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The Silent Gridiron: A 33-Year Football Hiatus · Sports History Network

• 0:47
  In 1923, Michigan and Notre Dame had not played football in over 13 seasons.
• 0:53
  Well, that day in June of 1923, at a track and field competition, the football game would be silent for another 33 years.
• 1:03
  Let's take the field and go.
• 1:05
  No huddle.
• 1:05
  Through the portal of positive gridiron history.
• 1:08
  With pigskindispatch.com On November 23, 1887, Michigan traveled to Notre Dame and found a game that barely even was recognizable as football.
• 1:18
  There was 100 men to his side and they were hacking around at a round ball, learning the rules from a book.
• 1:24
  But Michigan's players did something almost tender.
• 1:27
  They mixed the rosters and taught Notre Dame how to block, how to position, how to play rugby football.
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  Then they split apart and won eight to nothing in a game.
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  It was generosity.
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  It was also condescension.
• 1:39
  And that condescension simmered on for generation.
• 1:42
  By 1901, Fielding, hurry up.
• 1:45
  Yosta built Michigan into a relentless machine.
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  A point a minute.
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  Wolverines, undefeated Rose bowl champions, outscoring opponents 550 to nothing.
• 1:54
  And Yost took winning as seriously as any man who ever paced the sideline.
• 1:58
  To get an idea of the character makeup of Fielding Yost, we have our experts on from a couple years ago in separate interviews, Dr.
• 2:05
  John Behe and Matthew Debias, both great authors that talked about Yost in their books.
• 2:11
  As I studied his football teams and his coaching techniques, he was fearless.
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  And I look at his youth and I'm thinking that's where it came from.
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  He As a 10 year old, this was his first experience with the school.
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  He was in Fremont in a small town in West Virginia and Fairview, 10 miles away, they had a school.
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  He walked that 10 miles with his brother after a while, but he walked to school and back.
• 2:51
  And the school was only offered in the dead of winter.
• 2:55
  So he's out, he's in Nowhere's Bill, walking 10 miles each direction to school in the middle of winter and, and he's excited about it because he gets to learn.
• 3:10
  His dad has a, an outfitting shop and all the things that miners need to do the job, they come to his shop to purchase.
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  But his mom thinks that he ought to, he'd be a good teacher.
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  And he gets big for a high school boy.
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  At 17 he was 6 foot 195 pounds and they made him a marshal because, you know, they get some rowdiness, some drinking and this sort of thing.
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  So he's learning how to manage conflict.
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  As a 17 year old, you know, he, by 17, he is tough as nails.
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  You know about.
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  Hurry up Yost.
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  Freedling.
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  Hurry up Yost.
• 4:00
  I stated in my book when he retired in 1926 after, you know, as head coach of Michigan, he was, according to my calculations, the greatest college football coach of all time and remained so until, you know, Bud Wilkinson
• 4:16
  and Bud Bear Bryant came along.
• 4:19
  Yost literally put the Michigan Wolverines on the college football map before he came in 1901, Michigan, I mean, they had a football program, but they, they were nothing.
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  I mean, they were not, they were not even a power.
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  I mean, they were just there, a lot of loose bricks without mortar.
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  And when he came there, he converted them into a powerhouse.
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  In his first five seasons, they annihilated all competition.
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  I mean, they were the power and what is now the Big Ten.
• 4:48
  Back then it was simply called the Western Conference.
• 4:50
  But back then, I mean, they were called the point a minute teams because they were winning games like 128 to nothing and literally averaging a point a minute.
• 4:59
  I mean, they played in the very first Rose bowl game in 1902 against Stanford and beat Stanford 49 to nothing.
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  I mean, it was just.
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  His men would run off plays at a breakneck pace.
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  I mean, as soon as the ball was whistled dead, the quarterback Michigan quarter would start barking out the signals and the men would quickly pick themselves off, set themselves in formation and they would run the playoff.
• 5:20
  And it was just so relentless.
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  I mean, they were just.
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  They would go through teams like a knife through warm butter.
• 5:27
  He also was thin skinned when he felt disrespected.
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  Now that disrespect arrived on November 6, 1909.
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  Notre Dame, behind halfback Red Miller did what no Notre Dame team had ever done before.
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  They had beat Michigan 11.
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  Three was a score in Ann Arbor.
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  The Detroit papers called it a red letter day.
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  Yos called it arrogance.
• 5:46
  When Michigan's board of control sat down that winter to arrange a 1910 rematch, they didn't come for a contract.
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  They came for a fight.
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  The opening was eligibility.
