November 30, 1905: Chicago vs. Michigan, College Football's 1st "Game of the Century"

Walter Eckersall

November 30, 1905: The Championship of college football's Western Conference -- forerunner of the Big Ten -- is decided at Marshall Field in Chicago, named for the department store mogul who funded its construction. It becomes the 1st of many college football games referred to as "The Game of the Century."

The University of Chicago, coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg, came into the game at 10-0. They had allowed only 5 points all season, in a 16-5 win over Indiana. They had scored 44 points against Illinois, 42 each against Iowa and Beloit College, 33 against Lawrence University, and 32 against Northwestern.

They were led by Walter Eckersall, and, while quarterback was a very different position at the time, with the forward pass not legalized until the next season, he was widely regarded as the best player in the country. Stagg, later to be known as "The Grand Old Man of Football," called Eckersall "a selfless performer, marked by complete dedication to victory."

Future Notre Dame star end and coach Knute Rockne grew up in Chicago, and saw Eckersall play in both high school and college. He said of Eckersall, "The first time I learned a football was not only something to kick, but something to think with, was when I saw a great football player in action."

Stagg had recruited Eckersall out of Hyde Park High School, on the city's South Side, not far from the UC campus. Fielding Yost had also tried to recruit him, for the University of Michigan. There, Yost had such a high-powered offense that they were known as "The Point-a-Minute Team." They came in at 12-0: 65-0 over Ohio Wesleyan, 44-0 over Kalamazoo College, 36-0 over Case University, 23-0 over Ohio Northern, 18-0 over Vanderbilt, 31-0 over Nebraska, 70-0 over Albion, 48-0 over Drake, 33-0 over Illinois, 40-0 over Ohio State, 12-0 over Wisconsin, and 75-0 over Oberlin.

Granted, this 495-0 performance wasn't exactly against a modern Football Bowl Subdivision "Power 5 Conference" schedule. And only one of those games, the win over Illinois, was played away from Regents Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It should be noted that Wisconsin came closer than anybody to beating each team, having come within 4-0 of Chicago.

Since the start of the 1902 season, the Chicago Maroons were 46-4-3. But the Michigan Wolverines were 54-0-1 in their last 55 games. Their last loss? November 29, 1900, 15-6 -- against Chicago at Marshall Field. The showdown was set for Thanksgiving Day, and a crowd of 27,000, believed to be the largest in college football history to that point, filed into Marshall Field. (At the time, Thanksgiving Day was the last Thursday in November. It became the 4th Thursday in November in 1941.)

At first, the game was a punting duel between Eckersall and Michigan's John Garrels. It was scoreless early in the 3rd quarter, when a Garrels punt and a penalty pinned Chicago inside its own 10-yard line. On third down, as Eckersall attempted to punt, he encountered a fearsome rush, but evaded the Michigan tacklers, and was able to scramble to the 22-yard line and a 1st down.

After 3 more 1st downs, the drive stalled and Chicago were forced to punt again. Eckersall's booming punt carried into the end zone, where it was caught by Michigan's William Dennison "Denny" Clark, who attempted to run the ball out. He advanced the ball forward to the 1-yard line, but was hit hard by Art Badenoch, and then was brought back inside his own end zone by Mark Catlin.

Under the rules of the time, forward progress was not credited, and a ball carrier could be carried backwards or forwards until he was down. Therefore, Chicago were credited with a safety: 2 points. And that would produce the final score: Chicago 2, Michigan 0. Michigan's streak was over, and Chicago were awarded the Western Conference and National Championships.

Football observers like to say, "Defense wins championships." This is hardly ever true: You can't win if you don't score, and you can't score if you don't have the ball; and, if you have the ball, by definition, you are on offense. This time, defense really did win a Conference and a National Championship. The only other major football championship ever decided on a safety was the 1929 Rose Bowl, the Roy Riegels Game. (I have an entry for that event.)

Clark received the blame for the Michigan loss, and tried to live with it, but couldn't. In 1932, he shot and killed himself. He was 48 years old. In a suicide note to his wife, he reportedly expressed the hope that his "final play" would be of some benefit in atoning for his error at Marshall Field.

Denny Clark

Chicago would see its 14-game winning streak end on November 10, 1906, defeated by Minnesota. Since there was, as yet, no real professional football to speak of, Eckersall became a college football referee, considered the finest of his era. He also became a writer on the game for the Chicago Tribune. At the end of each season, as a counterweight to the Eastern-heavy "All-American" team selected by former Yale coach Walter Camp, Eckersall named an "All-Western" team, and it was considered prestigious in its day.

But "Eckie" was a heavy drinker, and died of cirrhosis of the liver on March 24, 1930. He was only 43 years old, and, to protect his public image, the Tribune reported the cause of death as a heart attack.

In 1949, the Chicago Public Schools constructed a sporting facility on the South Side, at 2423 East 82nd Street, named "Walter Eckersall Stadium." Eckersall, Stagg and Yost would all be charter inductees into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951.

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November 30, 1905 was a Thursday. Among the other notable college football games played that Thanksgiving Day: Alabama beat Tennessee, 29-0; Auburn beat Georgia, 20-0; Georgia Tech beat Clemson, 17-0; Holy Cross beat Fordham, 28-5; Indiana beat Ohio State, 11-0; Iowa beat St. Louis University, 31-0; Iowa State beat cross-State rival Drake, 17-12; Kansas beat arch-rival Missouri, 24-0 in Kansas City; Nebraska beat Illinois, 24-6; North Carolina beat Virginia, 17-0 in Norfolk, Virginia; Penn State beat the University of Pittsburgh, 6-0; the University of Pennsylvania beat Cornell, 6-5; and Utah beat Colorado State, 24-0.

Rutgers, Princeton, Harvard and Yale all completed their seasons the preceding Saturday. Army and Navy had the week off, to prepare for each other: They tied, 6-6, at Princeton's University Field.

November 14, 1908: Cornell vs. Chicago In the Snow

Stagg's Maroons. Note the shape of the ball.

November 14, 1908: American football has had several "snow bowls" in its history. This may have been the first.

Alone among the schools that would later be included in "the Ivy League," Cornell University is nowhere near what would come to be called "the Northeast Corridor." Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, isn't quite on it. But the rest are. From north to south: Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston; Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; Columbia University in New York City; Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey; and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In contrast, Cornell is not only, by far, the newest of the Ivies, having been founded by Ezra Cornell in 1865, but it is the furthest away: In Ithaca, New York, 223 miles northwest of Midtown Manhattan, and just 51 miles southwest of Syracuse University, which, like its Keystone State counterpart, Pennsylvania State University in State College, is a convenient marker separating "the Northeast" as a region of the United States from "the Midwest."

Nevertheless, because of its inclusion with the Ivy League, Cornell is generally considered a "Northeastern" school, and so its contest on this date with the University of Chicago was considered an "intersectional" matchup.

UC's location on the South Side of the Midwest's biggest city belies the fact that, if there was a Midwestern equivalent to the Ivy League, it would be one of the schools in it, as would the school just north of the city in Evanston, Illinois, which, reflecting the early history of America, is named Northwestern University. Both UC and NU started out in the league that would become known as the Big Ten Conference. UC dropped its football program in 1940, and despite looking so bad, so many times, over the ensuing years, that it seems like they'd dropped football, Northwestern remains in the Big Ten.

Chicago came into the game 4-0, having beaten Purdue, Indiana, Illinois and Minnesota, and only Illinois had gotten close. Cornell had not been as dominant in their wins, but they still came in at 6-0, having beaten Hamilton, Oberlin, Colgate, the University of Vermont, Penn State and Amherst.

The game was played at Marshall Field in Chicago. The stadium was named for the department store of the same name, which was named by its owner, of the same name, a major UC donor. But both teams were coached by the men for whom their next home field would be named: UC by Amos Alonzo Stagg, who, along with his fellow Yalie, Walter Camp, had done so much to create American football through standardization of the rules; and Cornell by Henry Schoellkopf.

