John Heisman and The Biggest Route In College Football

00:00:33 Speaker 1: Hey, folks, it's Will Gatchell here and you're listening to Sports Dot m P. Three. I'm shaking things up from our normal format of it today and diving right into the story. I'll be sharing a single thread, one storyline of an infinite number about the man for whom the Heisman Trophy, college football's most prestigious award is named after. So sit back, relax, and enjoy. Sports are constantly evolving. Athletes are getting faster, stronger, and bigger while also becoming more skilled. Meanwhile, more coaches and teams across leagues are willingly adopting or at least tinkering with radical strategies, scouting systems, and play styles. There's also modern analytics, cutting edge scouting and drafting ideologies, and the fact that the increasing skill level of athletes actually lets coaches try more unorthodox tactics that would not have been possible in the past. Yeah, yeah, I know sports are always changing, but there is something that appears to be changing more now than in the past, and that's the sports leagues themselves. The NBA added a mid season tournament and changed the playoffs to include a play in tournament. The NFL altered kickoffs and broke up that beautifully proportional sixteen game season by adding an extra game. The PGA Tour has been beefing with the upstart Live Tour, Formula One is undergoing unprecedented car regulation changes meant to increase competition, and the UEFA Champions League is in the first season of its completely new thirty sixteen format. You get the idea, and yet American college football might just be undergoing the biggest transformation of them all. There's the groundbreaking NIL deal, short for Name, Image and Likeness, which essentially fundamentally altered college football forever and sports as we know it. Instead of under the table deals featuring bags of cash or, in Rick Patino's case, actually never mind, college athletes are now able to monetize their likeness to secure deals with sponsors. The NIL deal addresses two long standing critiques of the NCAA, a lack of monetization for athletes that are amateurs and shady illegal deals to sign star recruits. The NIL deal isn't the only change. The College Football Transfer Portal has removed their requirement for a transfer to sit out a year if they went from one D one school to another, meaning there's more money all around, more talented players swapping teams at higher rates, and a whole lot of chaos. I couldn't find a fitting analogy to compare the NIL deal to in other sports, because the entire landscape of college football was basically flipped on its head and everyone is so scrambling to figure out just how this new norm will work. It's basically the Wild West of sports. Case in point, undefeated UNLV's quarterback abruptly quitting the team and announcing he was never paid any of the one hundred thousand dollars promised to him by the team as part of an NIL sponsorship deal. That headline is bizarre on its own, but would be incomprehensible to college football fans even just a few years ago. And that's only part of the equation. There's also conference realignment, the lingering effects of COVID giving students an extra year of eligibility. Oh yeah, and the twelve team playoff format. The days of arguing over which four teams should make college football's end of season four team knockout style championship tournament are finally over. After years of debate over the flaws of the four team college football playoffs set up which first began in twenty fourteen. This year we will see the first championship bracket to feature twelve teams. Under the old system, an undefeated non major conference team like Boise State might not have even been ranked in the top four and get a shot at taking on behemoths like Bama, Clemson, or Ohio State in the playoffs. To quote the late and legendary mcmiller. However, it ain't two thousand and nine no more. It's twenty twenty four and this twelve team format means that this year is Boise State Broncos team with five wins and one loss, led by the current Heisman Trophy favorite Ashton genty could still be ranked in the top twelve and make the playoffs even with the loss the Heisman. By the way, the top individual award in college football is given to the best player of the year, as voted on by a group of more than eight hundred and fifty media representatives from across the country. It's essentially the most Valuable player award for college football. Obviously, any votes for this type of award will always be heated. I mean, look at the MVP award in other leagues. Should it go to the best player on the best team that year, or the player that was most instrumental to their team's success aka the most valuable? Or what about the player that had the most impressive stats regardless of how their team played. When you factor in the intensity of college football rivalries, the absurd gap and talent between athletes on the field, meaning the gap in scale between the best player in college football and the worst player