Another change, in 1912, which would last far longer than some of the new rules on passing—gave teams four downs to make ten yards for a first down, replacing the old rule wherein teams had three downs to gain five yards in order to retain the ball. Furthermore, the size of the field was reduced from 110 yards to 100 yards and the time of games was shortened from seventy minutes to sixty, broken into two halves of thirty minutes each.
Forever innovative, Amos Alonzo Stagg, the head coach at Chicago, was among the first coaches to take advantage of the new rules by throwing the ball more often. In Stagg’s case, he had his quarterback or a halfback take the pass from center, then turn and fake a handoff to another back, and throw a pass to an end or another back who had been split wide, a maneuver that became known as a play-action pass. Eddie Cochems, the coach at St. Louis University, used the pass even more than Stagg, and it paid off handsomely. Throwing the ball as often as ten times a game, the Billikens went unbeaten in eleven games in 1906, the first year that a team could legally throw the football, albeit for no more than ten yards.
Even Yale coach Walter Camp began to use the pass in 1906, often having a player in punt formation throw the ball. As it was, Yale’s ground game was so good that the Bulldogs rarely had to pass as they went unbeaten in ten games while giving up only six points and scoring 144.
Some coaches remained reluctant to throw the ball, mainly on the grounds that only three things can happen when you pass and two of them are negative—the pass can be incomplete and, worse, it can be intercepted. Most of those coaches eventually came around, though, realizing that in long-yardage situations, the pass usually could be more effective than a running play. At any rate, 1906 clearly proved that the forward pass not only was here to stay, but would probably revolutionize college football. But it would take several more years for that to happen, given the reluctance of Eastern powers such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, and Army to throw the ball, which their coaches thought was an unnecessary, and dangerous, affectation that they could succeed without. One of the main reasons for that reluctance was that the ball was not designed to throw, but to kick. It was far more rounded than the modern-day ball, and at least an inch-and-a-half thicker.
The pass would continue to evolve as a weapon thanks to further rules changes. In 1910 the rules were changed so that a back no longer had to run at least five yards sideways behind the line of scrimmage before throwing a pass, though he still had to be at least five yards behind that scrimmage line. Even more dramatic changes occurred in 1912, when backs were permitted to throw anywhere behind the line of scrimmage without any distance limitations. Under other rules changes that year, an end zone of ten yards was established beyond the goal line, and a pass caught in the end zone was a touchdown and not a touchback. In addition, the value of a touchdown rose from five to six points, the field was shortened from 110 yards to 100 yards, and teams now had four downs to gain ten yards and a first down rather than three downs. All of those new rules remain in effect today, almost 100 years later.
That same year, Pop Warner, then the head coach at Carlisle, unveiled the single-wing formation, which made the halfback receiving the snap from center a triple-threat who could run, pass, or punt. That fitted his star back, Jim Thorpe, perfectly, since he could do all three very well. Warner’s single-wing was used for the first time in 1912 against Army and flummoxed a Cadet team that was beaten, 27-6. By the start of the following season, in 1913, almost every major football power in the country was using a variation of Warner’s single-wing, which remained the primary offensive formation until the introduction of the T-formation and its ensuing popularity starting in the late 1930s.
More than the T-formation, the 1913 game at West Point between Army and little-known Notre Dame became not only significant and momentous but changed football forever—in large measure because of the stage on which the Army-Notre Dame game was played—because of the mighty-mite passing tandem of Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne and their novel system of executing a successful pass play.
9
DORAIS TO ROCKNE AND AN UPSET FOR THE AGES
IN THE LONG and mostly glorious annals of Notre Dame football, no game has ever come close to rivaling the significance of the one played against Army at West Point on November 1, 1913. And no player’s performance has ever been as important as the one put on by an undersized quarterback named Charles “Gus” Dorais in that game. For all of their brilliance, even the best games ever played at Notre Dame by Joe Montana, Paul Hornung, Angelo Bertelli, Johnny Lujack, Daryle Lamonica, Joe Theismann, Terry Hanratty, Ralph Guglielmi, John Huarte, Jimmy Clausen, or any other outstanding quarterback pale in comparison to the significance of the performance by Dorais on that raw afternoon on the banks of the Hudson River in New York.
