SWC75
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1934
Probably the best team Syracuse had in the years of the Hoodoo was the 1934 team. In fact they were arguably the best team SU had between Vic Hanson’s 1923 team that won eight of nine, (losing only to Colgate, naturally), which was invited to the Rose Bowl only to have Chancellor Charles Wesley Flint refuse the bid as “an exploitation of the University for commercial gain” and Ben Schwartzwalder’s powerhouses of the late 50’s. Unlike the 1933 team, this group had real depth, bolstered by an outstanding class of sophomores led by Vannie Albanese of Manlius, who would become the team’s top star of the mid 30’s. But on this team he had plenty of competition.
There was big Lou Stark, 6-1 and 206 pounds, who in the words of Lawrence J. Skiddy “does most of the kicking most of the passing, a great part of the ball carrying and he has been one of the bulwarks of the team in backing up the line. As a triple threat he has few equals in the country and none in the East.” He had a speedy back up in Lou Ginter, a Syracuse native. Henry Merz was also fast and ran hard, especially at the goal line. Nick DiNunzio was an experienced quarterback. The Singer brothers, Milt and Walt, were stalwarts at center and end. Two linemen, “Big Joe” Vavra, (at 6-3 and 216 the biggest player on the team) and Ed Jontos made Roy Simmons Sr’s all-time Syracuse team. But none of those did what tackle and team captain James “Big 6” Steen did: he was an All-American and, at the end of the year was named the team’s MVP.
Then there was Lew Atikoff, a lineman who had gone out for the team as a senior after being on the basketball team for two years. He went out for football when he got a look at the training table Vic Hanson set for his team. In the Depression, you went where the food was. Atikoff played so well for the team that Hanson kept him after practice one day to run extra laps. When Atikoff asked why, Vic told him it was to work off all those extra pounds he was getting at their training table- and to punish him for not coming out for football as a sophomore!
The headlines just kept rolling in: “Syracuse downs Clarkson Tech, 28-0 “; “Syracuse overpowers Cornell eleven to win 20-7”; “Stark hurls 35 yard pass and Merz races 55 yards to score”; “Albanese and Stark lead Orange in rally to crush Ohio Weslayan, 32-10”; “Brown is played off its feet by Syracuse powerhouse”; “56 yard run by Albanese is star play at Providence.” “Syracuse staged finest exhibition of football in last five years”; “Orange uses power drives to beat Penn State”, “Spartans outclassed from start to finish”.
The Cornell win was, of course very satisfying, making it two in a row over SU’s new rival. The Brown game, a 33-0 road blow-out of a team that had been one of the better programs in the east in the early 30’s under Hall of Fame coach Tuss McLaughry, added to the luster. Hanson had so much depth this year he used 11 different backs in the Brown game, which Skiddy called SU’s most impressive performance since the often invoked 1915 38-0 win over Colgate. But Skiddy warned that Brown was weaker than in past years. “The victory made Sunday a decidedly pleasant day for Syracuse football fans but the result is not to be taken as convincing proof of Orange greatness.” But there were more pleasant Sundays to come.
A trip to Penn State produced SU’s fourth straight win over the Lions, 16-0. Unfortunately, the injury bug came back to bite SU in that game, with five players getting hurt, the worst being Stark and DiNunzio, who figured to miss the big confrontation the next week against perhaps the best team Michigan State had had to that point. Syracuse was now one of three unbeaten teams in the East, (along with Navy and Princeton) while State, who had beaten Michigan for the first time in 19 years, (breaking a 22 game Wolverine unbeaten string), was, along with Illinois and Minnesota one of three unbeaten teams in the Midwest. A term was mentioned in the week leading up to the game that I had not read in any of the previous decade’s articles: “The winner of the game will be a strong contender for national championship recognition.” Heretofore all the talk about a good team’s prospects had been about establishing themselves as the best team in the region. Now teams had national ambitions, as well.
But Skiddy warned “The Orange doesn’t need Stark badly for its game, any more than aviators need a sense of balance or engines need an engineer…With him in the game, the Orange rates an even chance against Michigan State. With him out, it looks like a cakewalk for the Spartans.” State brought 1,000 fans with them and the game drew a crowd of 26,000, the largest crowd ever to that point for a game in Archbold against anyone but Colgate.
