In its first year of publication, Time began its weekly summary of college football happenings with the "Big Three (Eastern) games."

• Harvard's "tall and scrawny" Karl Pfaffman drop-kicked a FG moments after his teammate Combs fell on a loose ball for a 3-0 lead at Princeton. A safety made the final score 5-0.
• "A 40-yard forward pass supplemented by a 35-yard run to the goal-line brought Brown's score in the closing minutes of play against Dartmouth up to 14 points. A few seconds previously Brown had scored on a Dartmouth fumble. The desperate rally did not suffice. Dartmouth had scored 16 points on two touchdowns and a place kick."
• Maryland, "little-advertised university of the South," scored two TDs in the opening period at Yale. However, the Eli, considered the top of the heap in the East along with Syracuse and Cornell, scored two TDs and a FG to take a 16-14 lead. The invaders missed a dropkick by inches that would have scored a huge upset.
• Bo McMillin returned to Boston, scene of the upset of Harvard he engineered as QB of Centre in 1921. This time, he could only watch as Boston College turned back his Centenary charges 14-0.

Knute Rockne

The upset of the week was Nebraska 14-7 over the "hitherto invincible" 6-0 Notre Dame eleven in Lincoln. This was the second year in a row that the Cornhuskers "blighted the prospects of Knute Rockne ... for national championship considerations." NU will get a chance to spoil the unbeaten record of Syracuse, which heads west November 24. Rockne "places his strategic dependence on a bewildering snap shift and persistent forward passing. He gives his men only one scrimmage a week. ... He has lost only three games in six years." Harold "Red" Grange got loose for a 28-yard broken field TD run against Wisconsin in Champaign-Urbana to spark a 10-0 triumph. 6-0 overall, Illinois leads the Western Conference with a 4-0 mark. In the South, a region not covered by Time, Alabama defeated Kentucky 16-8 in Tuscaloosa, while the Tide's next foe, LSU, rested for the big meeting in Montgomery November 16.

• Out West, USC won't be defending its Rose Bowl title after a 13-7 loss to California dropped the Trojans' record to 4-3. The visiting Bears moved to 7-0-1 to keep their Pasadena hopes alive. Up the coast, another strong Rose contender, Washington, defeated Montana 26-14. The 8-0 Huskies visit Berkeley next week.

Percy Haughton

Memorials were held in three different stadiums - Harvard, Yale, and Cornell - for Percy Haughton, "football coach extraordinary." QB Logan of Haughton's 1914 Harvard team wrote to the Harvard Crimson suggesting that Soldiers' Field at Cambridge be renamed Haughton Field. Percy's widow watched the Columbia team he had built lose to Cornell at Ithaca. "Chief cause ... was Ignacio Sadurdino Molinet, 19-year-old native of Cuba, Cornell's 179-pound backfield torpedo. Score: Cornell 14, Columbia 0" Princeton and Harvard played "inconsequential games - Princeton practicing against Swarthmore, 21 to 6; Harvard substitutes chastising Boston College, 13 to 0." "The gray ranks of West Point's cadets marched evenly into the Yale Bowl. Unawed by militarism, a chunky Eli, HB Pond, greeted their team promptly" with a 48yd TD run. "The Army marched and countermarched its backfield squad, right and left and double-time, but only once reached the end of the parade ground. Home marched the cadets, more evenly than ever. Score: Yale 7, Army 7" The unbeaten Lafayette Leopards challenged the undefeated Penn Quakers to no avail. After a FG by "Chief Leopard" Berry, "Chief Quaker" McGraw threw a pass to Joe Laird for a TD. Score: Penn 6, Lafayette 3. Penn rejoices in being the only unbeaten, untied Eastern team since Pittsburgh was tied by Syracuse 7-7. The low scoring trend continued elsewhere in the Northeast as Dartmouth defeated Brown 10-3. The Big Green gained 222yd "during an afternoon punctuated with many imperfect passes by Brown." "At Annapolis, two cripples met, one a self-styled lion, one a so-called goat. Limping, hobbling, they tussled until nightfall, when the Navy goat had to admit that the absence of Shapely, one of its curliest horns, was too great a handicap. The Penn State or Nittany lion came off with two field goals. Score: Penn State 6, Navy 0"