The game had come about a year earlier, in December 1912, when Jesse Harper, the newly named football coach and athletic director, wrote a letter to the Army manager of athletics expressing an interest in playing at West Point during the 1913 season, which would be Harper’s first as the Notre Dame head coach. With the approval, if indeed not the urging of the university’s president, the Reverend John W. Cavanaugh, Harper wanted to book well-known football schools such as Army in order to enhance Notre Dame’s name recognition and its prestige as a university. As it was, Notre Dame was still being ignored by most of the members of the Western Conference (later to become the Big Ten), mainly, Notre Dame officials thought, because of a perception that the Catholic school was recruiting academically ill-equipped players and because of an anti-Catholic bias by some of the Western Conference schools or its coaches. In fact, Notre Dame was no more guilty of recruiting players of dubious scholastic gifts than were Michigan and other members of the Western Conference, which consistently had rebuffed Notre Dame’s efforts to join. A number of other schools with strong football programs used a similar rationale in refusing to play Notre Dame. Army, meanwhile, was having difficulty scheduling games for another reason—its policy of using star players who already had played as many as four varsity seasons elsewhere, and thus, in the opinion of some prospective opponents, had an unfair advantage. At least in part because of that scheduling problem, Army, to Harper’s surprise, wrote back saying the Cadets would be willing to play Notre Dame on November 1 of the following year. Unlike many Eastern schools, Army knew about Notre Dame, mainly its baseball team, which, while barnstorming in the East, had played the Cadets twice and would play them again during the spring of 1913. Army’s football coaches also knew that Notre Dame was developing into a football power in the Midwest and would be a formidable opponent, albeit unlikely to beat the Cadets, one of the best teams in the East where college football was predominant.
In subsequent discussions, Army offered Notre Dame a $400 guarantee, barely enough to cover the team’s travel expenses, but, at Harper’s request, raised the ante to $1,000—still a piddling amount for a team traveling slightly more than 700 miles to play a football game.
As one of the top-ranked college teams in the country, Army was a heavy favorite to beat the “Westerners,” as West Point press releases and stories in New York City newspapers referred to Notre Dame. In addition to playing a stronger schedule than Notre Dame, the Cadets were bigger, heavier, and had the advantage of playing all of their games in an open field at West Point (except for the Navy game, which, in alternate years, was played in Annapolis). Leading up to the Army game, Notre Dame had outscored its first three opponents 169-7, but those opponents were Ohio Northern, South Dakota, and Alma College, hardly college football powers and well below the caliber of opposition Army usually faced. The new Army coach, Charley Daly, who like so many other Cadets had played football at two schools (in his case Harvard and Army, where he had been an All-American at both), had dispatched an assistant and former teammate, Tom Hammond, to scout Notre Dame. By then an Army captain, Hammond watched Notre Dame rout Alma, 62-0, the week before the Army game. In that contest, Harper had Gus Dorais pass infrequently, since
outstanding fullback Ray Eichenlaub, halfback Joe Pliska, and Dorais, a swift and elusive runner, had little difficulty penetrating Alma’s porous defense. Thus the scouting mission accomplished little, apart from determining that in Eichenlaub Notre Dame had one of the best fullbacks in the country and that the diminutive Dorais was almost equally as dangerous as a runner. Notre Dame was able to conceal its plan to primarily attack Army with the forward pass, something its opponents rarely used. Had the Army scout viewed any of the long and grueling practices Harper conducted on the following Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, he would have seen a number of plays that Harper had designed specifically for the Army game, most of them focusing on passing—to moving targets—which Harper was convinced his team would have to rely on if it were to beat the Cadets in Notre Dame’s biggest football encounter of the year.
