SWC75
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1948
The usual suspects were back in business in 1948: Michigan, Notre and Army. Also buzzing around were several other schools who, taking advantage of the “double class” situation, (players who would have bene in school in the early 40’s but had to go fight the war joining the players who, by their age, would normally have bene in school in the late 40’s) to have some of their best teams. In the final regular season poll, there were six undefeated teams: Michigan, Notre Dame and Army plus California, North Carolina and Clemson, (both UNC and Clemson were in the 17 team southern conference, which would give birth to the ACC in 1953 so the Tar Heels and Tigers didn’t play each other). There were also eight more one loss teams: Oklahoma, Georgia, Oregon, Southern Methodist, Tulane, Mississippi, Penn State and Cornell.
But in the end it was about Michigan and Notre Dame, who were #1-#2 in every poll from the third one on. There was no post bowl poll this year, (and there would not be another until 1965). Michigan repeated as Big Ten champs but the Rose Bowl contract specified that teams could not go two years in a row so neither the Wolverines nor the Irish played in a bowl game and a post bowl poll was deemed unnecessary.
The first poll, on October 4th had Notre Dame #1with North Carolina, with Charlie Choo Choo Justice, #2. Behind them were Northwestern, SMU, Army, Georgia Tech and then Michigan. They had all played 2 games. Missouri beat SMU 20-14 the next weekend. Michigan crushed #15 Purdue 40-0 and moved up to #4Notre Dame beat Michigan State 26-7 and North Carolina beat Wake Forest 28-6 and somehow, based on those results, changed places with them, assuming the #1 spot. Northwestern was #3. Then the Wolverines devoured them 28-0. While Notre Dame crushed Nebraska 44-13. North Carolina squeaked past NC State and fell to #3with Michigan #1 and Notre Dame #2. Michigan, Notre Dame and North Carolina were 1-2-3 for the next three weeks in a row until the Heels were tied by William & Mary 7-7 Army moved in the third spot. Michigan, Notre Dame and Army were 1-2-3 for the next three weeks.
Then came the dramatic ending to the season. Michigan had already needed its season November 20th with a 13-3 win over arch-rival Ohio State. Then, on November 27th came the most legendary of all Army-Navy Games, as 0-8 Navy tied 8-0 Army 21-21. Then on December 4th, Notre Dame and Southern California played to a 14-14 tie. Oklahoma had lost their opener at Santa Clara, 17-20 and won 9 in a row since Their streak would grow to 31 games, ending in the 1951 Sugar Bowl, (it was ‘practice’ for the 47 game streak of a few years later). Georgia lost their second game to UNC, 14-21 and won out after that. Oregon lost only their third game, to Michigan, 0-14. SMU lost that game to Missouri and were tied by TCU in their final regular season game 7-7. Tulane lost their second game to Georgia Tech 7-13 and won the rest of them. Mississippi, early in the Johnny Vaught era, had only a 7-20 loss to Tulane. Penn State was tied 14-14 by Michigan State
California had finished with a gleaming 10-0-0 r4ecord but that got spoiled in the Rose Bowl by two-loss Northwestern on a controversial “fumble at the goal line” play that was ruled a Northwestern touchdown. The one other team that had won all of its games was Frank Howard’s Clemson team at 10-0-0. The Tigers at that time had not had a glorious history. They’d been to the 1940 Cotton Bowl but not to any other and Howard’s record at Clemson going into this season was 36-34-3 in 8 seasons. The Tigers started out unranked and worked their way only up to #11 in the country, even with that perfect record. They were invited to the Gator Bowl, where they defeated Missouri 24-23. SMU defeated Oregon 21-13 in the Cotton Bowl, in a battle between Heisman Trophy winner Doak Walker and Kyle Rote vs. the Duck’s Norm Van Brocklin. Georgia lost to Bobby Layne’s Texas team, 28-41 in the Sugar Bowl. Oklahoma topped North Carolina 14-6 in the Sugar Bowl.
A lot of good teams but when the dust had cleared, Michigan was the only top ten team with a perfect record and went into the books as the national champion. They finished 9-0-0 (252-44: 28-5), with all the opponents being major college teams. Six of them had winning records and their combined record was 44-38- (.537). They’d beaten #14 Michigan State 13-7, #9 Oregon 14-0, #7 Northwestern 28-0 and #16 Minnesota 27-14. Their PDR was 1.33: they were the best team 7 of their 9 opponents had played. They were again an excellent passing team from their single wing, with the four almost interchangeable backs, finishing 6th in the country with 151 yards per game. They were 4th in rushing defense using their specialists (88 ypg) and #1 in scoring defense at 4.9 ypg.
Here is the Vautravers article on the 1948 season:
1948 College Football National Championship
1949
The biggest game of the year came when Army, who had not lost in two years, traveled to Ann Arbor to take on Michigan, who had not lost in three years. The Cadets had lost 7-27 in their last game of the Notre Dame series, (they did hook up again a decade later and intermittently since) in 1947. They tied a Pennsylvania team, (with Chuck Bednarik) that won all their other games, 7-7 a week later. They closed ‘447 with a 21-0 thrashing of Navy. They went 8-0-1 with that upset tie to a winless Navy team ruining their chances to at least share the national title with Michigan. Then they crushed Davidson 47-7 and a Penn State that had lost one game in two years, 42-7 to open the 1949 season. From the 1947 Navy game, they had been 11-0-1 and out-scored their opponents 404-103 (34-9). Michigan had arguably won two straight national championships and 25 consecutive games during which they had out-scored their opponents 842-126 (also 34-5). They’d opened by beating rising power Michigan State (a team they’d beaten 55-0 but then 13-7 and now 7-3 during their streak) and Stanford 27-7.
Harold Classen’s book “Football’s Unforgettable Games” has a chapter on this contest entitled “Military Tactics”. He notes that Coach Red Blaik had taken a page from former Michigan Coach Fritz Crisler’s book and was using the two platoon system, (in fact the use of the term platoon came from the fact that Army was using it.) Army had bene pointing to this game: “For a year, the Army coaching staff tirelessly mapped out the strategy for Michigan. Though he had not publically said so, Blaik was miffed with those who had tried to downgrade his wartime Cadets. The detractors insisted Army could not have gone unbeaten for 32 games against full-strength, peacetime completion. Michigan was to be the proving ground.”
“Army coaches not only studied films of the two previous games between the club, (which the cadets won 28-7 in 1945 and 20-13 in 1946) but they also acquir4ed film of the 1948 Wolverines. Army strategists figured out what the foe was most likely to do at any positon on the field, at any time…An analysis was made over every Michigan player, his personal reactions to any and all situations- the way he moved his hands, feet, eyes. So thorough were the preparations that Army players knew what Michigan would do before it did it.”
Michigan ran a 4-4-3 defense. The Cadets decided to keep it simple and run quarterback Arnold Galiffa on quick opening keepers. “Michigan was waiting for those deft Galiffa handoffs. It was not prepared for Galiffa’s fakes to his backfield mates followed by his jarring runs of his own making. Army had shown only a few standard running plays and passes in its previous one-sided decisions over Davidson and Penn State.”
But football is still a game of emotion. “Before he sent his squad onto the Michigan turf (Blaik) said quietly “I want three things when I walk off that field. One, that for all the 100,000 people present respect what we stand for. Two, that the Michigan team respects us as men. And three, that we can look at ourselves and say that I have done my best.” On the games second play, the Cadets hit Michigan’s Chuck Ortmann so hard he had to be carried form the field on a stretcher. Then the visitors went on a grinding 89 yard drive to take a 7-0 lead. Later in the quarter Michigan blocked a punt and took over at the Army 16 but could not score. In the second period Army’s Bruce Ackerson picked a fumble out fo the air and returned it to the Michigan 10. They scored on the next play to make it 14-0 at halftime.