In the Midwest, Illinois hosted Iowa in high winds. "Red Grange rushed like the winds, sweeping his fellows nearer to the Big Ten championship." Grange scored two TDs in Q1, set up a third, and threw two passes for 86 yd. Score: Illinois 36, Iowa 0 In other Big Ten action, Northwestern won its first conference game in two years, 17-7 over Indiana. Michigan upended Minnesota 13-0. Chicago, "despite gloomy prognostications by her 'Old Man,' Coach Alonzo Stagg," bested Purdue 19-6 to keep alive its hope of capturing the title from Illinois. Notre Dame was a "ruthless hostess" to Georgia Tech, 34-3, "a score characteristic of the potential national champions." Tech's FB Douglas Wycoff ran 47 yd to the one on the last play of the game. "In the Missouri Valley," Nebraska "pulled itself together after a dismaying first quarter" and defeated Missouri 14-6 behind the running of Rhodes and Bloodgood. Captain Bond led Missouri in its first defeat of the season. Down South, Alabama shellacked Mississippi 61-0, and West Virginia smothered Bethany 71-6. On the Pacific Coast, "California prefaced its argument with Southern California with the announcement that the game would terminate athletic relations between the two universities." Stanford was also rumored to have decided against any more contests with USC, holding them to be "not conducive to the best interests of intercollegiate sport." Then Cal won the swan song against the Trojans 7-0. Elsewhere out West, Oregon overcame Washington 7-3.

Red Grange

"Wadded warrior everywhere continued joyously the grim business of football."

"Punting his way down the field of the huge Illinois stadium, after two periods of scoreless, alternate rampage, [Bennie] Friedman of Michigan got near enough to Illinois' white posts to kick a goal. 'Red' Grange made the longest gain for Illinois – 15 yards around left end. Score: Michigan 3, Illinois 0" The Wolverines moved to 4-0, all shutouts, while the Illini dropped to 1-3. UM coach Fielding Yost proclaimed his contingent "the greatest football team I ever saw" and bragged that Grange "did not gain enough ground to bury him in." "Smart tricks are in the Dartmouth bag: a triple pass, executed with the polish of a fortune-teller's shuffle; criss-cross plays that befuddled the Harvard backs as much as if they had seen HB Oberlander (Dartmouth) take a rabbit out of his helmet. Dark fell before Harvard's last frantic forward pass slipped through groping butterfingers to the ground. Score: Dartmouth 32, Harvard 9." "For four periods Princeton fought itself into a lather on a field as wet as a shampoo, with a ball as slippery as shaving soap, against Colgate. In the last minutes a sophomore from Dayton, Ohio (Abraham Mankat, Colgate) forced a safety by blocking a kick; whereupon his encouraged teammates scored a touchdown that dashed the championship hopes of the last of the Big Three. Score: Colgate 9, Princeton 0."

• "Brown dedicated a handsome concrete stadium with ceremonies made impressive by the performance of a mountainous Yale eleven, which traveled there to appall the opposing Mahomets, 20 to 7."
• "Flannagan of Notre Dame ripped, kicked, butted, burrowed his way to victory against Minnesota in a game marred by many fumbles. Score: Notre Dame 19, Minnesota 7." [It was common to refer to players by first name only in those days. Flannagan should actually be Christy Flanagan.] The home loss was the Gophers' first after victories over North Dakota, Grinnell, and Wabash. The 4-1 Irish bounced back from a 27-0 licking by Army at Yankee Stadium. The defeat ran ND's record in the last eight games against the Cadets to 0-7-1.
• That same Army team "defeated its fourth Western invader," St. Louis, in a "sluggish contest," 19-0. John McEwan's team was probably looking ahead to its visit to Yale next week.

Other important games did not register on Time's east/midwest radar screen (probably because radar had not been invented yet!).

Alabama defeated Georgia Tech 7-0 in a battle of unbeatens in Atlanta. "After waging a dogged scoreless fight during the first half, Alabama scored early in the third quarter. Mack Brown caught Mycoff's punt on the 50 yard line and weaved a path through a maze of Tech players for the lone touchdown of the day" (Associated Press story). ["Mack Brown" was Johnny Mack Brown, who become a cowboy movie star.] The article refers to Tech's team as the "Golden Tornado." Tulane (4-0-1) traveled to Chicago to down Northwestern 18-7 at Soldier Field and "prove that football played in the south is just as peppery and tough as that of the north" (wire service story). Further west, Oklahoma A & M played rude hosts to TCU, 22-7. Bowman was the Aggie star "by his consistent line plunging." The AP story also noted ironically that "Matthews was put out of the game for slugging, the Christians receiving a 25 yard penalty."