Apart from the 210-pound Eichenlaub, Notre Dame’s key players on offense were also its smallest, the five-foot seven-inch Dorais and Rockne, who was an inch taller and, at 165 pounds, twenty pounds heavier than the little quarterback. Though Rockne had been a starter the previous three seasons, he had blossomed into a far better receiver under Harper. “I told Rockne that he’d never be a really good receiver until he learned to catch passes with his hands,” Harper was to say years later.
After receiving a raucous send-off from several hundred Notre Dame students, a traveling squad of nineteen players (but only fourteen pair of cleats), carrying their own football gear, along with sandwiches from the campus cafeteria, boarded a train at the South Bend station on the morning of Thursday, October 30. “Everyone in the dorms got up early and marched downtown accompanying the team to the train depot,” Rockne was to recall.
The team’s supplies were minimal, mainly a few trunks, several rolls of tape and bandages, and bottles of iodine and liniment. To allow for more space in their suitcases, some of the players wore their game jerseys under their coats on the twenty-two-hour trip. At Buffalo, the players boarded a sleeper, which arrived in West Point at eight o’clock on the morning of Friday, October 31. Also on board were a half dozen Notre Dame fans, including George Hull and Mike Calnon, the proprietors of Hullie and Mike’s restaurant in downtown South Bend, a favorite gathering place for Notre Dame students, including Rockne. One of Hull and Calnon’s missions on the trip was to place bets for some of those students and other fans in South Bend.
After checking in at Cullum Hall, a dormitory adjacent to Cullum Field where the game was to be played, the players had lunch in the West Point mess hall, and then practiced for about an hour. A story in The New York Times on game day claimed “the visitors seem particularly heavy and look to outweigh the Army by at least ten pounds to the man.” That was far from correct, since Notre Dame’s seven-man line—almost all teams employed seven men up front in those days—averaged only 180 pounds, about ten pounds lighter than that of the Cadets’ line, which included two All-Americans. Of the Notre Dame starters, only Eichenlaub, at 210 pounds, weighed over 200, compared with about a half dozen on the Army side. Then, too, the Times’ pregame story also described Dorais as “stocky,” which, at 145 pounds, he was anything but.
Though he was twenty pounds heavier, Rockne was not much bigger. That Rockne was the team captain in 1913 and a starting end for the third straight year was a surprise in itself. Always quick to deprecate his athletic ability, Rockne reveled in saying that he was an abject failure when he first went out for the varsity. “I was a dub, a washout, not even good enough for the scrubs,” he would write years later. In fact, Coach Shorty Longman was impressed by the raw and tough undersized freshman’s determination and latent football talent. Longman first tried Rockne at fullback, then switched him to end, where, as a backup, he saw considerable action. Rockne then was a starter his last three seasons, first under Jack Marks as a sophomore and junior, and then under Harper in 1913. “Having Knute was like having a coach out on the field,” Harper once said.
A crowd of about 5,000, about normal for an Army home game, turned out on a raw, cold, and cloudy afternoon, to sit on rickety wooden bleachers set on an open field on the famed West Point Plain. There was no admission charge to Army games at the time, and seats were on a first-come, first-served basis. As usual, the crowd was made up almost entirely of cadets and Army fans. The days of Notre Dame’s “subway alumni” were still years away. Since almost all of Army’s opponents were from the East, the crowd was curious to see how the “Westerners” would fare against the home side. Notre Dame was so little known in the East that a writer for one New York paper referred to the “Ramblers” as being from South Bend, Illinois. What the spectators saw would be both memorable and, in a way, historic in the annals of college football.