The game turned out to be a cakewalk alright, but not for the Spartans- for Stark’s replacement, Lou Ginter, “the quickest starting and fastest charging halfback to flash Orange colors on the football field this year. Ginter rushed, passed and kicked Syracuse to its sixth victory in a season that has not been marred by one defeat. Ginter, long held in the background because of the brilliance of Lew Stark and others, came into his own when opportunity, in the form of Stark’s injured ankle, knocked at his door. Never where two backs more directly opposite in their general style of football play than Ginter and Stark. Yes they play the same position and each has shown brilliantly in one crisis after another in the unusually severe schedule through which the Orange has traveled this season. Stark a slow starter, depends on his great weight and his clever and deceptive ball handling to make up for his lack of speed on the first two or three steps. Ginter is away like a flash, digging his spikes deeper into the ground with each succeeding step. Stark retreats for his pass plays, or for most of them. Ginter tosses his passes at full speed. Stark kicks from a decidedly deep formation. Ginter does most of his kicking from a close-up quick kick formation. Saturday was Ginter’s day. Supported in sparkling fashion by Albanese and Merz, who turned in the best blocking exhibition that Syracuse backs have shown all season. The lanky Onondaga lad cut loose for long gains time and again.” He did so enough to gain 179 yards on 35 carries, an amazing performance for a player playing both ways.
SU outrushed Michigan State, 247-154, outpassed them 72-25 and out-first-downed them 21-9. The problem was to outscore them. The year before, SU had a 3-0 halftime lead in East Lansing but their lack of depth had led to a second half collapse and a 3-27 humiliation. 3-0 was also the score of the 1934 game at halftime, something that made fans nervous. Syracuse was dominating the game but they showed a tendency to fumble the ball inside the visitor’s 20 yard line and surrender opportunities to put the game away. But this time the Orange didn’t collapse in the second half and kept the Spartans bottled up until Ginter burst through the line to score after a long fourth quarter drive and make it 10-0. The paper had a great picture of this play taken from the end zone with the caption “This play sent Michigan State’s hopes of an undefeated season crumbling into the ashes of failure.” But SU’s dreams were in tact.
Colgate’s dreams of another unbeaten season had crashed early, with a tough 7-10 road loss to an Ohio State team that lost one game by only one point to Illinois and outscored its opposition, 237-34. Their coach, Frances “Close the Gates of Mercy” Schmidt, (he was famous for running up the score whenever he could), said “Colgate offers one of the most modern offenses in the country…we were lucky enough to eke out a 10-7 victory and even now we don’t know how.” This was Andy Kerr’s last great team, the end of a 47-5-1 run over six seasons. According to Tim Cohane, “As the thirties advanced, defenses caught up with the double wing and the material fell off on Kerr.” That was a common analysis of why a successful coach had a run of poor seasons in those days. It was as if a coach were responsible for coaching players but the recruiting of them was someone else’s responsibility. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that schools rarely recruited a player out of its own area in those days. The paper published a list of key players for both teams, (it may have been an entire roster- 18 players for Colgate, 29 for Syracuse). Of those, 19 were from out of state and all of them from adjacent states. There were 2 players from Massachusetts, 5 from Connecticut, 5 from New Jersey, 6 from Pennsylvania and 1 from Ohio. A “lack of material” may just mean that the area a school was in had some bad years for producing talent. Kerr coached at Colgate until 1946 but only went 48-45-6 in his last 12 years. SU was only 41-40-7 over the same period.
But for now the Red Raiders were as formidable as ever. An unbeaten Tulane team found that out in New York City as Colgate avenged its loss the year before with a 20-6 thrashing. “The southern line was often riddled wide apart or kicked out of position by Colgate’s deceptive ball passing attack. The Tulane secondary was caught off guard by Colgate’s laterals, handled with swiftness and skill. It was a difficult attack for any team to meet with the ball flying back and forth from hand to hand, always accompanied by high-class blocking both at the line and downfield.” On one 43 yard scoring play Colgate used 4 laterals. On another, they lateralled five times and only a fumble prevented a sixth.