“The reckless charge of the Army line, the linebacking of Don Beck and Elmer Stout and the secondary alert to all Michigan passing attempts were taking their toll. Concentrating on the ground game, Michigan powered its way to Army’s 18 after the second half kickoff, led by Dufek and wingback Leo Koceski. The game’s only penalty against the Wolverines, 15 yards for illegal use of hands, thwarted this scoring bid. Late in the quarter, Brown got away a 62 yard punt which went out of bounds on the Michigan 3 but a penalty nullified the play. On the second try a high pass from center prevented Brown from kicking at all and he could only run as far as his 31. From there, Michigan drove to its touchdown, which Dufek scored on a short plunge.” The Wolverines picked off a pass on the first play after the kickoff and the Big House was going crazy. But an interception in the end zone ended the threat. Another Michigan turnover deep in their territory set up the clinching score and Army had won 21-7.
“Officers with the longest service at West Point couldn’t recall anything, including victories over Navy and Notre Dame, which produced such bedlam. As the Cadet Corps shouted and cannons belched a welcome to the returning players. Blaik smilingly acknowledged, “In the fidelity to execution of assignments on offense and defense, this was the finest performance I have known.” Army marched on to a season nearly as dominating as the wartime teams, finishing 9-0 and out-scoring their opposition 354-68, (39-8). Their only close game was a 14-13 squeaker over Pennsylvania. Michigan would slip to 6-2-1. They would have many great teams over the years but would not win another national championship until 1997, when they shared the tittle with Nebraska.
Red Blaik was not the only coach impressed with his team in 1949. Frank Leahy may have had his gr3eatest team Notre Dame. All those players who had enrolled in 1946 and played as freshman, 9the last year they could do so under the wartime rules), were now seniors. That included massive end Leon Hart, known as “The Monster”. He was already 6-4 245 as a freshman and would grow to 6-5 260. There’s a famous story of when he was sent into his first game in 1946. He turned to listen to his coach, then turned back to the field and ran right into teammate Bob Livingstone, who was exiting the field. From “Wake Up the Echoes” by Ken Rappoport: “Down went Livingstone and Hart ran over him, planting his size 13 shoe in the halfback’s chest. When Livingstone regained consciousness and learned the name of his assailant, he noted hazily: “You know, that hart’s going to be all right. Nobody ever hit me that hard before.“ As a senior, Hart was the best player in the country and would win the Heisman and Maxwell Trophys in recognition of that fact.
He was one of four consensus All-Ame4icans on the team, including the other end Jim Martin, Fullback Emil Sitko and quarterback Bob Williams, “a daring play-caller with no compunction about passing deep in his own territory, even on fourth down” They didn’t have the Four Horsemen but “The backfield of Williams, Sitko, Frank Spaniel and Larry Coutre was as devastating a crew as ever put on pads” per Joe Doyle of the South Bend Tribune. The Irish plowed through 10 opponents by a combined 360-86. For the first nine games, the closed final score was 34-21 over Michigan State. But that game was 34-7 going into the fourth quarter.
No other team could get within 23 points- until the finale in Dallas against Southern Methodist.
The Mustangs were having their greatest era with gridiron legends Doak Walker and Kyle Rote. Unfortunately, Walker, who had won the Heisman as a junior in 1948 had been injured two weeks earlier and the Mustangs had suffered frustrating defeats to Baylor (26-35) and TCU (13-21). But they still had Kyle Rote.
It didn’t seem to matter as the Irish rolled to a 14-0 halftime lead. Williams hit end Bill Wightkin with a 42 yard bomb to key a 73 yard scoring drive. SMU tried to come back with a 63 pass from Johnny Champion to end John Milam, who was forced out of bounds on the Notre Dame 6. But Rote was denied on fourth down a foot from the goal line. A Williams pass was batted around by three SMU players into the hands of Notre Dame end Ernie Zaleski who took it 35 yards to the end zone. The Kick failed but Notre Dame led 13-0 at halftime.
Rote led a 61 yard march in the third period that closed the score to 13-7, carrying the ball the last 3 yards himself. Jim Mutscheller, (much later a Johnny Unitas target as the Baltimore Colts tight end), intercepted a Mustang pass at the SMU 22. Bill Barrett scored form the 4 to make it 20-7. Then the fun really began.
From “Football’s Unforgettable Games” and “Wake Up the Echoes”: “Rote, a 190 pound junior from San Antonio, had only begun to fight and the way he fired up his teammates it looked as if this band of Texans was making another stand at the Alamo. The interior line, anchored by center Dick Hightower, began hitting with renewed vigor….Kyle Rote led a Mustang counterattack that left the Irish sucking wind and the big Texas crowd breathless. Running almost at will, Rote scored his second and third touchdowns…SMU struck with suddenness as Rote faked the Irish dizzy, then fired a long pass to little Champion, who got free from the defense long enough to make the catch on the 1. From there Rote scored. Shortly thereafter the Mustangs had pounded back to the Notre Dame 14. Rote needed three carries and the score was deadlocked at 20-20.” A missed extra point denied them the lead.
Frank Leahy: “I never saw more excitement in a game in my life. A fantastically partisan crowd and against a team that was truly superb, we had to take the kickoff and go on to score. Often a coach is given credit for giving a quarterback prudent information pertaining to how he should direct the team and win a game. At this moment the fans were going crazy, ringing cowbells, cheering. Bedlam was everywhere. Bob Williams, a wonderful quarterback and a terrific young man, brought his team over to me. Coach, this is it. We’re going out other now. Do you have any advice?” I looked at Williams and could see they were awfully tense. I wanted desperately to relax them. “Yes, I have some very good advice to give. Don’t ever enter the coaching profession.” They laughed and went out.”
“Frank Spaniel ran the kick-off back to the Notre Dame 46. Emile Sitko and Bill Barrett took the ball to the SMU 26 in five plays. Leon hart, moved to fullback, slammed to the 20. Barrett followed with a 6 yard gain. Bill gay got 6 more. Then Barrett went for two….One the next play, Barrett skirted around end and dashed over for a Notre Dame touchdown.” The conversion made it 27-20. But “The breathtaking drive had taken so little time that SMU still had a chance to score and pull out a tie…..Following the kickoff, the dauntless Texans charged from their 29 into the heart of enemy territory. Hart smacked Rote so hard on the tackle at the Irish 28 that the latter had to leave the game. While trainers worked furiously on the sidelines, Fred Benners passed to Rusty Russell on the 5. Russell lost a yard. Benners was injured when Hart boomed him on an attempted pass and a patched-up Rote returned to drive with every ounce of his waning strength for two yards down to the 4. The snap was to Rote again, a fake drive into the line – and a jump pass. Notre Dame center Jerry Groom and guard Bob Lally simultaneously hurled themselves into the air and came down with the ball on a joint interception. “
Rote had run for 115 yards, passed for 148 more, scored all three SMU touchdowns and punted for a 48 yard average. Leahy’s team had completed a four year undefeated run, with just the two ties: 1946 to Army and 1948 to USC preventing a perfect record. The players he recruited and their classmates had never experienced a loss in four years. “That’s the best team we’ve met all season. Rote is the most underrated back in America.” On his own team: “It has guts. It has character. It’s the greatest team I’ve ever coached.”
But another great coach had the same opinion of his team. Bud Wilkinson of Oklahoma also had a veteran team full of guys who had fought in the war and enrolled as freshman in 1946 along with younger players who were the normal age of freshmen and spent four years maturing. They’d actually been signed by Jim Tatum before he moved on to Maryland, giving the 30 year old Wilkinson, (Tatum was only 32 himself), a chance to prove himself with plenty of talented players to do it with. Several of the players had played for Tatum when he coached the Jacksonville Naval Air Station team during the war.
