Huddle Inventor Still Winning at Football

“We’re not just a deaf school,” [offensive line coach Todd] Collins said. “We’re here, we’re going to compete for a championship.”

That’s the spirit. While Gallaudet may be an underdog, it’s no upstart. “Gallaudet is proud to have contributed to the great history of college football,” the school’s athletics website says, noting the momentous events of 1894. That year the team faced two other schools for the deaf, which meant the opponents also knew sign language. Gallaudet notes that this inspired quarterback Paul Hubbard to innovate:

Hubbard was worried that the other teams were stealing Gallaudet’s plays because his signing was out in the open. He decided to circle up his teammates and the huddle was born.

After college, Hubbard moved to Kansas and became an instructor at the Kansas School for the Deaf in Olathe, Kan., where in 1899 he again used the huddle. Soon the system spread to football teams throughout the midwest. University of Illinois [coach] Robert Zuppke admits he took the idea from “a deaf team he saw somewhere.”

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Much farther west this Saturday, defenses will be hoping for longer huddles to rest as the high-flying offenses of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles zip up and down the field at the Rose Bowl Stadium.

Saturday night’s game marks 80 years that the teams have been competing for a particular trophy. Five years ago Kurt Snibbe reported for the Orange County Register on the Victory Bell, which was donated by alumni to UCLA in 1939. The Bruins began to ring the bell for each point they scored. Mr. Snibbe reports what happened after a 1941 UCLA victory over Washington State:

After the game some students offered to help load the 295-pound brass bell into a truck outside the stadium. The only catch: the helpers were USC students in disguise. They loaded the bell and took off with the truck.

The theft started a prank war between the two schools that escalated to the point of defacing statues and other acts of vandalism. When the police had to be brought in, the president of USC threatened to cancel the 1942 game.

The student governments reached an agreement that the winner of the game would take possession of the bell, and in the case of a tie the previous winner would keep it.

Who says student government is a waste of time?

This column is often opposed to new forms of governance. But 118 years ago, when the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University met for the first time on the gridiron, one could certainly argue that the rules of football needed reform. No matter how this Saturday’s game between the Sooners and the Cowboys turns out, it is unlikely to be as memorable as that first great clash of 1904.

Berry Tramel reported for the Oklahoman in 2014 on the legendary first meeting of the in-state rivals, when the Oklahoma State Cowboys were known as the Oklahoma A&M Aggies:

Oklahoma was not even yet a state, and Guthrie was the territorial capital. A local commercial club enticed the university teams to meet, and so they did on a bitter cold day. The park was lined by Cottonwood Creek, which a century later still is prone to flooding, and its banks were overrun on this day. The creek looked shallow but in fact was seven feet deep.

On the game’s fourth play, the Aggies were backed up on their goal line, and punter B.O. Callahan kicked the ball straight up into the stiff north wind. The ball floated back past Callahan’s head. The rules of the day were clear. The ball was free for the taking, no matter where it landed. Touchdown for the Sooners, touchback for the Aggies.

With players from both teams in hot pursuit, the ball landed and bounded down a foot trail and into the murky waters of Cottonwood Creek, where, according to OU historian Harold Keith, “it bobbed and floated like a cork as the swift current swept it downstream.”

A&M’s R.C. Baird tried to use a stick to fish out the ball. But OU’s T. Becker Matthews knocked Baird into the water. Matthews deduced that that put Baird closer to the ball, so in went Matthews, too. They battled for the slippery ball, and finally Matthews dunked Baird into the water, sending Baird scrambling for the banks.

Multiple players jumped into the frigid water and battled for the ball. Then Oklahoma’s Ed Cook managed to carry it out of the creek and into the end zone for a touchdown and the start of a lopsided Sooner victory.

Speaking of competitors for the ages, an enduring sports cliché features broadcasters declaring a “team of destiny” that somehow manages to win even when it seems to be overmatched. The legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice applied the label to the Princeton Tigers, who completed a perfect season 100 years ago today.

The New York Times

reported:

Big Blue Team’s Power and Courage Balked By Wasted Chances—Orange Defense Is Gallant…

PRINCETON, Nov. 18.–Victor over Harvard, now conqueror of Yale, Princeton reached this afternoon the football heights which it has been storming for eleven long years. As far as the championship crown is concerned, the big three series of this season is over and done with, for Princeton won again today, 3 to 0, and now rules supreme for the first time since 1911.

Yale took some measure of revenge last weekend in the country’s oldest college football rivalry when the Bulldogs spoiled what had been another undefeated Princeton season. Yale will play at Harvard on Saturday.

The Ivy schools have the oldest rivalries but there are two teams that have played more games against each other—and they will do battle again this weekend. The Lehigh University athletics department writes:

BETHLEHEM, Pa. – Coming off a thrilling, come-from-behind win over Colgate, Lehigh looks to finish its 2022 campaign on a high note as the Mountain Hawks travel to Fisher Stadium to face Lafayette in the 158th meeting of college football’s most-played rivalry.

This column urges fans from Pasadena to Pennsylvania to remember that while you can’t control what happens on the field on Saturday, conjuring a cheerful and well-provisioned tailgate party is entirely within your power. Good luck–we’re all counting on you.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)