• In the Far West, the Oakland Tribune crowed: "Oregon Teams Defeated by Bears and Cards." Stanford, called the Cards and not the Indians (the politically incorrect nickname adopted in 1930 and dropped in 1972), delighted a home crowd of 35,000 with a 26-10 win over the Oregon Aggies. Further north, "California ground Oregon into the sawdust of Multnomah field here [Portland] today, under a 28 to 0 score and did the trick with apparently little effort. ... The speed of the visitors and their all-around superiority was in evidence from the opening whistle to the final gun."

Time: "On the first full-fledged Saturday of the football season, U.S. citizens momentarily stopped criticizing military maneuvers on the Maginot Line, turned their attention to the field maneuvers of their favorite college football teams. Some of the games that kept them kibitzing long after the sun went down:"

• Elmer Layden's #11 Notre Dame eleven edged "scrappy" Georgia Tech in South Bend, 17-14. A "tantalizing little 140-pounder named Johnny Bosch" gave the Irish fits.
• In Evanston, Northwestern's coach Lynn "Pappy" Waldorf unveiled his "highly touted" sophomore RB Bill de Correvont who had scored 211 points for Chicago's Austin High two years ago. However, he wasn't nearly enough as Oklahoma, the defending Big Six champs, flattened the Wildcats 23-0. The loss was the first in a season-opener loss in Waldorf's five seasons at the helm.

John Kuzman

North met South before 41,454 at the Polo Grounds. Fordham boasted two of the best backs in the country, Len Eshmont and Jim Blumenstock, as well as "Little Sir Wrecker," 220-lb T John Kuzman, so-called because he injured several teammates during pre-season drills. Nevertheless, Frank Thomas' Alabama Crimson Tide prevailed 7-6. Bama scored in Q1 on a 13-yard reverse that finished a 40-yard drive. Haywood "Sandy" Sanford, who had booted the Tide into the Rose Bowl two years ago, added the crucial PAT. The Rams didn't threaten until a blocked punt set up their only score midway through Q4. The game was broadcast on an experimental medium called "television," the second week in a row a Fordham contest has been televised. Another Southern team came North and scored an upset, as LSU defeated Holy Cross behind four TDs by E Ken Kavanaugh, 26-7.

"What kind of football will the fans see this fall? The answer: more sleight-of-hand stuff than ever. Most teams are using half a dozen different styles of defense – four-, five- and six-man lines, each having variations known as loose, looping, overshifted, undershifted, orthodox. On offense, the tricky T formation is still the style, with a multitude of refinements, bearing such labels as the spit T, the wing T, the QT, the cockeyed T. Said Iowa's Coach Eddie Anderson: 'Football is different these days. You don't play a team any more; you play a squad. The trend is to have one team in for offense, another for defense."

Personal Note: The Alabama-Tulane contest was the first college game I ever attended. I was six and sat with my mother in the end zone as part of the 60,000 in Sugar Bowl Stadium. The game featured three TDs in the last minute of the first half and a fourth within the first three minutes of the second. The Tide's Norwood Hodges plunged one yard to break a scoreless tie with 53 seconds left in Q2. Hugh Morrow missed the place kick, which would prove the fatal error. Tulane's sophomore FB Eddie Price fumbled the ensuing kickoff, then rambled down the right sideline 101 yards to our end zone. Ed Heider booted the first of three PATs to put the Green Wave in the lead 7-6. Shortly after the next kickoff, Johnny August fumbled when trying to pass, and TU's Ray Olsen recovered on the Bama 39. On the last play of the half, Bennie Ellender heaved a 28-yard pass to Ray Prats who hauled it in on the 10 and carried two tacklers into the end zone. Two and a half minutes into the second half, Price intercepted a Harry Gilmer pass on the dead run and raced 55 yards for the score.

Harry Gilmer running against Tulane in 1947

Gilmer was the boyhood hero of Bobby Bowden, who grew up in Birmingham. 6' Harry was known for his jump passes. I still remember him springing up from a crowd of players and flinging the ball. In those pre-TV days, Alabama wore crimson helmets and jersies and khaki pants. Tulane wore green jerseys and white helmets and pants. When the game ended, my mother, who grew up in New Orleans, cheered the home team's victory. Then she looked down to see me crying. We had just moved to New Orleans from Birmingham, and my older brother and I were Crimson Tide fans. (Bama is still my third favorite team after my alma maters, LSU and FSU.)

With such an exciting game as my debut, is it any wonder I've had a lifelong love affair with college football? And I still cry when my team loses - I just wait until I get home.