendous driver of revenue and prestige for local schools. From its very beginning, its ability to generate cash from gate receipts, program sales, advertising, merchandise, and souvenirs made football the cash cow for student-based athletic programs. Practically since its inception at the collegiate level to the modern day, football has been able to foot the bill for entire athletic programs at scores of institutions across the country.

But, as “muckrakers” instinctively knew, there’s always a seedy underbelly where large amounts of cash are changing hands. And so in the summer of 1905, two nationally respected magazines, McClure’s and Collier’s, published extensive exposés on the darker side of the game. Their work shined sunlight on heretofore unknown practices such as providing exclusive academic considerations for players, hiring “ringers” to help ensure competitive teams, proselytizing (what we now call recruiting), and providing undisclosed financial aid to student athletes for tuition, room, and board.