

Discover more from Football Archaeology
A Tidbit of six weeks ago focused on a cartoon by Robert Ripley, whose Believe It Or Not columns made him healthy, wealthy, and wise. Well, maybe not the healthy and wise part, but definitely wealthy. Anyway, I came across another of his football cartoons today that listed many of football’s greatest players to that point, along with a drawing of Jim Thorpe, the greatest of the great.
The list feels like a roll call of Heisman winners who played before there was a Heisman Trophy. Most were running backs, and each was a national star in his day. Yet fame is fleeting. How many of the twenty-eight names on the list do you recognize? For how many can you identify their school, position, notable feats, and first or nicknames?
Eighteen or nineteen of those names are mentioned somewhere in Football Archaeology, so work remains in revealing parts of pigskin history.
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