THE GOOD OLD DAZE...

WHILE DOING OUR research on the famous old football coach, Andy Smith, last month, we were overcome by a sense of deja vu. Leafing through a book on the Great College Football Coaches of the Twenties and Thirties, we were astonished at the wealth of familiar names we came across.

The author, an impeccable football historian named Tim Cohane, certified 43 of them as "legends" and 37 others as "outstanding."

The names rang out like Christmas bells--Matty Bell, Andy Smith, Dana X. Bible, Bernie Bierman, Red Blaik, Fritz Crisler, Gil Dobie, Dick Harlow, Howard Jones, Andy Kerr, Elmer Layden, Lou Little, Tuss McLaughry, Dutch Meyer, Bob Neyland, Knute Rockne, Bill Roper, Carl Snavely, Jock Sutherland, Frank Thomas, Wallace Wade, Pop Warner, Fielding Yost, Bob Zuppke...

Back in the 20's and 30's most football fans could reel off these names in a breath and a half. What about today? How many great football coaches of the 80's and 90's could our modern fans name? Patemo? Sure. Osborne? Sure. Bowden? Sure. Spurrier? Perhaps. And then the phumphering would begin.

Why such a huge disparity in big-name recognition between the old era and the new? We believe it began with the revolution in college football in the Roaring Twenties. The appearance of a super hero, Red Grange. Number 77. He electrified the sport. College football became the rage. Right up with major league baseball (with Babe Ruth) and boxing (with Jack Dempsey).

Since there were no divisional breakdowns, everyone could play anyone else, and you would find all kinds of intriguing rivalries such as Georgia vs Yale, Notre Dame vs Carnegie Tech, and Fordham vs St. Mary's (of California)

Centre beats Harvard and Bo McMillin becomes a legend!

Would you believe that back in the 20's and 30's, all of the following colleges received votes as the team of the year: Harvard, Lafayette, Washington & Jefferson, Dartmouth, Navy, Yale, Detroit, Colgate, Princeton, and Cornell?

Big-time football meant college football. There was no competition from the pros. As the years flew by, the stage began changing. World War II, the coming of the T formation, television, the divisional breakdowns, and the enormous commercialization of major sports changed the structure of our games forever.

It was a little sad to see the founding fathers of college football, the Ivy League, elect to remain "small time." Its two swan songs were played out in 1934 when Columbia beat Stanford in the Rose Bowl, and 1951, when Princeton won a vote as best team of the year and had its star player, Dick Kazmaier, win the Heisman Trophy (and refuse to turn pro).

We loved Charlie Caldwell's Modern Single Wing with the Buck Lateral Series. It was a work of such exquisite beauty that we decided to do a motion picture analysis of it for our September 1951 issue.

We knew that Charlie, a world-class perfectionist, didn't believe we could do justice by his deux ex machina. And it amused us. Scholastic Coach had been doing such things since 1936.

We remember the day we walked into his office with the first set of proofs. We cleared off a desk and laid out a motion picture sequence of each play in the buck-lateral series.

We watched Charlie's face light up like a Christmas tree. "Hey!" he said. "Hey! I'm gonna use all these pictures in my book."

Which he did--but not until we published them in the September 1951 issue of Scholastic Coach.