The local paper reported, however that Syracuse’s preparation for the Maroon laterals was strong and that Kerr as a result had rarely used them against their arch-rival in the past. Talk in Syracuse was about the prospect for an undefeated season, which Vic Hanson “ridiculed”. New York City observers seemed to agree, aiming Colgate a 2-1 betting favorite over the Orange after seeing their display vs. Tulane. Upstate, where people had seen SU against the Spartans, the odds were reversed. Skiddy enthused: “Always one of the outstanding football games of the year, because of the tradition behind it, which serves to establish it as an intercollegiate classic, the game of 1934 carries national championship ranking as well.” That may have been a slight exaggeration but the Associated Press rated the two teams highly. They tried an experiment that two years later would become a weekly tradition. They had a panel of the nation’s sportswriters vote on who they thought the best teams in the country were and used a point system to publish a top ten. Colgate was #8 and Syracuse #10.
There was again talk of Syracuse going to the Rose Bowl, which liked to invite teams from the East, where the most prominent sportswriters were from. Princeton had turned down an invitation the year before and Navy had some tough games left. (Both were destined to lose on the day Syracuse played Colgate.) One sportswriter proposed that there be a round robin of the nation’s top teams in a series of games played for the benefit of the nation’s unemployed and mentioned SU as one of the possible participants. But Charles Wesley Flint was still the Chancellor, (as he would be until 1936), and he was unmoved. “Syracuse has put a strict rule against postseason games on its records and Chancellor Flint has shown consistency in upholding any move to cut over-emphasis. He is one of the real leaders in this fight.”
But any fight against over-emphasis of the Colgate game was doomed to failure. 6,000 bleacher seats were added to increase Archbold’s capacity to 40,000, with every seat expected to be filled at $3.30 a ticket, (a lot of money in 1934). The paper said “The stadium was nearly sold immediately in the wild rush for tickets. “ (I assume they meant it was nearly sold out.) The press box was enlarged and 40 wire reservations were made for the sportswriters from all over the nation to file their stories on the game. The rules against campus demonstrations were relaxed. One sign, spoofing the New Deal, called the game “Syracuse’s CCC project: Crush Colgate Completely”. A wagon was led around the campus, defying Chancellor Flint with a sign saying “Rose Bowl or bust”. It and the Cheerleading squad led over 1,000 students on a march from the campus to a downtown theater for a pep rally, including speeches and songs.
Dr. William Pelow bought a ticket from a random drawing and found he had the same seat that he had in 1915, the year of Syracuse’s famous 38-0 victory. That must mean something. Perhaps a good smoke might have helped SU. Former Columbia quarterback Cliff Montgomery was seen in an advertisement proclaiming that he smoked Camels for the “extra energy they give me”. Energy of a different sort was supplied by the Society of American Magicians who sent Vic Hanson a magic wand, instructing him “May this wand be as effective in your hands as it is in ours. Throw the wand over the goal posts between the half. May the better team win-and may that team be yours.” With that kind of support, how could SU lose?
What meant more to Hanson was that his team was full strength again, with DiNunzio and Stark back practicing with the team. Those practices were held indoors as Old Man winter again paid an early visit to Syracuse. But Hanson didn’t mind the snow as he felt his team had the better power running game than Colgate.
A picture in the Sunday paper showed broadly smiling Syracuse fans entering the stadium. The paper took pains to point out that they were entering the stadium, meaning that this was before the game. The caption read “These were the happier moments for Syracuse rooters.” There was also an overhead shot of the stadium, (it was not snowing), with a full house and the teams lining up for a play at the Colgate 15 yard line. The caption read “A few minutes after the game began with the Orange pushing the Maroon toward the west goal.”
The statistics of the game, a titanic defensive struggle, seemed to describe an Orange victory: 165 yards for SU, only 75 for Colgate and 16 first downs to five. Colgate again had a large advantage in punting 293 yards on 8 punts, (36.6 yards per punt) to 125 on 6 punts, (a paltry 20.8). Colgate also had the player the paper called the “Will O’ the Wisp”, Marty McDonough, who had clinched the previous year’s game with an 80 yard punt return.
Syracuse had the first scoring threat. A fourth down pass to Henry Merz at the Colgate 8 was dropped when Merz had nothing but green between him and the end zone. An interception on SU’s next possession set up Colgate at the SU 40. A few plays later, from the 17, McDonough faded from the backfield on what would now be called a screen pass. The play was perfectly executed and he didn’t even need to be a Wil O’ the Wisp. A picture shows McDonough waltzing into the end zone behind a wall of 4 blockers, “with all Orange players brushed aside and no one to lay a hand on him.”