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  Two Notre Dame linemen, Ralph Dimick and George Philbrook, had played up first at Pacific University in Oregon and then three seasons at Whitman College in Washington before two more at Notre Dame.
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  Seven seasons of collegiate athletics.
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  1910.
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  The rules were a patchwork and nobody fully agreed on them even then.
• 6:13
  What isn't difficult to say is what happened next.
• 6:15
  Notre Dame refused to bench him and Michigan canceled the game 24 hours before kickoff, right in front of a stadium that was selling tickets.
• 6:24
  Now fielding YOs, now steering, the Michigan athletics would not schedule Notre Dame for again for another 33 years.
• 6:30
  An entire generation of players graduated, have never gotten a chance to settle it on the field.
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  And Washington, all as a freshman in 1910, was an undersized end with a pug nose and a knack for catching passes.
• 6:42
  In 1913 he caught passes in a stunning upset over Army, a game that helped legitimize the forward pass itself.
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  Walter Camp named him as a third team All American.
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  Joest published his own All American team and slighted every Notre Dame player but put three Michigan players on it.
• 6:58
  Notre Dame understood exactly what it was, a deliberate slate.
• 7:02
  The player who carried it for the rest of his life was Newt Rockne.
• 7:06
  Rocky wasn't an observer of this feud.
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  He lived it as a student.
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  He absorbed a personal humiliation from the exact man running the Michigan athletics.
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  Five years later, he would become the head coach who spent the rest of his career in a collision course with the same man.
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  Newt Rockne has a great character of his own.
• 7:23
  And to get more detail on this man, we have our historian authors Matthew debios and Timothy P.
• 7:30
  Brown, who told us in recent interviews a little bit more about Notre Dame's offense.
• 7:36
  And the coach of that great club,.
• 7:38
  There's a guy that played there named Jesse Harper.
• 7:41
  He, you know, he ended up coaching it.
• 7:44
  I think he was at Wabash first and then, then Notre Dame.
• 7:49
  But you know, he, he led Notre Dame for seven, eight years.
• 7:53
  Something along those lines.
• 7:55
  And one of the, you know, he was at Notre Dame coaching them in 1913 when Rockne and, and Gus Doris, you know, kind of, kind of had a more innovative pass offense than a lot of other people at
• 8:12
  the time.
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  And they beat army in, kind of famously beat army that year.
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  So, so, but then, so Rockne kind of took that core offense and then adapted it.
• 8:27
  And so it, it's kind of, it's a little bit different.
• 8:32
  I mean for the most part, if you, if you don't really know the difference between single wing and Notre Dame box, you might look at them and say it's the same thing.
• 8:40
  But the, the big, there were a couple of big differences.
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  One was that the, the single wing tended to be an unbalanced line and then, then you overshifted the backs as well.
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  Whereas the, the Notre Dame box tended to be using a balance line and then you over shifted the backs.
• 9:04
  But it started like when you, when they came out of the huddle or if they didn't huddle and they just lined up, they would, they would start in the traditional T, and then on A signal, so there's a
• 9:18
  rhythm to the snap count.
• 9:20
  Another innovation with Notre Dame is that when they did their blocking, they wouldn't just do blocking at the line of scrimmage.
• 9:27
  They would go down the field and continue blocking.
• 9:30
  That was the great innovation behind Notre Dame because before Rockne came along with that shift, no one ever thought about you.
• 9:37
  They just thought of you.
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  Just do your blocking right at the line of scrimmage.
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  No one thought about telling your offensive lineman, okay, after you break through at the line of script, keep going, keep going.
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  Keep running and keep throwing blocks.
• 9:48
  And that's why Notre Dame had a devastating offense throughout all of Rocky's coaching career, his 12 seasons there, because it wasn't just backfield speed.
• 9:57
  He wanted offensive linemen with great.
• 10:00
  He wanted his offensive lineman at great speed as well, because they needed to go down in the field fast to keep throwing blocks for their backs there.
• 10:07
  And that's why Notre Dame's Brown game was so devastating, because that great speed, once they had got that momentum, once they broke through at the line of scrimmage, they would just get these long, incredible long gainers and just
• 10:20
  tear up through the backfields of opposing defenses there.
• 10:24
  Rocky took over as coach and head athletic director in 1918.
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  He inherited a program still scraping by.
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  It was underfunded, understaffed.
• 10:33
  You know, they're playing catch up to the rest of the Midwestern teams and the East.
• 10:36
  He built over the next decade turn Notre Dame into something closer to a cultural institution than an athletic department.
• 10:44
  National schedules, national pass press, the Gipper, the Four Horsemen, commercials, you name it.
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  Yos meanwhile, consolidated his power.
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  Back in Ann Arbor.
