Today's Tidbit... Stagg's Last Game At Chicago

Walter Camp was born in 1859 and died in 1925 at age 65. Amos Alonzo Stagg came into this world in 1862, a few years behind Camp, and left it in 1965 at age 102, 40 years after Camp's death.

While both were pioneers of the game, Camp never saw hash marks, option football, WWII, or the rise of the NFL. Stagg saw all those things, plus plastic helmets, two-platoon football, and the start of football's broad embrace of Black players. Camp, the father of American football, witnessed only the game's first 50+ years, while Stagg, the uncle of American football, saw the first 90 or so.

Against that backdrop, we look today at Stagg's last game as coach at the University of Chicago in 1932. Stagg arrived at the Hyde Park campus in 1892, hired by the new university's president, William Rainey Harper, who had known Stagg while a faculty member at Yale. Stagg was the first world’s full-time physical education director and coach and was the model for all that followed him. Try as he might, Stagg could not beat back the hands of time or those of university president Robert Maynard Hutchins who viewed college football as a pain in the butt that interfered with the mission of the modern university. Hutchins deemphasized Stagg's budget and then struck with the dagger, forcing Stagg to adhere to university policy and retire at age 70 following the 1932 season.