Richard Vautravers, in his article on the 1946 season, took a jaundiced view of what was going on in 1946: “With all the football talent returning from the war, and many former football players having access to extra years of eligibility due to wartime eligibility rules, college football was sharply transformed in 1946. A bidding war broke out for the services of the best available players, and the South was a particularly active purchaser of football talent. But in hindsight the most notable purchaser was Oklahoma, a nobody before the war that was about to become an elite football power overnight. How? Cold, hard cash. For players. Francis Wallace published an article in the November 9th Saturday Evening Post, "Football's Black Market," that exposed the sordid scene and made quite the splash. According to the article, eight war veterans who had played for Tulsa's 1944 team (8-2, #7) were purchased by Oklahoma, and Oklahoma would continue buying top recruits for decades afterward. But Oklahoma was not alone.” But they were good at it. From his 1949 article: “Oklahoma was a major player in the "black market" of football talent returning from the war. Recruits were matched up with "sugar daddies" who gave them money and bought them clothes. This was a system that Oklahoma continued, more or less, through the 1980s, despite the periodic affliction of NCAA penalties for cheating along the way.” What he doesn’t say is that the whole thing was financed by Oklahoma oil men who wanted the state to be known for its football team, rather than the “Grapes of Wrath”
Try-outs were allowed back then and Tatum had 275 candidates, which he and his staff eventually whittled down to 40 by the start of the season. 31 of them were military veterans. After losing to Army 7-21 in their opener, the ’46 Sooners cruised to a 7-3 regular season record, ending a 73-12 devastation of Oklahoma A&N, (now State), a team that had beaten them 47-0 the year before. They closed the season by winning the first ever Gator Bowl over North Carolina State, 34-13. Tatum responded with a demand for a 10 year contract and total control of the athletic department. Instead, the school offered Wilkinson, his top assistant a four year contract and Tatum departed for Maryland.
Wilkinson got off to as good a start as a head coach as you could possibly imagine. He had a bad stretch early, losing his third game to a 10-1 Texas team, tying an 8-1-2 Kansas team and losing to a 4-5-2 Texas Christian team, then winning 36 of his next 37 games. His 1948 team had lost to Santa Clara 17-20 in their opening game and then won 10 in a row, including a 14-6 win over Charlie Choo Choo Justice and his previously unbeaten North Carolina team. They absolutely roared through the 1949 season, outscoring 11 opponents 399-88. They had two close game, against Texas (20-14) and Santa Clara, (28-21) but both those games were made to seem close by very late scores by the losing team after the game have essentially been decided.
In the Sugar Bowl they faced an LSU team that bragged about beating three conference champions, (Rice of the SWC- their only defeat; Tulane of the SEC and North Carolina of the Southern Conference), and were planning on making the Sooners #4. To that end, they set up a spy operation near the Sooner’s practice field which was discovered. It made Wilkinson and his team so mad, they went out and stomped the Tigers 35-0.
Wilkinson always considered this to be his greatest team, better even than the teams of 1953-57 that won a record 47 games in a row. “I would say that 1949 probably was the strongest team with this reservation: A’’ the athletes from 1941 through 1945 went into the service and were back together, so you had the unusual situation of four to five classes of seniors coming together at one time It’s unlikely that it will ever happen again. So it is really unfair to compare this team with what I call a normal college team. Many of the 1949 players had combat experience and had been athletes in the service. It was the last big group of veterans and they were mature, highly competent and unflappable. We did not have any weakness.”
Coaches can be judged by their “coaching tree”- the players and assistants who worked with them who went on to be successful head coaches. Wilkinson had many. His 1949 team was quarterbacked by 25 year old Darrell Royal, who went on to become the legendary coach at Texas. He had replaced Jack Mitchell, who had coaching success at Wichita State, Arkansas and Kansas. The left end in front of Royal was Jim Owens, the long-time coach at Washington and the left guard was Dee Andros, famous for his upsets at Oregon State.
One thing that helped Wilkinson compile his amazing record in Norman was the weakness of the conference he was in, which was known as the “Big Six” when he started (Oklahoma, Kansas, Kansas State Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa State). They added Colorado in 1948 to become the Big 7 and finally the Big 8 when they added Oklahoma (A&M) State, which had been in the Missouri Valley Conference, in 1960. No matter how many teams were in the conference, there was really just a “Big One” until late in Bud’s tenure. He went undefeated in his first 74 conference games, marred only by ties with Kansas in 1947 and Colorado in 1952. His 1947 team tied Kansas for the conference title and then he won 12 Big 7 championships in a row. Other than the Sooners, the conference had the following ranked teams from 1947-59: Kansas, #12 in 1947, whom they tied 13-13; #20 Missouri in 1949, (27-7), #17 Nebraska in 1950 (49-35); #20 Colorado in 1951 ((55-14), #20 Colorado in 1956 (27-19) and #18 Missouri in 1959 (23-0). That was it.
From 1947-59, these are the winning percentages of the Big 8 teams, (I’ll include Oklahoma A&M State since Oklahoma played them every year):
Oklahoma .894 (1st in the country)
Colorado .581 (38th)
Kansas .503 (77th)
Missouri .500 (79th)
Oklahoma State.481 (91st)
Iowa State .388 (121st)
Nebraska .379 (125th)
Kansas State .265 (136th and last in the country)
The Sooners were 9-4 against arch-rival Texas in those years and 8-5-1 in regular season games against ranked teams. They were 6-1 in bowl games, against teams ranked #3, #9, #7, #1, #3, #16 and #9. So the Sooners proved themselves but their degree of difficulty was limited by the weakness of their conference.
A fourth team also ran the table that year. California was kind of in the Twilight Zone in the late 40’s. They just couldn’t get out of the same recurring dream. In 1947 they went 9-1 but the one loss was to USC and that put the Trojans in the Rose Bowl that year, (where Michigan crushed them). Then they went undefeated for three straight years – with a tie in 1950- and lost the Rose Bowl three straight times by a combined margin of 17 points, including a controversial play in the 1949 game where a Northwestern player seemingly fumbled before he crossed the goal line but was credited with a touchdown in a 14-20 loss. Their 1949 team lost to Ohio State 14-17, taking them out of the national title hunt. Under Syracuse grad Pappy Waldorf, they had a 33 game regular season winning streak from 1947-50 but have faded from history because they never won the big one.
The first poll of the year was October 3rd. Michigan was #1, Notre Dame #2, Oklahoma #3 followed by Tulane, Minnesota, North Carolina and then Army at #7. Despite having gone undefeated in the previous regular season, California was down at #10, behind Southern California and Southern Methodist. That weekend Army knocked off Michigan and Ohio State tied USC. The Next week it was Notre Dame #1, Army #2 and Oklahoma #3 with Michigan falling to #7 and Cal moving up to #9. The Irish then crushed Tulane, (a team SPORT magazine had declared “The Best in the Country”), 46-7 while Michigan again fell to Northwestern 20-21. Cal beat USC 16-10 and moved up to #5. Oklahoma, despite beating Kansas 48-26, slipped behind Minnesota in #4 who had crushed Ohio State 27-0. Michigan then beat Minnesota 14-7 and it was Notre Dame, Army, Oklahoma and California at the top from October 24th onward. All four of them kept pounding out the victories but the order changed after Army barely beat a 4-4 Penn team and dropped to #4 on November 7th. On November 19th Oklahoma beat #19 Santa Clara 28-21 while California beat #12 Stanford 33-14. That was enough for the writers to vote Cal #2 and move the Sooners down to #3. That completed Cal’s season. But when the Sooners clobbered Oklahoma A&M 41-0, they were moved back up to #2 for the final poll. Notre Dame gained revenge on USC for their upset tie the previous year, 32-0 and Army did the same to Navy, 38-0 that same day. That put Notre Dame #1 in the final poll and that made them national champion. (It would have been a great year for a four team playoff.)
