Football History Rewind Part 56

1925 saw a new scientific ranking system come to fruition from and unlikely person. The history of football was fantastic during the 1925 college season. Big named, players, big time coaches, and schools on the rise led to one of the best seasons in history.

The “roaring twenties” certainly have had their impact on the game of football as this series has shown. The players and coaches from this era of football are still well known names that any football fan has heard of. Traditions were also started in the mid 1920's that carry on today. This edition of Football History Rewind will enlighten the reader to the start of tradition in 1925 that is still a very hot topic.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the 1925 Michigan and Minnesota game

Annual controversy

This time of year in college football is usually full of controversy. The main argument is: “who is the number one team in the nation?” The radio and television experts fill the air waves on their opinions of who should be playing for the National Championship and how unfair the system is to determine the two teams who will vie for this title. The commentaries also weigh in heavily as to the faults of the B.C.S. , the F. B. S. and how the NCAA should step in and introduce a more expansive playoff system to better the way we crown a champion.

It gets a little bit annoying to hear all of the talk each and every year at nauseam for this subject. The other major sports in the collegiate and professional realms never have the debate of who is best that the top division in NCAA football does. Today no one knows the answers to how these issues will be resolved or if they ever will be but we do know how they got started. 

1925: the start of number one

From football’s early beginnings there had been some sort of ranking system. The Helms Athletic Foundation suggested their rankings each season from 1883 through 1935. This was not done with very much fact but was more of an opinion from the group. 

The path to having an official scientific ranking system in College football all started at the University of Illinois in the School of Economics. Yes you read it right, the School of Economics. A teacher in this department, Frank G. Dickinson, was an avid football fan who decided to apply his mathematical skills to his favorite pastime. Dickinson developed a formula by which data could be entered to determine who the best team in the land was each season. At first it was for his own amusement but one day he revealed it to one of his classes as part of a lecture. One student in this class happened to be the sports editor of the school newspaper and he published his professor’s rankings in a story that he wrote. 

This article came to the attention of a clothing mogul in Chicago named Jack Rissman. Rissman was so intrigued by the notion that he decided to use the rankings to award a trophy to the top team in the Western Conference. When word of this notion spread to nearby South Bend, Indiana things took another course. Knute Rockne loved the idea so much that he immediately invited Rissman and Dickinson to lunch to discuss taking this award to a national level so that Notre Dame amongst others could be a part of the rankings. Rockne easily persuaded the men to go national with the system and award and even talked the two into doing it retroactively back to 1924 so that the Fighting Irish could be the very first National Champions in the scientific system. The Dickinson System was used until 1940 when it became over shadowed by the Associated Press system.

The decision of who was number one was controversial back then in the way it went down and the tradition of objective argumentation carries on to this day. The bean counters and Math Geeks got us again!        

The 1925 Collegiate Season

This was a big year of change as the power of college football shifted. It wasn't the Eastern teams that held all the power, no other parts of the country including the West and Deep South were producing very good football teams.

Michigan under Fielding Yost was once again a strong team with a 7-1 overall record, the Wolverines only loss was by a score of 2-3 to the University of Minnesota. The club featured not one but two consensus All-Americans in quarterback Benny Friedman and end Bennie Oosterbaan.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the 1925 Pitt versus Penn State game day action

Pittsburgh too was a powerhouse with Pop Warner at the helm, but they too suffered a lone defeat in week two against Lafayette by the score of 9-20. They each were strong contenders but there were a couple of undefeated squads in collge football that outdid them.

Alabama and Dartmouth were the two teams that ended up with the best record of all the major college teams in the Nation in 1925. The both were undefeated as a matter of fact.

The Dartmouth Indians, led by halfback Andy Oberlander, compiled an 8–0 record and outscored its opponents by a whopping total of 340 to 29! Having defeated the likes of Harvard, Cornell, and Chicago in the process of their rugged schedule third year head coach Jesse Hawley, has his team on a mission. The Indian eleven were retroactively declared the national champion by the Dickinson System and by historian Parke H. Davis.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Tech Golden Tornado play a football game in 1925

The Crimson Tide of Alabama were equally impressive as they compiled a perfect 10–0 record and were recognized in later years as the national champions by the Billingsley Report, Boand System, College Football Researchers Association, and the Helms Athletic Foundation just to name a few. The athleic star of the Tide were Johnny Mack Brown and Grant Gillis. An epic game against Georgia Tech in late October propelled them to the trademark victory of this version of the Tide was in a game between undefeated teams in the 1926 Rose Bowl. Alabama defeated Pacific Coast Conference champion Washington by a 20–19 score in a game that has gone down in history as "the game that changed the South."

The banner photo is of The 1925 Dartmouth Indians football team was an American football team that represented Dartmouth College as an independent during the 1925 college football season. In its third season under head coach Jesse Hawley, the team compiled an 8–0 record, shut out five of eight opponents, and outscored all opponents by a total of 340 to 29. The team was retroactively designated as the 1925 national champion by the Dickinson System and Parke H. Davis.. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Dartmouth College.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: On This Day Sports, the Sports Reference's family of website databases & Stathead.com