in college football is a lot bigger than the gap between the best and worst players in the NFL, leading to absurd stat lines and the hundreds of players across more than one hundred and twenty Division one foot ball teams in the country competing for that single award, and you can begin to understand why joining the exclusive Heisman winners club means so much to the few who get in. The trophy itself, one of the most recognizable in sports depicts a helmeted player in motion, holding a ball in one arm, the other outstretched warding off any would be tacklers. And yet the man for whom the award, which is technically called the Heisman Memorial Trophy is named after, remains less recognizable, and his glory days took place long before college quarterbacks were slinging Starbucks sponsored touchdowns and fighting for one of twelve playoff spots. There are dozens of sayings that revolves something around playing to have fun, playing to win, or how winning is fun and that's why you should play. You might even remember a former coach saying some version of one of these phrases at some point in your life. A few coaches end up more on the fun side, but most end up in the winning camp. Now, a coach that wants to win isn't controversial, but sometimes coaches win by a bit too much, which doesn't make the other team's parents very happy. Here's what I mean. 00:07:18 Speaker 2: A highly successful girls high school basketball coach is now benched after critics say he ran up the score, ending with a humiliating one hundred and fifty nine point margin of victory over the outmatch deposing team. 00:07:31 Speaker 1: And here's one more, just for fun. 00:07:34 Speaker 2: High school football coach in Nasau County has become the first to be suspended for running up the score. 00:07:40 Speaker 1: Spoiler alert, this phenomenon isn't anything new. In fact, the most lopsided score in college football history happened all the way back in nineteen sixteen and makes that one hundred and sixty one to two basketball score feel kind of close by comparison. The Georgia Tech Engineers based off against the Cumberland College Bulldogs on Grant Field in Atlanta. This wasn't a typical game by any stretch of the imagination, and it almost never happened. Cumberland had discontinued its football program that year, but the team had already committed to playing the game versus Georgia Tech before the program was ended, and Cumberland would have to pay a three thousand dollars fine if it didn't play the game. That's approximately eighty six thousand dollars in today's currency. And this is where things get weird. John William Heisman, Georgia Tech's head coach at the time, paid the opposing team five hundred dollars or roughly fourteen thousand dollars in today's terms to cover their travel expenses and ensure they arrived for the game. And no, I didn't misspeak. I am talking about Georgia Tech's coach paying the other team to come to the game and arrived they did. Cumberland filled with a roster of fraternity Bros, put together by the team's student manager, would face off against Georgia Tech, a team that was in the midst of some of the greatest years in its football program's history, led by one of the game's greatest innovators ever, head coach John Heisman. Once the first whistle blew and the game began, it immediately became clear to anyone in attendance that there would be no battle from the Bros. They were going to get massacred by Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech entered the locker room at halftime, winning the game one hundred and twenty six to zero, and John Heisman walked in to give his team a speech. People might assume that there's not much more to say when your team's up one hundred twenty six to zero at halftime in a football game, but those people were not John. Instead, he said, quote, you never know what those Cumberland players have up their sleeve, So in the second half, go out and hit them clean and hit them hard. Do not let up end quote that's right. I am talking about his speech to the team at halftime up one hundred and twenty six to zero. If they had anything up those sleeves. I think that they would have shown it. The final score read Georgia Tech two hundred and twenty two Cumberland University zero. Well, technically, Georgia Tech did let up a little bit since they only scored ninety four points in the second half compared to the one hundred and twenty six they scored in the first. They didn't show any mercy to their opponents, doing just as their coach told them. One Cumberland players said, quote, one of our best plays of the game was when one of our players got the ball on a pitch out and he only lost ten yards end quote. And the guy wasn't speaking in hyperbole. Here's a few stats from the game. Cumberland turned the ball over on fifteen of their forty five plays from scrimmage. Nine of those turnovers were fumbles and the other six were interceptions. George Murphy was responsible for six of those turnovers, with four fumbles and two interceptions himself. There were also five pick sixes meaning