At the start, it appeared that Army’s heavier line would overwhelm its Notre Dame counterpart. “They really pushed us around at the start,” Rockne was to say later, “but we held our own.” Indeed, Notre Dame did. The lightly regarded visitors struck first, scoring midway through the first quarter on a 42-yard touchdown pass from Dorais to Rockne. Dorais then kicked the extra point to make it 7-0, Notre Dame.
Rockne said later that a faked injury enabled him to get wide open for his touchdown catch. “I came out of one scrimmage limping and continued to limp for the next few plays, which convinced the defensive back on my side that I wasn’t worth watching,” Rockne said. “So when I started limping down the field on the touchdown play, he ignored me and I put on a burst of speed that left him flat-footed.”
In the second quarter Army scored twice after long drives to take a 13-7 lead. With Harper having instructed Dorais to “open it up,” meaning to throw more often, Dorais did just that, completing three consecutive passes to put the ball on the Army two-yard line, from where halfback Joe Pliska bolted into the end zone. Dorais’s point after then gave Notre Dame a 14-13 halftime lead. By then, to the astonishment of the hushed crowd, Dorais had completed 12 of 14 passes. Among those stunned by Notre Dame’s wide-open style of play was a reserve Army linebacker and halfback named Dwight Eisenhower, who was sidelined by an injury and did not play in the game.
Concerned that Army, with its greater depth and size, might overcome Notre Dame in the second half, Harper decided to have Dorais throw even more. “We figured it was the best chance we had,” Harper said later. “Gus could throw the ball as well as any man who lived, and I think he proved it in the game.”
As it developed, for reasons Harper never did explain, Dorais threw only one pass (it was incomplete) in the third quarter, which was scoreless but marked by a stalwart goal-line stand by Notre Dame. With first down at the Notre Dame two-yard line late in the period, Army was repulsed on two rushing attempts, after which Vernon Prichard threw a pass into the end zone that was intercepted by Dorais.
At Harper’s direction, Dorais went to the air again, with great success, in the fourth quarter, as Notre Dame stunned the Cadets by scoring three unanswered touchdowns, all of them set up by Dorais’s passes. Two of the touchdowns were scored by Eichenlaub, who gained more than 100 yards rushing, while the third was on a pass from Dorais to Pliska as the visitors prevailed, 35-13. By midway through the final period, even many of the Cadets were cheering Dorais’s heroics. Certainly no one watching the game had ever seen such a demonstration of pin-point long passing.
“Army had its usual great team, but the passes completely demoralized them,” Harper said. “By the time the game ended, we could do anything we pleased, running or passing. They didn’t know what to expect or what to do about it.” Harper also noted that Army appeared confused by Notre Dame’s style of passing, which had receivers catching passes on the run in an era when passes were almost always thrown to stationary receivers. “Our style opened up the game considerably,” Harper said, “and many schools copied it.”
In what for the time was a masterful performance, Dorais completed 14 of 17 passes for an astounding 243 yards. “A frail youth of 145 pounds, as agile as a cat and as restless as a jumping jack, Dorais shot forward
passes with accuracy . . . often as far as 30 yards away,” exulted The New York Times reporter, who was obviously not the same one who had described Dorais as “stocky” in a pregame story. He went on to say, “The Army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before Notre Dame’s great playing, and their style of old-fashioned close-line smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the Indiana collegians.”
Remarkably Notre Dame never called for a time-out during the game and used only one substitute, against twelve by Army. At that, the substitute, Art Larkin, was inserted into the game after halfback Sam Finegan broke a shoelace. With no extra football shoes, Harper had no choice but to replace Finegan with Larkin in the final minutes of the game. Harper never did say why he never let any of the other Notre Dame substitutes play in the momentous victory. As for Notre Dame’s tendency to play its starters all sixty minutes, John Voelkers, a reserve halfback on the 1913 team, said years later, “Harper was a stickler on condition. We had two or three scrimmages during the week, and they were rough. And they ended with wind sprints and then runs to the locker room. Those scrimmages were harder than the games we played.”
The Gipper Page 8