Vince Lombardi

Brennan Marion, WR for the Tulsa Golden Hurricane, was signed as a free agent by the Miami Dolphins after the 2009 NFL Draft. What's so significant about that, you say? Well, Marion's road to the NFL was circuitous to say the least.

• Marion attended a different school in the Pittsburgh area each year from grades six to twelve because his mother moved frequently.
• He moved to the San Francisco area following his senior year of high school in order to play for De Anza Junior College with his best friend, Chuck Thompson.
• Despite working odd jobs to make ends meet, he and Thompson could not keep up with the $1,300 montly rent on their apartment and were evicted. (Sounds like they selected much too expensive digs.)
• With no place else to stay, they slept in the school's locker room when the janitor left the door unlocked and in the press box when he didn't. They ate the value meals at McDonald's and Wendy's and cookies and chips given them by a clerk at the 7-Eleven.
• After three months, an assistant coach finally figured out what they were doing and invited them to live with his family.
• Despite the challenging living conditions, Marion led all California JC players in receiving to earn a scholarship to Tulsa.
• With room and board paid for and access to Division IA workout facilities, Marion gained 30 pounds and improved his speed to 4.3 for the 40. The next two seasons, he caught 82 passes for 2,356 yards, averaging 31.9 per catch as a junior, an NCAA record.
• Brennan's Cinderella story received a setback when he tore his ACL in the 2008 C-USA championship game. That caused NFL teams to back off him in the draft.
• He was still limping at the Dolphins' minicamp but said his knee was 90%. He ran a 4.52 40 just three months after surgery. He has a chance to at least make the Miami practice squad.
  

Captains meet before the 1942 Army-Navy Game

Earl Blaik

World War II travel restrictions made the 1942 and 1943 Army-Navy gridiron clashes unique.

• 1942: After playing the annual classic at Philadelphia every year since 1932, the service academies played at Thompson Stadium in Annapolis for the first time since 1893. Congress actually debated whether the game should be cancelled because of the war. However, President Franklin Roosevelt, just as he did for major league baseball, decreed that the game should be played because it would be good for the morale of the military and of the nation. Because of gasoline rationing, attendance was limited to those within a 10-mile radius of the stadium. So that ruled out the West Point Cadet Corps from attending. The Naval Academy superintendant ordered third- and fourth-year midshipmen to sit behind the Army bench and cheer for the visitors. The middies sang Army fight songs and yelled Cadet cheers during the game, led by two Navy cheerleaders who had traveled to West Point to learn them. Navy won for the fourth year in a row, 14-0, before a crowd of only 11,700, the lowest for the annual clash since 1893. (Just a year before, nine days before Pearl Harbor, 98,497 had attended in Philadelphia.) With the pressure and uncertainty of the war, players let off steam on the field with crushing hits, punches to the jaw, and tripping and kicking at every chance. At one point, an Army player called time in order to find his missing teeth in the grass. Colonel Earl Blaik, in his second year rebuilding the Army football program, guided the Cadets to a 6-3 record. The win gave coach Billick Whelchel a 5-4 record for his rookie season at the helm in Annapolis.
• 1943: Army hosted at West Point for the first time since 1892. Again, a faction in the War Department lobbied for the game's cancellation, and it was only nine days before the scheduled date that the go-ahead was given. The situation was reversed from 1942 as part of the cadet corps served as Navy's rooting section. The cadets sang "Anchors Aweigh" with as much enthusiasm as the midshipmen had sung "On, Brave Old Army Team" the year before. The result was the same, however ? another Navy victory, another shutout, 13-0, and another physical game. Five fights had to be broken up in the first half alone. Army did improve its record slightly from 1942 to 7-2-1 to rank #11 in the final AP poll. Navy, at 8-1, finished #4. The only loss was to national champion Notre Dame.
• 1944: The annual spectacle returned to a neutral site, Baltimore, never to be played again at either Annapolis or West Point. With Felix "Doc" Blanchard's transfer to West Point from North Carolina, Blaik had all the pieces in place for the greatest Army teams of all time. The 1944 and 1945 aggregations, with Blanchard joining Glenn Davis as "The Touchdown Twins," each went 9-0 and were acclaimed national champions. Army ended Navy's five-game winning streak with a 23-7 win, then triumphed again, 32-13, at Philadelphia in 1945. After the '45 season, Blaik turned down an invitation to the Rose Bowl, feeling his team had nothing left to prove and not wanting to interfere with players' exam preparation and holiday leave.

Bill Cosby

Ed Marinaro

>Mark Harmon

Gerald Ford

 

 

Jack Kemp

These men had success on the gridiron and then in the political arena.

• Undoubtedly the most athletic president ever was Gerald Ford. He was the starting C for Michigan from 1932-4. He played in the 1935 College All Star Game against the NFL champion Chicago Bears. He was so good that Sports Illustrated named him to its Silver Anniversary Team in 1959. He turned down NFL offers in order to attend Yale Law School where he served as an assistant coach. After serving 24 years in the House of Representatives, Ford became vice president in time to replace Richard Nixon when he resigned.
• Dwight Eisenhower played HB at West Point in 1912, earning the nickname the "Kansas Cyclone." He suffered a knee injury late in the season that ended his gridiron career. (The injury occurred against Tufts the week after Army lost to Carlisle and the great Jim Thorpe. It did not happen while trying to tackle Thorpe, as many sources report.) After a military career that culminated as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Ike was elected president in 1952 and served two full terms.
• Jack Kemp played QB for Division III Occidental College (CA) and then in the NFL, CFL, and AFL. He led the Buffalo Bills to the AFL championship in 1964 and 1965. He finished with 21,218 passing yards and 114 TD tosses. He started his political career, in a sense, while still a player when he co-founded the AFL Players Association. He was elected to Congress in 1971, serving nine terms. He became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under George H. W. Bush. He ran unsuccessfully for vice-president on the Republican ticket of Bob Dole in 1996.
• Another outstanding pro player who entered politics is Steve Largent. After a successful college career at Tulsa, he played WR for Seattle from 1976-89, setting career records for receptions (819), yardage (13,089), and TDs (100), all since surpassed by Jerry Rice. He represented Oklahoma in the House of Representatives from 1994 to 2002, when he ran unsuccessfully for governor.