Notre Dame crushes USC:
#17 USC vs. #1 Notre Dame - 1949
Army sinks the Navy:
1949 Army vs Navy football game highlights
It was after that final poll that the Irish took their trip to Dallas and barely beat SMU, a 27 ½ point underdog. Vautravers; “his season is a good example of the fact that the AP poll didn't just ignore bowl games, it often ignored regular season games that took place after Thanksgiving weekend as well.”. Army didn’t play in bowls but Oklahoma and California did with the bears losing 14-17 to Ohio State in the Rose bowl but the Sooners blowing LSU out of the Sugar Bowl, 35-0. Had there been a poll after the bowls, would Oklahoma and Notre Dame have switched positons?
The Sooners come marching in:
1950 01 01 Sugar Bowl Oklahoma Sooners vs Louisiana State Tigers
Vautravers 1949 summary:
1949 College Football National Championship
he feels Notre Dame and Oklahoma could be considered co-national champions but if you had to pick one, it would be Notre Dame. Army had the biggest win but weakest schedule and the weakest close call against Penn so he has them a clear third. Vautravers points out that Oklahoma doesn’t claim to be the 1949 national champion but they do claim the 1950 championship, which is problematic as we shall see in my next article in this series. He seems surprised by this, obviously feeling that that they have a better claim on the 1949 title.
Notre Dame was chosen by 11 NCAA approved selectors: AP, Berryman, Boand, DeVold, Dunkel, Helms, Houlgate, Litkenhous, National Championship Foundation, Poling and Williamson, to 2 for the Sooners Billingsley and College Football Research. Of the non-NCAA selectors I found on the net, Time Travel, Dolphin, Sorenson, Square gear, Taylor and Waits had Notre Dame. Howell had Oklahoma and Wilson had Army. Authors Bill Libby and Robert Leckie both chose Notre Dame.
Notre Dame played 10 teams, all major college team. They beat them all, outscoring them 360-86, (36-9). Those teams had a combined record of 45-46-4, (.495). Their PDR was 1.60. They were the best team 7 of their opponents had played. They beat #16 North Carolina 42-6 and #19 Michigan State34-21, (a game that had been 34-7. Tulane was #4 when the Irish beat them 46-7. The came back to win the SEC but fell out of the Top 20 when they lost their last game to LSU 0-21. Vautravers puts Tulane at #24 and also ranked SMU at #17, saying the SWC was very strong that year. (I like years when the SWC is very strong!)
Fixing the 1949 AP Poll
The Irish were 4th in the nation in scoring with 36.0 ppg, (behind Army, Wyoming- who beat Northern Colorado 103-0) and Oklahoma). They were 7th in the country in points allowed at 8.6. They led the nation in total offense with 435 ypg. They were 4th in rushing offense (291) and rushing defense (96).
Oklahoma played 11 teams, all major college and defeated them all by a combined 399-88 (36-8). Those teams had a combined record of 54-50-6 (.519). Their PDR was 1.73. They were the best team that 7 of their opponents played. They beat #15 Santa Clara 28-21 and #9 LSU 35-0. The Sooners were 3rd in the nation in scoring (36.4) and 9th in scoring defense (8.8). They were 3rd in total offense (409), 2nd in rushing (320), 1st in rushing defense (56) and 6th in total defense (203). George Thomas (859 yards) and Lindell Pearson (753) were 7th and 9th in the country in rushing. Notre Dame and Army had no one in any top ten, largely because they sued more people with their two platoons.
Army played 9 teams, all major college and beat all of them by a combined 354-68 (39-8). Those teams had a combined record of 31-46-3 (.403). Their PDR was 1.78. They were the best team that 4 of their opponents played. Army led the country in scoring (39.3) and were fourth in scoring defense ((7.6). They were fifth in total offense (394) and second in total defense (186), sixth in rushing (276) and in rushing defense (101).
Let’s look at the rosters:
Leon Hart of Notre Dame won the Heisman Trophy by a huge margin, 995 votes to 272 for Charlie Justice. Arnold Galiffa of Army was 4th with 196 votes. Notre Dame also had the #5 guy, quarterback Bob Williams, (189), and the #8 guy, running back Emil Sitko (79). Nobody on Oklahoma got a vote. Williams got 159 votes and finished 6th in 1950 while Army’s end Hank Foldberg was 8th with 103 votes. Oklahoma’s fullback, Leon heath was 7th with 125 votes. No one from the three teams made the top 10 in 1951. No freshman played in 1949 so the 1952 vote is not relevant.
Notre Dame’s ends, Hart and Jim Martin, are both in the Hall of Fame as are QB Williams, HB Sitko and center Jerry Groom. Galiffa was Army’s only Hall of Famer and end Jim Owens made it for the Sooners.
Hart, Williams and Sitko were consensus All Americans for Notre Dame. Groom made it the next year. Heath would make the 1950 team along with tackle Jim Weatherall who would repeat in 1951 and win the Outland Trophy and the nation’s best lineman that year. Galiffa was on the team for Army in 1949 and Foldberg in 1950.
Notre Dame’s future pros:
Al Cannava HB/DB 1950 Packers (1 year)
Gus Cifelli T 1950-52 Lions 1953 Packers 1954 Eagles/Steelers (5)
Larry Coutre HB 1950 Packers and 1953 Colts and Packers (2)
Billy Gay DB 1951 Cardinals (1)
Jerry Groom MG-DT-C-LB 1951-55 Cardinals (5)
Leon Hart E 1950-57 Lions (8)
Jim Martin G-LB-K 1950 Browns, 1951-61 Lions, 1963 Colts, 1964 Redskins (14)
Johnny Petitbon HB/DB 1952 Texans, 1955-56 Browns, 1957 Packers (4)
Emil Sitko HB 1950 49ers, 1951-52 Cardinals (3)
Mike Swistowicz HB/DB 1950 Cardinals and Yankees (1)
Bob Toneff DT-DE-T-LB-G 1952 49ers, 1954-57 49ers, 1959-64 Redskins (12)
Fred Wallner LB-G 1951-55 Cardinals 1960 Oilers (6)
Bill Wightkin T-DE 1950-57 Bears (8)
Bob Williams QB 1951-53 Bears (3)
Ernie Zaleski, HB/DB 1950 Baltimore Colts (1)
That’s 15 players who played a total of 74 years (4.9 years per player). None of them are in the Pro Football HOF, (which surprised me: I thought maybe Hart and Martin might have made it).
Oklahoma’s future pros:
Leon Heath FB/HB 1951-53 Redskins (3)
Willie Manley T-G 1950-51 Packers, 1953-54 Edmonton CFL (4)
Jim Owens E/DE 1950 Colts (1)
Lindy Pearson HB 1950-52 Lions, 1952 Packers (3)
George Thomas HB/DB 1950-52 Redskins (3)
Stan West DG-G-C 1950-54 Rams, 1955 Giants, 1957-58 Cardinals (9)
That’s 6 players who played a total of 23 years, 3.8 years per player. NO Pro HOFers.
Army’s future pros:
Arnold Galiffa QB 1953 Giants 1954 Packers (2)
Al Pollard FB/HB 1951 Yankees, 1951-53 Eagles (3)
That’s two players who played 5 years (2.5) with no Pro HOFers. Obviously, being a service academy, West Point is not going to produce many pro players.
All three teams dominated the teams they played and put up numbers you’d expect for a national champion. They had no common opponents. Notre Dame has the most accomplished roster and the support of the vast majority of selectors but Oklahoma’s greatest team might have slipped ahead of them in a post bowl poll, (the last regular season poll being taken before the ND-SMU game.) Army had the best victory of any of them.
So….Who was #1 for 1949?