Syracuse took the kickoff and marched nearly the length of the field. Walt Singer broke away from a defender at the goal line- only to have a pass bounce off his fingertips. On fourth and goal, Vannie Albanese got knocked down by a wave of Red Raiders at the six inch line.
It was déjà vu all over again to open the second half as Syracuse took the kickoff and drove all the way to Colgate goal line where Lou Stark was stopped short of the goal on his fourth straight carry. He got even closer than Albanese, to the two inch line. A picture shows Stark with his back on the ground in emotional agony, his face to the sky as if asking God what it takes to score a touchdown against Colgate. His head is actually in the end zone but the ball, his grasp of which had weakened, was on the ground next to his shoulder- not quite to the goal line.
The game seemed to turn when Colgate’s punter, Kern, for some reason decided to cross up the Orange, (and probably Andy Kerr) by running with the ball from his end zone. It may have made Stark feel a little better when he, too was tackled just short of that damned goal line for an SU safety. Now it was 2-7 and the home team was about to get the ball back.
Kern got off a poor punt from the 20, one that never made it over 10 yards in the air and hit the ground at the 40. But it somehow eluded every Orange player and kept bouncing until it reached the 17. The Orange couldn’t move the ball and DiNunizio stepped back to his own 15 to punt. McDonough gathered in the ball at the Colgate 42. “Kuk and Kern retreated with the Syracuse ends and blocked them. McDonough raced in between them and over to the sideline. Irwin and Anderson dropped back to lead him and in one of the most perfect blocking exhibitions that Syracuse has ever seen, the Colgate team bowled over first one Syracusan and then another out of the way as the Wil O’ the Wisp picked his way down the field to a touchdown. That run meant the game”.
“For the first three periods Syracuse lived up to its reputation of being the best Orange team of the post-war days. Desperate in the last period, it tossed caution to the wind and tried reckless forward and lateral passes against an alert team, well in front, that stood its ground in remarkably fine fashion.”
The final score was Colgate 13, Syracuse 2. “Colgate had two chances to score and cashed in on each and once more the cry of victory for guile over brawn was raised among the spectators, more than 25,000 of whom groaned in agony as a strong and hard charging Orange team out rushed and out charged its foe most of the time but the Orange was not the smart alert team Colgate was.”
After the game there was another unfortunate battle for the goal posts, the biggest one yet. “Hundreds of Colgate supporters, not all of them obviously undergraduates, swept onto the field at the close of the game, their objective the capture of the goalposts…Milling around for several minutes, the Colgate contingent made a sudden thrust against the detail at the Eastern end of the bowl, (SU’s ROTC students had decided to get some training for battle conditions by defending the goal posts). The Syracuse college soldiers swung their riot sticks vigorously and withstood the first attack. A second thrust, however, saw the ROTC line broken and the fighting became more or less general. Patrolmen, wary, proclaimed neutrality. Reinforcements arrived from the western goal posts in which the Colgate array evidently was little interested. The additional riot sticks turned the tide and fighting stubbornly, the Raiders retreated. It was a retreat, however, that quickly was transferred into another assault with a whoop and rush that was irresistible. The Colgate contingent swept down the field and seized the now undefended western goal posts. A half hearted attack was later made on the Eastern goal but failed.” At least SU earned a tie in the post game brawl.
Some 10,000 fans stayed for an hour after the game to watch this melee. There were a dozen people who had to be taken to hospitals, five of them unconscious. One man didn’t regain his senses for four hours and two were still out when the paper went to press. Meanwhile, Colgate fans were observed in the lobby of the Hotel Syracuse sawing the western goalposts into pieces and selling them for $2.00 each. You did anything you could to make a buck in the Depression. Their clientele may have been limited by the Colgate fans who were dropping buckets of water out of the windows of their rooms onto the heads of pedestrians below to celebrate Colgate’s seventh straight victory in the series.
A disheartened Syracuse team lost to Columbia the next week to finish at 6-2. Chancellor Flint was probably just as glad he didn’t have to turn down another Rose Bowl invitation in the name of combating the over emphasis of football. Colgate had once again de-emphasized Syracuse football. It was the end of the great period of Colgate football. In Andy Kerr’s first six seasons they had gone 8-1, 9-1, 8-1, 9-0, 6-1-1 and 7-1. They had some good teams after that but have never been a national power at the major college level since.
Colgate’s glory era was over. But the Hoodoo continued…
Probably the best team Syracuse had in the years of the Hoodoo was the 1934 team. In fact they were arguably the best team SU had between Vic Hanson’s 1923 team that won eight of nine, (losing only to Colgate, naturally), which was invited to the Rose Bowl only to have Chancellor Charles Wesley Flint refuse the bid as “an exploitation of the University for commercial gain” and Ben Schwartzwalder’s powerhouses of the late 50’s. Unlike the 1933 team, this group had real depth, bolstered by an outstanding class of sophomores led by Vannie Albanese of Manlius, who would become the team’s top star of the mid 30’s. But on this team he had plenty of competition.
There was big Lou Stark, 6-1 and 206 pounds, who in the words of Lawrence J. Skiddy “does most of the kicking most of the passing, a great part of the ball carrying and he has been one of the bulwarks of the team in backing up the line. As a triple threat he has few equals in the country and none in the East.” He had a speedy back up in Lou Ginter, a Syracuse native. Henry Merz was also fast and ran hard, especially at the goal line. Nick DiNunzio was an experienced quarterback. The Singer brothers, Milt and Walt, were stalwarts at center and end. Two linemen, “Big Joe” Vavra, (at 6-3 and 216 the biggest player on the team) and Ed Jontos made Roy Simmons Sr’s all-time Syracuse team. But none of those did what tackle and team captain James “Big 6” Steen did: he was an All-American and, at the end of the year was named the team’s MVP.
Then there was Lew Atikoff, a lineman who had gone out for the team as a senior after being on the basketball team for two years. He went out for football when he got a look at the training table Vic Hanson set for his team. In the Depression, you went where the food was. Atikoff played so well for the team that Hanson kept him after practice one day to run extra laps. When Atikoff asked why, Vic told him it was to work off all those extra pounds he was getting at their training table- and to punish him for not coming out for football as a sophomore!
The headlines just kept rolling in: “Syracuse downs Clarkson Tech, 28-0 “; “Syracuse overpowers Cornell eleven to win 20-7”; “Stark hurls 35 yard pass and Merz races 55 yards to score”; “Albanese and Stark lead Orange in rally to crush Ohio Weslayan, 32-10”; “Brown is played off its feet by Syracuse powerhouse”; “56 yard run by Albanese is star play at Providence.” “Syracuse staged finest exhibition of football in last five years”; “Orange uses power drives to beat Penn State”, “Spartans outclassed from start to finish”.
The Cornell win was, of course very satisfying, making it two in a row over SU’s new rival. The Brown game, a 33-0 road blow-out of a team that had been one of the better programs in the east in the early 30’s under Hall of Fame coach Tuss McLaughry, added to the luster. Hanson had so much depth this year he used 11 different backs in the Brown game, which Skiddy called SU’s most impressive performance since the often invoked 1915 38-0 win over Colgate. But Skiddy warned that Brown was weaker than in past years. “The victory made Sunday a decidedly pleasant day for Syracuse football fans but the result is not to be taken as convincing proof of Orange greatness.” But there were more pleasant Sundays to come.
A trip to Penn State produced SU’s fourth straight win over the Lions, 16-0. Unfortunately, the injury bug came back to bite SU in that game, with five players getting hurt, the worst being Stark and DiNunzio, who figured to miss the big confrontation the next week against perhaps the best team Michigan State had had to that point. Syracuse was now one of three unbeaten teams in the East, (along with Navy and Princeton) while State, who had beaten Michigan for the first time in 19 years, (breaking a 22 game Wolverine unbeaten string), was, along with Illinois and Minnesota one of three unbeaten teams in the Midwest. A term was mentioned in the week leading up to the game that I had not read in any of the previous decade’s articles: “The winner of the game will be a strong contender for national championship recognition.” Heretofore all the talk about a good team’s prospects had been about establishing themselves as the best team in the region. Now teams had national ambitions, as well.
But Skiddy warned “The Orange doesn’t need Stark badly for its game, any more than aviators need a sense of balance or engines need an engineer…With him in the game, the Orange rates an even chance against Michigan State. With him out, it looks like a cakewalk for the Spartans.” State brought 1,000 fans with them and the game drew a crowd of 26,000, the largest crowd ever to that point for a game in Archbold against anyone but Colgate.
