THESEASON

By Louis M. Guenin
© 1998

Michigan's conquering heroes of 1997 achieved a goal long known in the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences as "the perfect season," a season of victory in every regular season game and in the Rose Bowl. This year a scheme for declaring a national football champion (described in "A Football House of Cards") cuts in its swath the ties binding those conferences to their historic pursuit.

One hundred years ago this Thanksgiving, Neil Snow's extra point secured a 12-11 victory for Michigan over Amos Alonzo Stagg's Chicago Maroons. The kick followed Charles Widman's escape from a pile of players and 65-yard sprint to the touchdown heard round the world. "Far we their praises sing for the glory and fame they've bro't us,' wrote Louis Elbel in "The Victors," the tribute that echoes still. This 1898 victory earned Michigan her first Western Conference championship and first undefeated season since 1891 (the year routinizing a season of nine or more games).

The Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association inaugurated "postseason" football by inviting the 1901 Michigan team of new coach Fielding H. Yost to play Stanford, whom Yost had coached the year before. On a hot New Year's Day, 1902, in Pasadena's Tournament Park, All-American fullback Snow established what remain the Rose Bowl records for touchdowns and points while the incomparably fast freshman half back Willie Heston led in rushing yardage. With eight minutes remaining and trailing 49-0, Stanford's captain sued for surrender. For the Wolverines this concluded an 11-0 season and a level of perfection described by Yost as "almost an impossibility." They had yielded not one point to any opponent. Given the defensive line play, the Michigan fullback, in Yost's words, was "called upon to make a tackle but once this season." Only two opponents crossed the Michigan 30-yard line, and they only by penalties for Michigan forward passes. Since formation in 1896, the Big Ten has seen only one other unbeaten and unscored upon team, the 7-0 Illinois squad of 1910.

Staging a polo match in 1903 and then enamored of Ben Hur, the Tournament of Roses presented chariot races following the 1904 Rose Parade. At least they averted one-sided football. The "point-a-minute" Wolverines marched through another 11-0 season in 1902 and achieved nine shutouts, including a 119-0 pasting of Michigan Agricultural College. Michigan remained undefeated until, after holding its first 12 opponents scoreless, the 1905 team lost on a safety at Chicago, 2-0. In only six games during 1901-1905 did a Michigan opponent score. There was one tie. Officials halted a bruising battle at Minnesota in 1903 after the Gophers evened the score at 6-6 with two minutes remaining, whereupon thousands stormed the field. The legacy of that confrontation endures in the form of Michigan's countermeasure against Gopher perfidy with the drinking water, an implement left on the field in the postgame swarm. Minnesota goaded Michigan into competing for return of "the Little Brown Jug."

Harrowing encounters eventually suggested to the Tournament of Roses that chariot racing might be more dangerous than tangling with Wolverines. The organizers decided to have a go with more docile contestants, and in 1913 offered a race of mounted ostriches. In another between a camel and an elephant, the pachyderm gained the lead only to balk. Surely a halfback pursued by tacklers would never do that. And pigskins were now known to fly through the air. Late in a scoreless confrontation in 1910 at Ferry Field, the Wolverines became the first to employ the forward pass as a pivotal weapon as they surprised Minnesota with two consecutive completions enabling a touchdown plunge for a 6-0 victory.

The Tournament of Roses reinstated football by inviting Michigan and California for New Year's Day, 1916. Michigan's Senate Council disapproved the trip, whereupon Washington State met Brown. Shortly after a 28-0 California win over Ohio State on New Year's Day, 1921, the Big Ten voted to forbid all postseason games. Despite periodic entreaties thereafter by the Pacific Coast Conference, the Big Ten stood firm. In the opinion of many faculty, the regular season was long enough. The Rose Bowl, dedicated in 1922, welcomed a string of eastern and southern visitors.

Meanwhile Michigan completed undefeated, untied seasons in 1918 and 1923. But Yost declared the 1925 Wolverine contingent "the greatest football team I ever saw." Against them, by Yost's estimate, Red Grange of Illinois "did not gain enough ground to bury him in." Including All-Americans Benny Friedman, Bennie Oosterbaan (a sophomore), Harry Hawkins, Bob Brown and Tom Edwards, this penultimate Yost squad shut out all opponents except in a 3-2 loss to Northwestern. Its meeting with the Wildcats in Chicago finds no counterpart in Michigan lore save for the 1950 Snow Bowl. By virtue of torrential rains, a battle of punts was played, or rather navigated, on a submerged Grant Park field that, in the words of one writer, "presented conditions suitable to the launching of a steamer." Oosterbaan, twice more thereafter an All-American in football and basketball and the only athlete ever to lead the Big Ten in touchdowns, baskets, and base hits, declined numerous offers from professional teams to remain at Michigan as assistant coach. Later he would become head coach of basketball and then football. Fullback Wally Weber, who with undue modesty would later declaim that "my sole function in the drama was to inflate the ball," served for long as an assistant coach and for decades proceeded to "regale with dubious rhetoric" audiences before whom he would thunderously and whimsically "expatiate upon" Michigan's storied history. Praising a piledriver spotted among a current crop of Wolverines, the coach would exclaim, "When he hits 'em, generations yet unborn feel the shock of the impact!"

Invited to the Rose Bowl was the 1931 Wolverine team of coach Harry Kipke, All-American captain of the 1923 team. In accordance with Big Ten policy, Michigan declined. The Wolverines achieved undefeated seasons again in 1932 and 1933 (although the latter included a scoreless tie with Minnesota), but still no postseason play. When Big Ten commissioner Major John L. Griffith died in 1944, Northwestern athletic director Tug Wilson favored Michigan coach H. 0. "Fritz" Crisler as successor. Crisler, also athletic director since succeeding Yost in 1941, was content at Michigan. The choice, to Wilson's surprise, was Wilson. Soon discussion returned to the Rose Bowl. Michigan professor of law Ralph W. Aigler, emissary in the hiring of Crisler from Princeton in 1938, presented to his colleagues a plan containing three precautions: a conference representative could not leave for California until the fall semester ended, no member could appear in consecutive years, and proceeds would be divided equally among members. On this basis the Big Nine (Chicago having withdrawn earlier in the year) voted 7-2 on September 1, 1946 to compete in the Rose Bowl.

On October 20, 1946, Fielding Yost died suddenly in Ann Arbor at age 75. Yost had led 25 Michigan teams to nearly unrivaled excellence. Ever the enthusiastic teacher, of which a glimpse remains in his studious Football for Player and Spectator, Yost as athletic director was prolific in correspondence and reports. As Hepheistos was to Olympus, so was Yost to Ferry Field. Athletic in manner, Yost bore no resemblance to the awkward gait of the god who built the palaces of the gods, but Yost shepherded to completion Michigan Stadium, Yost Field House, the Intramural Building, other facilities realizing "athletics for all," and the University Golf Course. To build the Hole That Yost Dug, he "lived on the job from first to the last." Yost specified linear walls to bound the Michigan Stadium field because curved walls (as in the Rose Bowl) would place the seats farther from the field. What would otherwise be an ellipsoid frustum thereby lacks a standard name, and may deservedly be called a "yostoid." By symmetry, its distinguishing architectural feature, and an understated exterior beckoning visitors across its grassy knolls to the subterranean vastness within, the yostoid peerlessly fulfilled a faculty committee's wish for a structure of "the utmost simplicity." Now the annual target for those competing there would be the New Year's venue of Yost's first Michigan team.