The usual suspects were back in business in 1948: Michigan, Notre and Army. Also buzzing around were several other schools who, taking advantage of the “double class” situation, (players who would have bene in school in the early 40’s but had to go fight the war joining the players who, by their age, would normally have bene in school in the late 40’s) to have some of their best teams. In the final regular season poll, there were six undefeated teams: Michigan, Notre Dame and Army plus California, North Carolina and Clemson, (both UNC and Clemson were in the 17 team southern conference, which would give birth to the ACC in 1953 so the Tar Heels and Tigers didn’t play each other). There were also eight more one loss teams: Oklahoma, Georgia, Oregon, Southern Methodist, Tulane, Mississippi, Penn State and Cornell.
But in the end it was about Michigan and Notre Dame, who were #1-#2 in every poll from the third one on. There was no post bowl poll this year, (and there would not be another until 1965). Michigan repeated as Big Ten champs but the Rose Bowl contract specified that teams could not go two years in a row so neither the Wolverines nor the Irish played in a bowl game and a post bowl poll was deemed unnecessary.
The first poll, on October 4th had Notre Dame #1with North Carolina, with Charlie Choo Choo Justice, #2. Behind them were Northwestern, SMU, Army, Georgia Tech and then Michigan. They had all played 2 games. Missouri beat SMU 20-14 the next weekend. Michigan crushed #15 Purdue 40-0 and moved up to #4Notre Dame beat Michigan State 26-7 and North Carolina beat Wake Forest 28-6 and somehow, based on those results, changed places with them, assuming the #1 spot. Northwestern was #3. Then the Wolverines devoured them 28-0. While Notre Dame crushed Nebraska 44-13. North Carolina squeaked past NC State and fell to #3with Michigan #1 and Notre Dame #2. Michigan, Notre Dame and North Carolina were 1-2-3 for the next three weeks in a row until the Heels were tied by William & Mary 7-7 Army moved in the third spot. Michigan, Notre Dame and Army were 1-2-3 for the next three weeks.
Then came the dramatic ending to the season. Michigan had already needed its season November 20th with a 13-3 win over arch-rival Ohio State. Then, on November 27th came the most legendary of all Army-Navy Games, as 0-8 Navy tied 8-0 Army 21-21. Then on December 4th, Notre Dame and Southern California played to a 14-14 tie. Oklahoma had lost their opener at Santa Clara, 17-20 and won 9 in a row since Their streak would grow to 31 games, ending in the 1951 Sugar Bowl, (it was ‘practice’ for the 47 game streak of a few years later). Georgia lost their second game to UNC, 14-21 and won out after that. Oregon lost only their third game, to Michigan, 0-14. SMU lost that game to Missouri and were tied by TCU in their final regular season game 7-7. Tulane lost their second game to Georgia Tech 7-13 and won the rest of them. Mississippi, early in the Johnny Vaught era, had only a 7-20 loss to Tulane. Penn State was tied 14-14 by Michigan State
California had finished with a gleaming 10-0-0 r4ecord but that got spoiled in the Rose Bowl by two-loss Northwestern on a controversial “fumble at the goal line” play that was ruled a Northwestern touchdown. The one other team that had won all of its games was Frank Howard’s Clemson team at 10-0-0. The Tigers at that time had not had a glorious history. They’d been to the 1940 Cotton Bowl but not to any other and Howard’s record at Clemson going into this season was 36-34-3 in 8 seasons. The Tigers started out unranked and worked their way only up to #11 in the country, even with that perfect record. They were invited to the Gator Bowl, where they defeated Missouri 24-23. SMU defeated Oregon 21-13 in the Cotton Bowl, in a battle between Heisman Trophy winner Doak Walker and Kyle Rote vs. the Duck’s Norm Van Brocklin. Georgia lost to Bobby Layne’s Texas team, 28-41 in the Sugar Bowl. Oklahoma topped North Carolina 14-6 in the Sugar Bowl.
A lot of good teams but when the dust had cleared, Michigan was the only top ten team with a perfect record and went into the books as the national champion. They finished 9-0-0 (252-44: 28-5), with all the opponents being major college teams. Six of them had winning records and their combined record was 44-38- (.537). They’d beaten #14 Michigan State 13-7, #9 Oregon 14-0, #7 Northwestern 28-0 and #16 Minnesota 27-14. Their PDR was 1.33: they were the best team 7 of their 9 opponents had played. They were again an excellent passing team from their single wing, with the four almost interchangeable backs, finishing 6th in the country with 151 yards per game. They were 4th in rushing defense using their specialists (88 ypg) and #1 in scoring defense at 4.9 ypg.
Here is the Vautravers article on the 1948 season:
1948 College Football National Championship
1949
The biggest game of the year came when Army, who had not lost in two years, traveled to Ann Arbor to take on Michigan, who had not lost in three years. The Cadets had lost 7-27 in their last game of the Notre Dame series, (they did hook up again a decade later and intermittently since) in 1947. They tied a Pennsylvania team, (with Chuck Bednarik) that won all their other games, 7-7 a week later. They closed ‘447 with a 21-0 thrashing of Navy. They went 8-0-1 with that upset tie to a winless Navy team ruining their chances to at least share the national title with Michigan. Then they crushed Davidson 47-7 and a Penn State that had lost one game in two years, 42-7 to open the 1949 season. From the 1947 Navy game, they had been 11-0-1 and out-scored their opponents 404-103 (34-9). Michigan had arguably won two straight national championships and 25 consecutive games during which they had out-scored their opponents 842-126 (also 34-5). They’d opened by beating rising power Michigan State (a team they’d beaten 55-0 but then 13-7 and now 7-3 during their streak) and Stanford 27-7.
Harold Classen’s book “Football’s Unforgettable Games” has a chapter on this contest entitled “Military Tactics”. He notes that Coach Red Blaik had taken a page from former Michigan Coach Fritz Crisler’s book and was using the two platoon system, (in fact the use of the term platoon came from the fact that Army was using it.) Army had bene pointing to this game: “For a year, the Army coaching staff tirelessly mapped out the strategy for Michigan. Though he had not publically said so, Blaik was miffed with those who had tried to downgrade his wartime Cadets. The detractors insisted Army could not have gone unbeaten for 32 games against full-strength, peacetime completion. Michigan was to be the proving ground.”
“Army coaches not only studied films of the two previous games between the club, (which the cadets won 28-7 in 1945 and 20-13 in 1946) but they also acquir4ed film of the 1948 Wolverines. Army strategists figured out what the foe was most likely to do at any positon on the field, at any time…An analysis was made over every Michigan player, his personal reactions to any and all situations- the way he moved his hands, feet, eyes. So thorough were the preparations that Army players knew what Michigan would do before it did it.”
Michigan ran a 4-4-3 defense. The Cadets decided to keep it simple and run quarterback Arnold Galiffa on quick opening keepers. “Michigan was waiting for those deft Galiffa handoffs. It was not prepared for Galiffa’s fakes to his backfield mates followed by his jarring runs of his own making. Army had shown only a few standard running plays and passes in its previous one-sided decisions over Davidson and Penn State.”
But football is still a game of emotion. “Before he sent his squad onto the Michigan turf (Blaik) said quietly “I want three things when I walk off that field. One, that for all the 100,000 people present respect what we stand for. Two, that the Michigan team respects us as men. And three, that we can look at ourselves and say that I have done my best.” On the games second play, the Cadets hit Michigan’s Chuck Ortmann so hard he had to be carried form the field on a stretcher. Then the visitors went on a grinding 89 yard drive to take a 7-0 lead. Later in the quarter Michigan blocked a punt and took over at the Army 16 but could not score. In the second period Army’s Bruce Ackerson picked a fumble out fo the air and returned it to the Michigan 10. They scored on the next play to make it 14-0 at halftime.
“The reckless charge of the Army line, the linebacking of Don Beck and Elmer Stout and the secondary alert to all Michigan passing attempts were taking their toll. Concentrating on the ground game, Michigan powered its way to Army’s 18 after the second half kickoff, led by Dufek and wingback Leo Koceski. The game’s only penalty against the Wolverines, 15 yards for illegal use of hands, thwarted this scoring bid. Late in the quarter, Brown got away a 62 yard punt which went out of bounds on the Michigan 3 but a penalty nullified the play. On the second try a high pass from center prevented Brown from kicking at all and he could only run as far as his 31. From there, Michigan drove to its touchdown, which Dufek scored on a short plunge.” The Wolverines picked off a pass on the first play after the kickoff and the Big House was going crazy. But an interception in the end zone ended the threat. Another Michigan turnover deep in their territory set up the clinching score and Army had won 21-7.
“Officers with the longest service at West Point couldn’t recall anything, including victories over Navy and Notre Dame, which produced such bedlam. As the Cadet Corps shouted and cannons belched a welcome to the returning players. Blaik smilingly acknowledged, “In the fidelity to execution of assignments on offense and defense, this was the finest performance I have known.” Army marched on to a season nearly as dominating as the wartime teams, finishing 9-0 and out-scoring their opposition 354-68, (39-8). Their only close game was a 14-13 squeaker over Pennsylvania. Michigan would slip to 6-2-1. They would have many great teams over the years but would not win another national championship until 1997, when they shared the tittle with Nebraska.
Red Blaik was not the only coach impressed with his team in 1949. Frank Leahy may have had his gr3eatest team Notre Dame. All those players who had enrolled in 1946 and played as freshman, 9the last year they could do so under the wartime rules), were now seniors. That included massive end Leon Hart, known as “The Monster”. He was already 6-4 245 as a freshman and would grow to 6-5 260. There’s a famous story of when he was sent into his first game in 1946. He turned to listen to his coach, then turned back to the field and ran right into teammate Bob Livingstone, who was exiting the field. From “Wake Up the Echoes” by Ken Rappoport: “Down went Livingstone and Hart ran over him, planting his size 13 shoe in the halfback’s chest. When Livingstone regained consciousness and learned the name of his assailant, he noted hazily: “You know, that hart’s going to be all right. Nobody ever hit me that hard before.“ As a senior, Hart was the best player in the country and would win the Heisman and Maxwell Trophys in recognition of that fact.
He was one of four consensus All-Ame4icans on the team, including the other end Jim Martin, Fullback Emil Sitko and quarterback Bob Williams, “a daring play-caller with no compunction about passing deep in his own territory, even on fourth down” They didn’t have the Four Horsemen but “The backfield of Williams, Sitko, Frank Spaniel and Larry Coutre was as devastating a crew as ever put on pads” per Joe Doyle of the South Bend Tribune. The Irish plowed through 10 opponents by a combined 360-86. For the first nine games, the closed final score was 34-21 over Michigan State. But that game was 34-7 going into the fourth quarter.
No other team could get within 23 points- until the finale in Dallas against Southern Methodist.
The Mustangs were having their greatest era with gridiron legends Doak Walker and Kyle Rote. Unfortunately, Walker, who had won the Heisman as a junior in 1948 had been injured two weeks earlier and the Mustangs had suffered frustrating defeats to Baylor (26-35) and TCU (13-21). But they still had Kyle Rote.
It didn’t seem to matter as the Irish rolled to a 14-0 halftime lead. Williams hit end Bill Wightkin with a 42 yard bomb to key a 73 yard scoring drive. SMU tried to come back with a 63 pass from Johnny Champion to end John Milam, who was forced out of bounds on the Notre Dame 6. But Rote was denied on fourth down a foot from the goal line. A Williams pass was batted around by three SMU players into the hands of Notre Dame end Ernie Zaleski who took it 35 yards to the end zone. The Kick failed but Notre Dame led 13-0 at halftime.
Rote led a 61 yard march in the third period that closed the score to 13-7, carrying the ball the last 3 yards himself. Jim Mutscheller, (much later a Johnny Unitas target as the Baltimore Colts tight end), intercepted a Mustang pass at the SMU 22. Bill Barrett scored form the 4 to make it 20-7. Then the fun really began.
From “Football’s Unforgettable Games” and “Wake Up the Echoes”: “Rote, a 190 pound junior from San Antonio, had only begun to fight and the way he fired up his teammates it looked as if this band of Texans was making another stand at the Alamo. The interior line, anchored by center Dick Hightower, began hitting with renewed vigor….Kyle Rote led a Mustang counterattack that left the Irish sucking wind and the big Texas crowd breathless. Running almost at will, Rote scored his second and third touchdowns…SMU struck with suddenness as Rote faked the Irish dizzy, then fired a long pass to little Champion, who got free from the defense long enough to make the catch on the 1. From there Rote scored. Shortly thereafter the Mustangs had pounded back to the Notre Dame 14. Rote needed three carries and the score was deadlocked at 20-20.” A missed extra point denied them the lead.
Frank Leahy: “I never saw more excitement in a game in my life. A fantastically partisan crowd and against a team that was truly superb, we had to take the kickoff and go on to score. Often a coach is given credit for giving a quarterback prudent information pertaining to how he should direct the team and win a game. At this moment the fans were going crazy, ringing cowbells, cheering. Bedlam was everywhere. Bob Williams, a wonderful quarterback and a terrific young man, brought his team over to me. Coach, this is it. We’re going out other now. Do you have any advice?” I looked at Williams and could see they were awfully tense. I wanted desperately to relax them. “Yes, I have some very good advice to give. Don’t ever enter the coaching profession.” They laughed and went out.”
“Frank Spaniel ran the kick-off back to the Notre Dame 46. Emile Sitko and Bill Barrett took the ball to the SMU 26 in five plays. Leon hart, moved to fullback, slammed to the 20. Barrett followed with a 6 yard gain. Bill gay got 6 more. Then Barrett went for two….One the next play, Barrett skirted around end and dashed over for a Notre Dame touchdown.” The conversion made it 27-20. But “The breathtaking drive had taken so little time that SMU still had a chance to score and pull out a tie…..Following the kickoff, the dauntless Texans charged from their 29 into the heart of enemy territory. Hart smacked Rote so hard on the tackle at the Irish 28 that the latter had to leave the game. While trainers worked furiously on the sidelines, Fred Benners passed to Rusty Russell on the 5. Russell lost a yard. Benners was injured when Hart boomed him on an attempted pass and a patched-up Rote returned to drive with every ounce of his waning strength for two yards down to the 4. The snap was to Rote again, a fake drive into the line – and a jump pass. Notre Dame center Jerry Groom and guard Bob Lally simultaneously hurled themselves into the air and came down with the ball on a joint interception. “
Rote had run for 115 yards, passed for 148 more, scored all three SMU touchdowns and punted for a 48 yard average. Leahy’s team had completed a four year undefeated run, with just the two ties: 1946 to Army and 1948 to USC preventing a perfect record. The players he recruited and their classmates had never experienced a loss in four years. “That’s the best team we’ve met all season. Rote is the most underrated back in America.” On his own team: “It has guts. It has character. It’s the greatest team I’ve ever coached.”
But another great coach had the same opinion of his team. Bud Wilkinson of Oklahoma also had a veteran team full of guys who had fought in the war and enrolled as freshman in 1946 along with younger players who were the normal age of freshmen and spent four years maturing. They’d actually been signed by Jim Tatum before he moved on to Maryland, giving the 30 year old Wilkinson, (Tatum was only 32 himself), a chance to prove himself with plenty of talented players to do it with. Several of the players had played for Tatum when he coached the Jacksonville Naval Air Station team during the war.
Richard Vautravers, in his article on the 1946 season, took a jaundiced view of what was going on in 1946: “With all the football talent returning from the war, and many former football players having access to extra years of eligibility due to wartime eligibility rules, college football was sharply transformed in 1946. A bidding war broke out for the services of the best available players, and the South was a particularly active purchaser of football talent. But in hindsight the most notable purchaser was Oklahoma, a nobody before the war that was about to become an elite football power overnight. How? Cold, hard cash. For players. Francis Wallace published an article in the November 9th Saturday Evening Post, "Football's Black Market," that exposed the sordid scene and made quite the splash. According to the article, eight war veterans who had played for Tulsa's 1944 team (8-2, #7) were purchased by Oklahoma, and Oklahoma would continue buying top recruits for decades afterward. But Oklahoma was not alone.” But they were good at it. From his 1949 article: “Oklahoma was a major player in the "black market" of football talent returning from the war. Recruits were matched up with "sugar daddies" who gave them money and bought them clothes. This was a system that Oklahoma continued, more or less, through the 1980s, despite the periodic affliction of NCAA penalties for cheating along the way.” What he doesn’t say is that the whole thing was financed by Oklahoma oil men who wanted the state to be known for its football team, rather than the “Grapes of Wrath”
Try-outs were allowed back then and Tatum had 275 candidates, which he and his staff eventually whittled down to 40 by the start of the season. 31 of them were military veterans. After losing to Army 7-21 in their opener, the ’46 Sooners cruised to a 7-3 regular season record, ending a 73-12 devastation of Oklahoma A&N, (now State), a team that had beaten them 47-0 the year before. They closed the season by winning the first ever Gator Bowl over North Carolina State, 34-13. Tatum responded with a demand for a 10 year contract and total control of the athletic department. Instead, the school offered Wilkinson, his top assistant a four year contract and Tatum departed for Maryland.
Wilkinson got off to as good a start as a head coach as you could possibly imagine. He had a bad stretch early, losing his third game to a 10-1 Texas team, tying an 8-1-2 Kansas team and losing to a 4-5-2 Texas Christian team, then winning 36 of his next 37 games. His 1948 team had lost to Santa Clara 17-20 in their opening game and then won 10 in a row, including a 14-6 win over Charlie Choo Choo Justice and his previously unbeaten North Carolina team. They absolutely roared through the 1949 season, outscoring 11 opponents 399-88. They had two close game, against Texas (20-14) and Santa Clara, (28-21) but both those games were made to seem close by very late scores by the losing team after the game have essentially been decided.
In the Sugar Bowl they faced an LSU team that bragged about beating three conference champions, (Rice of the SWC- their only defeat; Tulane of the SEC and North Carolina of the Southern Conference), and were planning on making the Sooners #4. To that end, they set up a spy operation near the Sooner’s practice field which was discovered. It made Wilkinson and his team so mad, they went out and stomped the Tigers 35-0.
Wilkinson always considered this to be his greatest team, better even than the teams of 1953-57 that won a record 47 games in a row. “I would say that 1949 probably was the strongest team with this reservation: A’’ the athletes from 1941 through 1945 went into the service and were back together, so you had the unusual situation of four to five classes of seniors coming together at one time It’s unlikely that it will ever happen again. So it is really unfair to compare this team with what I call a normal college team. Many of the 1949 players had combat experience and had been athletes in the service. It was the last big group of veterans and they were mature, highly competent and unflappable. We did not have any weakness.”
Coaches can be judged by their “coaching tree”- the players and assistants who worked with them who went on to be successful head coaches. Wilkinson had many. His 1949 team was quarterbacked by 25 year old Darrell Royal, who went on to become the legendary coach at Texas. He had replaced Jack Mitchell, who had coaching success at Wichita State, Arkansas and Kansas. The left end in front of Royal was Jim Owens, the long-time coach at Washington and the left guard was Dee Andros, famous for his upsets at Oregon State.
One thing that helped Wilkinson compile his amazing record in Norman was the weakness of the conference he was in, which was known as the “Big Six” when he started (Oklahoma, Kansas, Kansas State Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa State). They added Colorado in 1948 to become the Big 7 and finally the Big 8 when they added Oklahoma (A&M) State, which had been in the Missouri Valley Conference, in 1960. No matter how many teams were in the conference, there was really just a “Big One” until late in Bud’s tenure. He went undefeated in his first 74 conference games, marred only by ties with Kansas in 1947 and Colorado in 1952. His 1947 team tied Kansas for the conference title and then he won 12 Big 7 championships in a row. Other than the Sooners, the conference had the following ranked teams from 1947-59: Kansas, #12 in 1947, whom they tied 13-13; #20 Missouri in 1949, (27-7), #17 Nebraska in 1950 (49-35); #20 Colorado in 1951 ((55-14), #20 Colorado in 1956 (27-19) and #18 Missouri in 1959 (23-0). That was it.
From 1947-59, these are the winning percentages of the Big 8 teams, (I’ll include Oklahoma A&M State since Oklahoma played them every year):
Oklahoma .894 (1st in the country)
Colorado .581 (38th)
Kansas .503 (77th)
Missouri .500 (79th)
Oklahoma State.481 (91st)
Iowa State .388 (121st)
Nebraska .379 (125th)
Kansas State .265 (136th and last in the country)
The Sooners were 9-4 against arch-rival Texas in those years and 8-5-1 in regular season games against ranked teams. They were 6-1 in bowl games, against teams ranked #3, #9, #7, #1, #3, #16 and #9. So the Sooners proved themselves but their degree of difficulty was limited by the weakness of their conference.
A fourth team also ran the table that year. California was kind of in the Twilight Zone in the late 40’s. They just couldn’t get out of the same recurring dream. In 1947 they went 9-1 but the one loss was to USC and that put the Trojans in the Rose Bowl that year, (where Michigan crushed them). Then they went undefeated for three straight years – with a tie in 1950- and lost the Rose Bowl three straight times by a combined margin of 17 points, including a controversial play in the 1949 game where a Northwestern player seemingly fumbled before he crossed the goal line but was credited with a touchdown in a 14-20 loss. Their 1949 team lost to Ohio State 14-17, taking them out of the national title hunt. Under Syracuse grad Pappy Waldorf, they had a 33 game regular season winning streak from 1947-50 but have faded from history because they never won the big one.
The first poll of the year was October 3rd. Michigan was #1, Notre Dame #2, Oklahoma #3 followed by Tulane, Minnesota, North Carolina and then Army at #7. Despite having gone undefeated in the previous regular season, California was down at #10, behind Southern California and Southern Methodist. That weekend Army knocked off Michigan and Ohio State tied USC. The Next week it was Notre Dame #1, Army #2 and Oklahoma #3 with Michigan falling to #7 and Cal moving up to #9. The Irish then crushed Tulane, (a team SPORT magazine had declared “The Best in the Country”), 46-7 while Michigan again fell to Northwestern 20-21. Cal beat USC 16-10 and moved up to #5. Oklahoma, despite beating Kansas 48-26, slipped behind Minnesota in #4 who had crushed Ohio State 27-0. Michigan then beat Minnesota 14-7 and it was Notre Dame, Army, Oklahoma and California at the top from October 24th onward. All four of them kept pounding out the victories but the order changed after Army barely beat a 4-4 Penn team and dropped to #4 on November 7th. On November 19th Oklahoma beat #19 Santa Clara 28-21 while California beat #12 Stanford 33-14. That was enough for the writers to vote Cal #2 and move the Sooners down to #3. That completed Cal’s season. But when the Sooners clobbered Oklahoma A&M 41-0, they were moved back up to #2 for the final poll. Notre Dame gained revenge on USC for their upset tie the previous year, 32-0 and Army did the same to Navy, 38-0 that same day. That put Notre Dame #1 in the final poll and that made them national champion. (It would have been a great year for a four team playoff.)
Notre Dame crushes USC:
#17 USC vs. #1 Notre Dame - 1949
Army sinks the Navy:
1949 Army vs Navy football game highlights
It was after that final poll that the Irish took their trip to Dallas and barely beat SMU, a 27 ½ point underdog. Vautravers; “his season is a good example of the fact that the AP poll didn't just ignore bowl games, it often ignored regular season games that took place after Thanksgiving weekend as well.”. Army didn’t play in bowls but Oklahoma and California did with the bears losing 14-17 to Ohio State in the Rose bowl but the Sooners blowing LSU out of the Sugar Bowl, 35-0. Had there been a poll after the bowls, would Oklahoma and Notre Dame have switched positons?
The Sooners come marching in:
1950 01 01 Sugar Bowl Oklahoma Sooners vs Louisiana State Tigers
Vautravers 1949 summary:
1949 College Football National Championship
he feels Notre Dame and Oklahoma could be considered co-national champions but if you had to pick one, it would be Notre Dame. Army had the biggest win but weakest schedule and the weakest close call against Penn so he has them a clear third. Vautravers points out that Oklahoma doesn’t claim to be the 1949 national champion but they do claim the 1950 championship, which is problematic as we shall see in my next article in this series. He seems surprised by this, obviously feeling that that they have a better claim on the 1949 title.
Notre Dame was chosen by 11 NCAA approved selectors: AP, Berryman, Boand, DeVold, Dunkel, Helms, Houlgate, Litkenhous, National Championship Foundation, Poling and Williamson, to 2 for the Sooners Billingsley and College Football Research. Of the non-NCAA selectors I found on the net, Time Travel, Dolphin, Sorenson, Square gear, Taylor and Waits had Notre Dame. Howell had Oklahoma and Wilson had Army. Authors Bill Libby and Robert Leckie both chose Notre Dame.
Notre Dame played 10 teams, all major college team. They beat them all, outscoring them 360-86, (36-9). Those teams had a combined record of 45-46-4, (.495). Their PDR was 1.60. They were the best team 7 of their opponents had played. They beat #16 North Carolina 42-6 and #19 Michigan State34-21, (a game that had been 34-7. Tulane was #4 when the Irish beat them 46-7. The came back to win the SEC but fell out of the Top 20 when they lost their last game to LSU 0-21. Vautravers puts Tulane at #24 and also ranked SMU at #17, saying the SWC was very strong that year. (I like years when the SWC is very strong!)
Fixing the 1949 AP Poll
The Irish were 4th in the nation in scoring with 36.0 ppg, (behind Army, Wyoming- who beat Northern Colorado 103-0) and Oklahoma). They were 7th in the country in points allowed at 8.6. They led the nation in total offense with 435 ypg. They were 4th in rushing offense (291) and rushing defense (96).
Oklahoma played 11 teams, all major college and defeated them all by a combined 399-88 (36-8). Those teams had a combined record of 54-50-6 (.519). Their PDR was 1.73. They were the best team that 7 of their opponents played. They beat #15 Santa Clara 28-21 and #9 LSU 35-0. The Sooners were 3rd in the nation in scoring (36.4) and 9th in scoring defense (8.8). They were 3rd in total offense (409), 2nd in rushing (320), 1st in rushing defense (56) and 6th in total defense (203). George Thomas (859 yards) and Lindell Pearson (753) were 7th and 9th in the country in rushing. Notre Dame and Army had no one in any top ten, largely because they sued more people with their two platoons.
Army played 9 teams, all major college and beat all of them by a combined 354-68 (39-8). Those teams had a combined record of 31-46-3 (.403). Their PDR was 1.78. They were the best team that 4 of their opponents played. Army led the country in scoring (39.3) and were fourth in scoring defense ((7.6). They were fifth in total offense (394) and second in total defense (186), sixth in rushing (276) and in rushing defense (101).
Let’s look at the rosters:
Leon Hart of Notre Dame won the Heisman Trophy by a huge margin, 995 votes to 272 for Charlie Justice. Arnold Galiffa of Army was 4th with 196 votes. Notre Dame also had the #5 guy, quarterback Bob Williams, (189), and the #8 guy, running back Emil Sitko (79). Nobody on Oklahoma got a vote. Williams got 159 votes and finished 6th in 1950 while Army’s end Hank Foldberg was 8th with 103 votes. Oklahoma’s fullback, Leon heath was 7th with 125 votes. No one from the three teams made the top 10 in 1951. No freshman played in 1949 so the 1952 vote is not relevant.
Notre Dame’s ends, Hart and Jim Martin, are both in the Hall of Fame as are QB Williams, HB Sitko and center Jerry Groom. Galiffa was Army’s only Hall of Famer and end Jim Owens made it for the Sooners.
Hart, Williams and Sitko were consensus All Americans for Notre Dame. Groom made it the next year. Heath would make the 1950 team along with tackle Jim Weatherall who would repeat in 1951 and win the Outland Trophy and the nation’s best lineman that year. Galiffa was on the team for Army in 1949 and Foldberg in 1950.
Notre Dame’s future pros:
Al Cannava HB/DB 1950 Packers (1 year)
Gus Cifelli T 1950-52 Lions 1953 Packers 1954 Eagles/Steelers (5)
Larry Coutre HB 1950 Packers and 1953 Colts and Packers (2)
Billy Gay DB 1951 Cardinals (1)
Jerry Groom MG-DT-C-LB 1951-55 Cardinals (5)
Leon Hart E 1950-57 Lions (8)
Jim Martin G-LB-K 1950 Browns, 1951-61 Lions, 1963 Colts, 1964 Redskins (14)
Johnny Petitbon HB/DB 1952 Texans, 1955-56 Browns, 1957 Packers (4)
Emil Sitko HB 1950 49ers, 1951-52 Cardinals (3)
Mike Swistowicz HB/DB 1950 Cardinals and Yankees (1)
Bob Toneff DT-DE-T-LB-G 1952 49ers, 1954-57 49ers, 1959-64 Redskins (12)
Fred Wallner LB-G 1951-55 Cardinals 1960 Oilers (6)
Bill Wightkin T-DE 1950-57 Bears (8)
Bob Williams QB 1951-53 Bears (3)
Ernie Zaleski, HB/DB 1950 Baltimore Colts (1)
That’s 15 players who played a total of 74 years (4.9 years per player). None of them are in the Pro Football HOF, (which surprised me: I thought maybe Hart and Martin might have made it).
Oklahoma’s future pros:
Leon Heath FB/HB 1951-53 Redskins (3)
Willie Manley T-G 1950-51 Packers, 1953-54 Edmonton CFL (4)
Jim Owens E/DE 1950 Colts (1)
Lindy Pearson HB 1950-52 Lions, 1952 Packers (3)
George Thomas HB/DB 1950-52 Redskins (3)
Stan West DG-G-C 1950-54 Rams, 1955 Giants, 1957-58 Cardinals (9)
That’s 6 players who played a total of 23 years, 3.8 years per player. NO Pro HOFers.
Army’s future pros:
Arnold Galiffa QB 1953 Giants 1954 Packers (2)
Al Pollard FB/HB 1951 Yankees, 1951-53 Eagles (3)
That’s two players who played 5 years (2.5) with no Pro HOFers. Obviously, being a service academy, West Point is not going to produce many pro players.
All three teams dominated the teams they played and put up numbers you’d expect for a national champion. They had no common opponents. Notre Dame has the most accomplished roster and the support of the vast majority of selectors but Oklahoma’s greatest team might have slipped ahead of them in a post bowl poll, (the last regular season poll being taken before the ND-SMU game.) Army had the best victory of any of them.
So….Who was #1 for 1949?