The game turned out to be a cakewalk alright, but not for the Spartans- for Stark’s replacement, Lou Ginter, “the quickest starting and fastest charging halfback to flash Orange colors on the football field this year. Ginter rushed, passed and kicked Syracuse to its sixth victory in a season that has not been marred by one defeat. Ginter, long held in the background because of the brilliance of Lew Stark and others, came into his own when opportunity, in the form of Stark’s injured ankle, knocked at his door. Never where two backs more directly opposite in their general style of football play than Ginter and Stark. Yes they play the same position and each has shown brilliantly in one crisis after another in the unusually severe schedule through which the Orange has traveled this season. Stark a slow starter, depends on his great weight and his clever and deceptive ball handling to make up for his lack of speed on the first two or three steps. Ginter is away like a flash, digging his spikes deeper into the ground with each succeeding step. Stark retreats for his pass plays, or for most of them. Ginter tosses his passes at full speed. Stark kicks from a decidedly deep formation. Ginter does most of his kicking from a close-up quick kick formation. Saturday was Ginter’s day. Supported in sparkling fashion by Albanese and Merz, who turned in the best blocking exhibition that Syracuse backs have shown all season. The lanky Onondaga lad cut loose for long gains time and again.” He did so enough to gain 179 yards on 35 carries, an amazing performance for a player playing both ways.
SU outrushed Michigan State, 247-154, outpassed them 72-25 and out-first-downed them 21-9. The problem was to outscore them. The year before, SU had a 3-0 halftime lead in East Lansing but their lack of depth had led to a second half collapse and a 3-27 humiliation. 3-0 was also the score of the 1934 game at halftime, something that made fans nervous. Syracuse was dominating the game but they showed a tendency to fumble the ball inside the visitor’s 20 yard line and surrender opportunities to put the game away. But this time the Orange didn’t collapse in the second half and kept the Spartans bottled up until Ginter burst through the line to score after a long fourth quarter drive and make it 10-0. The paper had a great picture of this play taken from the end zone with the caption “This play sent Michigan State’s hopes of an undefeated season crumbling into the ashes of failure.” But SU’s dreams were in tact.
Colgate’s dreams of another unbeaten season had crashed early, with a tough 7-10 road loss to an Ohio State team that lost one game by only one point to Illinois and outscored its opposition, 237-34. Their coach, Frances “Close the Gates of Mercy” Schmidt, (he was famous for running up the score whenever he could), said “Colgate offers one of the most modern offenses in the country…we were lucky enough to eke out a 10-7 victory and even now we don’t know how.” This was Andy Kerr’s last great team, the end of a 47-5-1 run over six seasons. According to Tim Cohane, “As the thirties advanced, defenses caught up with the double wing and the material fell off on Kerr.” That was a common analysis of why a successful coach had a run of poor seasons in those days. It was as if a coach were responsible for coaching players but the recruiting of them was someone else’s responsibility. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that schools rarely recruited a player out of its own area in those days. The paper published a list of key players for both teams, (it may have been an entire roster- 18 players for Colgate, 29 for Syracuse). Of those, 19 were from out of state and all of them from adjacent states. There were 2 players from Massachusetts, 5 from Connecticut, 5 from New Jersey, 6 from Pennsylvania and 1 from Ohio. A “lack of material” may just mean that the area a school was in had some bad years for producing talent. Kerr coached at Colgate until 1946 but only went 48-45-6 in his last 12 years. SU was only 41-40-7 over the same period.
But for now the Red Raiders were as formidable as ever. An unbeaten Tulane team found that out in New York City as Colgate avenged its loss the year before with a 20-6 thrashing. “The southern line was often riddled wide apart or kicked out of position by Colgate’s deceptive ball passing attack. The Tulane secondary was caught off guard by Colgate’s laterals, handled with swiftness and skill. It was a difficult attack for any team to meet with the ball flying back and forth from hand to hand, always accompanied by high-class blocking both at the line and downfield.” On one 43 yard scoring play Colgate used 4 laterals. On another, they lateralled five times and only a fumble prevented a sixth.