Reference: Football's Most Wanted, Floyd Conner

Dwight Eisenhower

Steve Largent

Jim Thorpe

Joe Guyon

• The team was the bright idea of Walter Lingo, owner of the Oorang Dog Kennels in LaRuse, a small OH town. Lingo, who had no interest in football, paid the $100 fee to obtain a franchise in order to create a team that would promote the owner's mail order dog business.
• Walter hired the man he called "the world's greatest athlete," Jim Thorpe, to assemble a team composed entirely of Native Americans.
  • The Oorang roster included players with names like Big Bear, Dick Deer Slayer, Long Time Sleep, Joe Little Twig, and Laughing Gas. There were also Leon Boutwell, Bob Hill, and other players with American names. Although there were charges that Thorpe played some ringers, apparently every player had at least some Indian blood. Most of the squad members came from Thorpe's alma mater, Carlisle Indian School.
  • The team was the only all-Indian team ever to play in a major pro league.
• The team could not play its home games in Larue for the simple reason that the town had no field. However, only 15 miles away was Marion, a city of 30,000 which did have a suitable field. Marion was booming because it was the hometown of the current U.S. President, Warren Harding.
• The 1922 team played only one home eague game, defeating the Columbus Panhandles in the second league contest 20-6 before 1,200 at Lincoln Park in Marion. They did host Bucyrus, an independent team, the next week and beat them by the same score, although the contest didn't count in league standings. The Indians finished the season 3-6 in league games and 5-8 in all games.
• Oorang didn't do well for several reasons.
  • It was hard for the team to take football seriously when the owner was much more interested in the pregame and halftime activities than the game itself. Lingo produced elaborate exhibitions involving his Airedales and Indians. For example, Nikolas Lassa wrestled the bear that was part of the show. Players also were expected to display their marksmanship, tomahawk work, and knife and lariat throwing as well as demonstrate Indian dances.
  • Another reason for the team's lack of success was Thorpe himself. He was not a good coach, especially where discipline was concerned. Many players had a liquor problem that often rendered them at less than full strength for the games.
  • Thorpe didn't play the first part of the season and even when he finally did play, it was seldome more than a half. One news story said that Thorpe's presence on the field improved the team by "fully 50 percent."
• The best player on the team was RB Joe Guyon, who had played at Carlisle a few years after Thorpe and also at Georgia Tech. Oorang was not his first pro team, and he ended up playing seven years in the league and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1966. He led the 1922 Indians in yardage and points.
• The bottom fell out for Oorang in 1923. The Indians went 1-10 in NFL games and beat the Marion Athletic Club in a non-league game that was their only home contest of the season. Oorang became a "travelling team" that played all its games on the road, a common occurence in pro football in the 1920s. The only NFL victory for Oorang was in its final game, 19-0 over the Louisville Brecks at the Kentucky Fair Grounds. It is little wonder that Louisville never fielded another team in the NFL after that debacle.
• One problem was that injuries kept Guyon out of action until the eighth game. Thorpe played much more than he did the prevous year but was himself the victim of an injury in the ninth game. Reporters agreed that, when healthy, Thorpe "was still a strong punter, passer and line-plunger but had lost the blazing speed that had made him a great player." The other good player on the squad, B-E Pete Calac, was the only one of the Big Three to play most of the season.
• Crowds for Lingo's dog and pony show (literally) were down from the previous season. The novelty had worn off although bad weather was the culprit on some occasions. So, faced with diminishing returns on his investment in a football team, Walter threw in the towel and the Oorang Indians were history.

Frank Gifford in a print ad

Charley Conerly, Marlboro Man

Approximately 16,000 Sugar Bowl tickets have been returned here by Tulsa and Tennessee universities in deference to the office of defense transportation's request that bowl authorities recall all tickets sold outside of the New Orleans area.

A. B. Nicholls, VP of the football spectacle's governing committee, told Monday Quarterbacks that these tickets were now on sale to the locals and that they would be distributed on a "first-come-first-served" basis. Nicholls stated also that the transportation of all athletic teams to New Orleans including participants in basketball and boxing, seemed assured.

"I know that arrangements have been completed to bring the Great Lakes and Stanford basketball teams here," he said. "And there seems no difficulty in the way of either Tulsa or Tennessee ."

Thousands of the returned Sugar Bowl tickets were distributed to service personnel. The Volunteers of General Robert Neyland defeated Henry Frnka's Golden Hurricane 14-7 before 58,361 on New Year's Day 1943.

These rules changes were in force for the 1926 college football season.

1. After a safety, the ball is put in play from the 20 yd line by kick. A lateral pass before the kick is not allowed.
2. If the kickoff team kicks out of bounds twice in succession, the receiving team gets the ball on their own 40.
3. Hand proctectors and masks for injured players are allowed again for the first time since 1922. All padding is subject to inspection by the umpire.
4. The end of each quarter is denoted by the head linesman's gun. Previously, the gun was fired only at the end of each half.
5. A free kick must go at least ten yards. The kicking team is entitled to a second try.

Johnny Mack Brown running for Alabama against Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl.