Today's Tidbit...100 Years Of Football: 1946-1952
This is the fourteenth in a series looking back at “100 Years of Football,” syndicated cartoons published by Jerry Brondfield and Charles Beck in 1969. Today's version covers the period from 1946-1952.
Frank Leahy took over at Notre Dame in 1941, winning national titles in 1946, 1947, and 1948. His 1946 team famously tied Army at Yankee Stadium, 0-0, in the only college game with four Heisman winners on the rosters. Johnny Lujack and Leon Hart were the Irish Heisman winners and multi-year All-Americans.
Leahy and Notre Dame continued their dominance, ultimately finishing in 1953 with 6 undefeated seasons in his 11 years on Notre Dame’s sideline. He also sported a 107-13-9 record in that time. Despite his dominance, a more important and longer-lasting impact on the game took shape 160 miles to the northeast.
Fritz Crisler, Michigan’s coach, was a rules committee member in 1941 when unlimited substitution was made legal due to short rosters, but even he did not implement the two-platoon scheme until the 1945 Army game. It ranks with the forward pass as being among football’s most revolutionary rule changes.
Crisler and then Bennie Oosterbaan put out tremendous football teams in 1947 and 1948 using the two-platoon system that others were adopting. However, just as their platooning revolutionized football, Doak Walker of SMU was showing everyone what could be accomplished by committing to the passing game.
Bud Wilkinson of Oklahoma learned the Split T option under Don Faurot and expanded it with the Sooners, but his greatest influence was his development of the Oklahoma 5-2 defense, the first to give interior linemen two-gap responsibility and allow linebackers to roam. His 47 game win streak and 13 straight conference titles testify to the effectiveness of his methods.
Princeton and Dick Kazmaier dominated Eastern football in the early 1950s, running and throwing out of the Single Wing. As the T formation and Wing T supplanted that offense, Kazmaier won the 1950 Heisman, the last Ivy League player to do so, another marker of the end of Eastern football dominance.
Click the appropriate link for other stories in the series:
1870s | 1880s | 1890s | 1900-1905 | 1905-1910 | 1910-1915 | 1916-1922 | 1923-1926 | 1927-1930 | 1931-1935 | 1935-1939 | 1940-1946 | 1946-1952 | 1953-1963 | The Pros | Modern NFL and Post-1906 All-Stars
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Lujack completed 55% of his passes? Damn, son, that would get you benched at literally every dang school today. Times have changed.