The local paper reported, however that Syracuse’s preparation for the Maroon laterals was strong and that Kerr as a result had rarely used them against their arch-rival in the past. Talk in Syracuse was about the prospect for an undefeated season, which Vic Hanson “ridiculed”. New York City observers seemed to agree, aiming Colgate a 2-1 betting favorite over the Orange after seeing their display vs. Tulane. Upstate, where people had seen SU against the Spartans, the odds were reversed. Skiddy enthused: “Always one of the outstanding football games of the year, because of the tradition behind it, which serves to establish it as an intercollegiate classic, the game of 1934 carries national championship ranking as well.” That may have been a slight exaggeration but the Associated Press rated the two teams highly. They tried an experiment that two years later would become a weekly tradition. They had a panel of the nation’s sportswriters vote on who they thought the best teams in the country were and used a point system to publish a top ten. Colgate was #8 and Syracuse #10.
There was again talk of Syracuse going to the Rose Bowl, which liked to invite teams from the East, where the most prominent sportswriters were from. Princeton had turned down an invitation the year before and Navy had some tough games left. (Both were destined to lose on the day Syracuse played Colgate.) One sportswriter proposed that there be a round robin of the nation’s top teams in a series of games played for the benefit of the nation’s unemployed and mentioned SU as one of the possible participants. But Charles Wesley Flint was still the Chancellor, (as he would be until 1936), and he was unmoved. “Syracuse has put a strict rule against postseason games on its records and Chancellor Flint has shown consistency in upholding any move to cut over-emphasis. He is one of the real leaders in this fight.”
But any fight against over-emphasis of the Colgate game was doomed to failure. 6,000 bleacher seats were added to increase Archbold’s capacity to 40,000, with every seat expected to be filled at $3.30 a ticket, (a lot of money in 1934). The paper said “The stadium was nearly sold immediately in the wild rush for tickets. “ (I assume they meant it was nearly sold out.) The press box was enlarged and 40 wire reservations were made for the sportswriters from all over the nation to file their stories on the game. The rules against campus demonstrations were relaxed. One sign, spoofing the New Deal, called the game “Syracuse’s CCC project: Crush Colgate Completely”. A wagon was led around the campus, defying Chancellor Flint with a sign saying “Rose Bowl or bust”. It and the Cheerleading squad led over 1,000 students on a march from the campus to a downtown theater for a pep rally, including speeches and songs.
Dr. William Pelow bought a ticket from a random drawing and found he had the same seat that he had in 1915, the year of Syracuse’s famous 38-0 victory. That must mean something. Perhaps a good smoke might have helped SU. Former Columbia quarterback Cliff Montgomery was seen in an advertisement proclaiming that he smoked Camels for the “extra energy they give me”. Energy of a different sort was supplied by the Society of American Magicians who sent Vic Hanson a magic wand, instructing him “May this wand be as effective in your hands as it is in ours. Throw the wand over the goal posts between the half. May the better team win-and may that team be yours.” With that kind of support, how could SU lose?
What meant more to Hanson was that his team was full strength again, with DiNunzio and Stark back practicing with the team. Those practices were held indoors as Old Man winter again paid an early visit to Syracuse. But Hanson didn’t mind the snow as he felt his team had the better power running game than Colgate.
A picture in the Sunday paper showed broadly smiling Syracuse fans entering the stadium. The paper took pains to point out that they were entering the stadium, meaning that this was before the game. The caption read “These were the happier moments for Syracuse rooters.” There was also an overhead shot of the stadium, (it was not snowing), with a full house and the teams lining up for a play at the Colgate 15 yard line. The caption read “A few minutes after the game began with the Orange pushing the Maroon toward the west goal.”
The statistics of the game, a titanic defensive struggle, seemed to describe an Orange victory: 165 yards for SU, only 75 for Colgate and 16 first downs to five. Colgate again had a large advantage in punting 293 yards on 8 punts, (36.6 yards per punt) to 125 on 6 punts, (a paltry 20.8). Colgate also had the player the paper called the “Will O’ the Wisp”, Marty McDonough, who had clinched the previous year’s game with an 80 yard punt return.
Syracuse had the first scoring threat. A fourth down pass to Henry Merz at the Colgate 8 was dropped when Merz had nothing but green between him and the end zone. An interception on SU’s next possession set up Colgate at the SU 40. A few plays later, from the 17, McDonough faded from the backfield on what would now be called a screen pass. The play was perfectly executed and he didn’t even need to be a Wil O’ the Wisp. A picture shows McDonough waltzing into the end zone behind a wall of 4 blockers, “with all Orange players brushed aside and no one to lay a hand on him.”