• 10:55
  He stepped away from the head coaching of the football field and became the athletic department's head.
• 11:01
  You know, he never let go of one conviction, and that was schools like Notre Dame had a structural advantage over teams like Michigan.
• 11:09
  Looser eligibility, more aggressive, recruited and transfer students that the Big Ten had restricted.
• 11:15
  He called this position quote fair and no favors, end quote, a phrase he used in a letter to the Chicago Tribune writer Hugh Fullerton on January of 1923.
• 11:25
  For years, it stayed theoretical, a philosophy he grumbled about in letters.
• 11:29
  What kept the relationship from fully collapsing, oddly enough, was track.
• 11:34
  Jesse Harper, Notre Dame's former head coach and track coach, had kept the rivalry with Michigan in track and field alive.
• 11:47
  They had a series every year going on even after football went dark.
• 11:51
  Now, Rockne himself had coached track in 1914, and the only thread that linking the two athletic departments at all was track and field.
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  But that thread snapped in June of 1923.
• 12:04
  Here's where you have to understand Fairy field.
• 12:08
  The track itself tells us the story.
• 12:11
  If you're finding this timeline useful, that thread that way of a single cinder track holding football rivalry together.
• 12:19
  It's exactly what we do here on the gridiron timeline.
• 12:21
  Year by year and more of this era lives on@pigskindispatch.com in our American football timeline.
• 12:27
  That single afternoon didn't create the feud.
• 12:30
  It turned a slow, simmering institutional grievance into something entirely personal.
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  What followed was two weeks of increasingly blunt letters between the two men, then years of open hostility, sniping at each other through go betweens like the Detroit News columnist H.G.
• 12:46
  Salinger.
• 12:47
  By 1929, Rockne was bedridden with phlebitis, a severe blood clot condition.
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  He was fielding yet another inquiry about Notre Dame's academic cleanliness.
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  He finally let it go in writing.
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  He was miffed.
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  Now he compared Yost to Senator Tom Heflin of Alabama, a notorious anti Catholic voice in con at the time.
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  He told him in essence that Michigan's athletic director would do the sport a favor by resigning.
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  And it was about as direct as an accusation of bigotry as you'll find in the private letters of two prominent men from this era.
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  Rocketing was clearly meant every word of it.
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  Now we don't have to have a mirror image from Yost.
• 13:26
  He never unloaded on Rockne with that same fury on paper.
• 13:29
  But given everything else we know about how Yos talked about Rockne to other people, there's little reason to believe he would have disagreed with the sentiment.
• 13:38
  He would have just aimed it all at Rockne instead.
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  And then abruptly, it was over.
• 13:44
  On March 31, 1931, Newt Rockney died in a commercial plane crash in rural Kansas.
• 13:49
  He was 43 years old, one of the first major public figures to die in a plane crash.
• 13:54
  And the telephone operators at the Chicago Tribune reportedly stopped answering with the paper's name and just said, yes, it's true about Rockne, end quote.
• 14:03
  President Hoover issued a statement.
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  The King of Norway even sent his condolences.
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  Fielding Jost also issued a public statement, and by all appearances, it was generous.
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  He called Rockne the most colorful character in modern football.
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  He praised the toughness of his teams.
• 14:17
  But look at what Yost didn't do.
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  The Big Ten commissioner sent flowers to the funeral on behalf of every athletic director in the conference except Yost.
• 14:25
  He sent nothing under his own name.
• 14:27
  Coaches around the country contributed to a memorial fund from $5 to $200.
• 14:32
  Yos contribution was 10 bucks.
• 14:35
  Now no personal note to Rocky's widow has ever surfaced in a mountain of correspondence both schools have otherwise preserved exhaustively.
• 14:43
  Time did what these two men couldn't manage on their own in 1942, with America at war and college football scrambling to find wartime schedules, Michigan and Notre Dame finally played each other again on the gridiron y was retired
• 14:57
  to.
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  But he was very much alive.
• 14:59
  He watched it all happen.
• 15:00
  He never got and Rockne never got the one thing this whole story keeps circling back to an actual game between the two of them.
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  Two men spent 20 years defining themselves against each other in letters and newspaper columns, in a shouting match on a center track in 1923.
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  Never once on the same field that they gave their lives to.
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  We hope you enjoyed this story.
• 15:25
  Thanks for joining us today.
• 15:26
  You can find more football history at your portal to gridiron.
• 15:29
  Your history pigskindispatch.
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  Com.
• 15:31
  Today we salute the track that ended the rivalry and the hurdle that history never forgot.
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  Thanks for joining us today.
• 15:38
  Have a great gridiron day.