Speaking of those rules: It was a different time. The forward pass had been legalized only 2 years before, but there were still restrictions on it, and it was rarely used. It would not be a factor in this game, even if the weather had been good. The field was 110 yards long, kickoffs were done at midfield, it was 3 downs to gain 10 yards, a touchdown was worth 5 points, and a field goal was worth 4 points.

In 1912, these would all be changed: The field would become 100 yards, a team would kick off from its own 40-yard line, it would be 4 downs to gain 10 yards, a touchdown would be worth 6 points, and a field goal would be worth 3. Men who could kick the ball a long way would still be important, but not nearly as important, moving American football even further from its English ancestors, soccer and rugby.

As for that weather: It snowed throughout the game, making running difficult, kicking and punting harder, and passing would have seemed to be all but impossible. It probably didn't help however many fans came out -- no attendance figure appears to have been recorded -- that both teams traditionally wore red: Cornell's teams have always been called the Big Red, while Chicago's were the Maroons.

Cornell scored in the middle of the first half, on a touchdown pass from Gardner to Mowe. The extra point was good, and their 6-0 lead held until the final minute of play. In the Chicago Daily Tribune, I.E. Sanborn wrote, "In a hard fought, exciting but poorly played game Chicago and Cornell broke-even on Marshall field yesterday, the final score being 6 to 6, leaving the question of supremacy between east and west suspended in the snow laden air."

Hard to believe that both UC and Cornell have good journalism schools.

Sanborn called the tying play a "triangular pass," "Steffen to Page to Schommer." Walter Steffen, later a city Alderman and Judge, was the captain and quarterback; Harlan Page, later UC's basketball and baseball coach, was an end; and John Schommer, who has been called basketball's first superstar, was a halfback.

So the "triangular pass" was probably a forward pass from Steffen to Page, and then a lateral from Page to Schommer. What would later be called a "hook and ladder," which, as Don Shula, who pulled it off a few times, pointed out is a corruption of its original name, "hook and lateral."

The following week, Chicago won a close one over Wisconsin, to finish 5-0-1, to win the league title. Cornell beat Trinity College of Connecticut. However, in what had already become their traditional Thanksgiving Day rivalry game, they went to Philadelphia to play Penn, and lost. They finished 7-1-1. Had there been an Ivy League at the time, Penn would have won the title.

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November 14, 1908 was a Saturday. These other notable college football games were played:

* Harvard beat Dartmouth, 6-0 at Harvard Stadium in Boston.

* Brown beat Vermont, 12-0 at Andrews Field in Providence, Rhode Island.

* Syracuse beat Tufts, 28-0 at Archbold Stadium in Syracuse, New York.

* Army played Washington & Jefferson to a tie, 6-6 on The Plain in West Point, New York.

* Navy beat Penn State, 5-0 at Worden Field in Annapolis, Maryland.

* North Carolina beat South Carolina, 22-0 at Campus Athletic Field in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

* The Carlisle Indian School -- with Jim Thorpe as a freshman -- beat the University of Pittsburgh, 6-0 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh.

* Georgia and Alabama played to a tie, 6-6 at the Birmingham Fairgrounds in Birmingham, Alabama.

* Tennessee beat Clemson, 6-5 at Waite Field in Knoxville, Tennessee.

* In an intersectional matchup, Ohio State beat Vanderbilt, 17-6 at Dudley Field in Nashville.

* In yet another intersectional matchup, this one a battle of unbeatens like Cornell vs. Chicago, Penn beat Michigan, 29-0 at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

* Illinois beat Purdue, 15-6 at Stuart Field in West Lafayette, Indiana.

* Missouri beat Washington University of St. Louis, 40-0 at Rollins Field in Columbia, Missouri.

* Kansas beat Nebraska, 20-5 at Nebraska Field in Lincoln.

* In what would have been a battle of unbeatens had Princeton not lost to Dartmouth at the Polo Grounds the week before, Yale beat Princeton, 11-6 at University Field in Princeton, New Jersey.

* In contrast, New Jersey's other major team played a much less significant game, but won it: Rutgers beat Muhlenberg, 15-5 at Neilson Field in New Brunswick.