Syracuse took the kickoff and marched nearly the length of the field. Walt Singer broke away from a defender at the goal line- only to have a pass bounce off his fingertips. On fourth and goal, Vannie Albanese got knocked down by a wave of Red Raiders at the six inch line.
It was déjà vu all over again to open the second half as Syracuse took the kickoff and drove all the way to Colgate goal line where Lou Stark was stopped short of the goal on his fourth straight carry. He got even closer than Albanese, to the two inch line. A picture shows Stark with his back on the ground in emotional agony, his face to the sky as if asking God what it takes to score a touchdown against Colgate. His head is actually in the end zone but the ball, his grasp of which had weakened, was on the ground next to his shoulder- not quite to the goal line.
The game seemed to turn when Colgate’s punter, Kern, for some reason decided to cross up the Orange, (and probably Andy Kerr) by running with the ball from his end zone. It may have made Stark feel a little better when he, too was tackled just short of that damned goal line for an SU safety. Now it was 2-7 and the home team was about to get the ball back.
Kern got off a poor punt from the 20, one that never made it over 10 yards in the air and hit the ground at the 40. But it somehow eluded every Orange player and kept bouncing until it reached the 17. The Orange couldn’t move the ball and DiNunizio stepped back to his own 15 to punt. McDonough gathered in the ball at the Colgate 42. “Kuk and Kern retreated with the Syracuse ends and blocked them. McDonough raced in between them and over to the sideline. Irwin and Anderson dropped back to lead him and in one of the most perfect blocking exhibitions that Syracuse has ever seen, the Colgate team bowled over first one Syracusan and then another out of the way as the Wil O’ the Wisp picked his way down the field to a touchdown. That run meant the game”.
“For the first three periods Syracuse lived up to its reputation of being the best Orange team of the post-war days. Desperate in the last period, it tossed caution to the wind and tried reckless forward and lateral passes against an alert team, well in front, that stood its ground in remarkably fine fashion.”
The final score was Colgate 13, Syracuse 2. “Colgate had two chances to score and cashed in on each and once more the cry of victory for guile over brawn was raised among the spectators, more than 25,000 of whom groaned in agony as a strong and hard charging Orange team out rushed and out charged its foe most of the time but the Orange was not the smart alert team Colgate was.”
After the game there was another unfortunate battle for the goal posts, the biggest one yet. “Hundreds of Colgate supporters, not all of them obviously undergraduates, swept onto the field at the close of the game, their objective the capture of the goalposts…Milling around for several minutes, the Colgate contingent made a sudden thrust against the detail at the Eastern end of the bowl, (SU’s ROTC students had decided to get some training for battle conditions by defending the goal posts). The Syracuse college soldiers swung their riot sticks vigorously and withstood the first attack. A second thrust, however, saw the ROTC line broken and the fighting became more or less general. Patrolmen, wary, proclaimed neutrality. Reinforcements arrived from the western goal posts in which the Colgate array evidently was little interested. The additional riot sticks turned the tide and fighting stubbornly, the Raiders retreated. It was a retreat, however, that quickly was transferred into another assault with a whoop and rush that was irresistible. The Colgate contingent swept down the field and seized the now undefended western goal posts. A half hearted attack was later made on the Eastern goal but failed.” At least SU earned a tie in the post game brawl.
Some 10,000 fans stayed for an hour after the game to watch this melee. There were a dozen people who had to be taken to hospitals, five of them unconscious. One man didn’t regain his senses for four hours and two were still out when the paper went to press. Meanwhile, Colgate fans were observed in the lobby of the Hotel Syracuse sawing the western goalposts into pieces and selling them for $2.00 each. You did anything you could to make a buck in the Depression. Their clientele may have been limited by the Colgate fans who were dropping buckets of water out of the windows of their rooms onto the heads of pedestrians below to celebrate Colgate’s seventh straight victory in the series.
A disheartened Syracuse team lost to Columbia the next week to finish at 6-2. Chancellor Flint was probably just as glad he didn’t have to turn down another Rose Bowl invitation in the name of combating the over emphasis of football. Colgate had once again de-emphasized Syracuse football. It was the end of the great period of Colgate football. In Andy Kerr’s first six seasons they had gone 8-1, 9-1, 8-1, 9-0, 6-1-1 and 7-1. They had some good teams after that but have never been a national power at the major college level since.
Colgate’s glory era was over. But the Hoodoo continued…
