Football History Rewind Part 62

We rewind the history of football back to the season of 1928 in college football in this episode. The highlights of the season including the top teams, players, cpaches, and games.

The 1928 season was "a change of the guard" situation as far as who was the master coach of the nation. Knute Rockne's Notre Dame squad suffered four losses during the season as it seemed his bag of tricks was being figured out by other coaches. Attention was now being given to a new innovative offense that Pop Warner was running at Stanford.

The Double Wing formation

Like football today, the west coast always plays a slightly different brand of football than the rest of the country. Pop Warner and his double wing formation during the 1928 season could be considered the original "west coast offense. Not because it has any similar strategy to the
current west coast system, nor do the two approaches even look alike, but it is because it all started in California. Warner had developed the system earlier than 1928, but it received some eastern exposure in 1928 when the Army-Navy series was forced to break off for a couple of seasons. Army and Navy each were accusing the other of illegal eligibility concerns. The game was reinstated after two years when it hit the desk of then-President Herbert Hoover with no corrective adjustments to the eligibility requirements of the two academies and their football squads. Very interesting, but how does this affect Stanford? Well, this first season of the two that the Army team took Navy off their schedule was filled by Stanford, who would travel to the Polo Grounds in New York City to play the powerful undefeated team of Army in the final game of the season for the Cadets. Army was big and strong, but it was no match for the trickery of Warner's double wing, which was full of fake hand-offs, spins, and double reverses.
Warner first attacked the outside flanks of the Army defense with success. When Army adjusted to this style, the Cardinal offense pounded the middle of the line with some big runs. Army was off balance all day as the Stanford squad impressed many onlookers in New York that day.
A month later at a coach's convention in New Orleans, the big crowds of eager young coaches were flocking to Warner rather than Rockne as they had in recent years. The coaches asked questions to Warner, and he was not shy in sharing his system. The result was that about a dozen top coaches in the East used either Warner's new double wing, his original single wing, or a variation of the two.

Stanford and its double wing were not the best team or system in California that season. The Southern Cal squad and their innovative coach Howard Jones. The Trojans did not allow Stanford to even score a point in their match-up in 1928. Jones had devised a six-man line that all but thwarted any success by Warner's double wing. He had outmuscled the trickery with numbers on the line and then threw a seventh player at linebacker in the mix near the line to shut down any other sneaky ideas Warner may have up his sleeve. Another tactic that stymied the Cardinal offense was that Jones had his defensive lineman step back at the snap on certain plays rather than rush the line. This tactic allowed the lineman to watch the fake hand-offs develop and determine the real point of attack without the extra confusion of being caught up in blocking schemes by their opponents. To add insults to injury Jones employed the Warner developed single wing system on offense with great success against the man who innovated it many years before.

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Another team claimed the National Championship of college football in 1928 besides USC. The Georgia Tech Golden Tornadoes, according to The Tip Top 25 website was the retroactive champs per Parke H. Davis, Helms, National Championship Foundation, and the CFB Researchers with their spotless 10-0 record. Of course, Davis also states that Detroit was tied for the title with GT. The knock on Georgia Tech's claim is that their schedule was not that tough, other than the 1929 Rose Bowl game, where they knocked off Stanford with the help of the famous "Wrongway Riegels" run. The Dickinson System considered this strength of opposition in their scoring, which is why it chose the Trojans as the nation's top team of 1928.

It was accurately stated earlier in this article that some of the luster was wiped from the Knute Rockne star in 1928. Notre Dame was outmatched on the field that seasons more so than any other year that Rockne coached the team. Rockne still had magic, though, enough to pull off his most well-known accomplishment, even though it was his team's worst record under his watch. This event occurred at halftime while the visiting Irish were locked in a scoreless tie with Army at Yankee Stadium. Rockne had seen his team suffer two consecutive defeats in the weeks before this game, and he could not face a third in a row. He had to do something big and dramatic to lead his team to victory. The group gathered around their coach in the locker room. Rockne spoke in a soft voice and his players did not make a sound to hear every word their coach had to say. Solemnly Rockne spoke of his visit to George Gipp, a recent star for the Irish. Knute added drama as he bent over the locker room's rub-down table, reenacting the Gipp deathbed visit in a quiet voice. The team listened to the monologue, which Rockne skillfully crafted to seem like a dialogue. The team was hearing Gipp tell the coach that he wanted the team to win one in his memory at some point when things were not going right for the Irish.
All at once, the coach slowly rose to his feet and turned from the table to face his players. Rockne looked at the tear-soaked faces of his players and paused a moment. The solemn look of the old coach changed quickly at this point, and a confident look of determination entered his eyes as he told the team, "Boys, let's go get 'em; this is that game!"
Army came out in the second half and quickly broke the tie with quick six points. The Irish responded with two unanswered scores of their own to have a 12-6 lead with two minutes remaining in the game. The climatic last drive of Army put every fan on the edge of their seat. The Cadets marched methodically down the field, deep into Irish territory. The Gipp fever must have gone through the Notre Dame's defense near the end of this fourth quarter because they somehow gathered up some last-second energy to stop the Cadets at the one-yard line as time expired. The story spread across the country and eventually ended up on the silver screen; the rest is history.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: TipTop25.com, NewsPapers.com, the Sports Reference's family of website databases & Stathead.com.

Banner photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the New Year's Day football game in the famous Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California from the Keystone View Company, Manufacturers and Publishers, [1929].