interceptions returned for touchdowns, and two fumble returns for touchdowns. Plus, Georgia Tech ran twenty eight offensive plays and scored touchdowns on eighteen of them. It also featured one of the most bizarre plays in college football history. After scoring and taking a one hundred and five to zero lead, Georgia Tech's kicker, Jim Prios, kicked off to Cumberland University. The player set to receive the kick then fumbled the ball during the kickoff, and it got picked up by a Georgia Tech player for a touchdown. But it wasn't just any player. It was Jim Prios. Yes, the guy that kicked the ball, ran all all the way down the field, recovered the fumble and scored a touchdown on the same play. Okay, last thing, I promise. Georgia Tech also played the entire game without throwing a single pass or running a single play that received negative yards. What speaking of what you might be thinking, what motivated John to bring forth this beatdown of biblical proportions onto Cumberland University? Well, the answer is baseball. Yeah, that's right, baseball, the one with the bat. John Heisman was also the head coach of Georgia Tech's baseball team, and in the spring of nineteen fifteen, they faced off against Cumberland University in a weird reversal of score lines minus an extra zero Georgia Tech was the one to not score this time, losing the game twenty two to zero. It's hard not to immediately draw some sort of connection between the twenty two to zero and two hundred and twenty two to zero score lines. And I mean, look, if I lost to a team twenty two to zero in baseball and was able to play that team in a different sport where that roster is filled with a bunch of frat bros, I can guarantee you that I would run it up to two hundred twenty two to zero, not two hundred twenty one, not two hundred twenty three, two hundred twenty two to zero. Before you start calling John Heisman petty, there's one other aspect worth mentioning. He thought that Cumberland's baseball team had done basically the polar opposite of recruiting frat bros to fill a roster, and had hired professional baseball players to join their roster, and so because of that, he wanted to crush the school extra badly when he had the opportunity to face them for revenge a year later for John Heisman being the coach of the most lopsided win in college football history is a mere footnote on his list of accomplishments. A prolific writer and pioneer, Heisman was constantly trying to push football forward, and by the time he was whooping Cumberland, he had already achieved one of his most defining achievements, getting the forward pass legalized in nineteen oh six, even though he wouldn't have to use it when he crushed Cumberland. Despite his tremendous impact on how the sport was played, countless innovative strategies, and mentoring dozens of future legends, it wasn't until well after he retired from coaching that Heisman would create the thing that would later bear his name. Appointed as the first athletic director for the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City in nineteen thirty, officers of the group urged Heisman to establish a structure and voting system that could determine the best collegiate football player in the country. Ironically, he was actually initially opposed to the idea because it focused on the accomplishments of an individual over a team. Eventually, Heisman changed his min and created the Downtown Athletic Club Award. Starting in nineteen thirty five. Only a year later, John W. Heisman passed away from pneumonia, and club officers unanimously voted to rename the award to the Heisman Memorial Trophy in his honor. One player wins the Heisman Trophy every year, and only one player has won it more than once. I can point out that the award named after the man largely responsible for making football one of America's favorite pastimes, a man who pursued winning and team success above all else in multiple sports, doesn't really fit with his legacy. I could bring up the Heisman Curse, the superstitious belief that winning the Heisman Trophy makes that winner's team more than likely to win a championship, but that doesn't seem fair. The award is just one of John Heisman's many immense contributions to college football. John was a pioneer that always looked forward, willingly embraced change, and sought out what's next. So it's hard to imagine that he himself wouldn't be happy to see just how far the Heisman Trophy has come since nineteen thirty five. It has a legacy of its own, one that might not be defined by winning in a team success point of view, but one that's defined and redefined each and every year by every new winner, every new name, and that's a pretty damn cool legacy. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Sports dot MP three. I'm your host, Will Gatchel, and I will be back again for this season in one season finale of Sports dot MP three in two weeks time. Please make sure to hit the like or subscribe button, leave a comment and share with friends if you enjoyed it, have an amazing two weeks and see us soon. Peace,