It was the fall of 1940, and Americans turned to college football for relief from the turbulent world around them. The Depression still had its grip on the nation and, across the Atlantic, the Battle of Britain raged. As war crept closer every day, the nation's first peacetime draft called Americans to the defense of the country. While the great Tom Harmon of Michigan set new standards on the gridiron, on other fields black stars struggled for the right to play. At Stanford, coaching genius Clark Shaughnessy reinvented the game and in the process engineered the greatest turnaround in the history of college football. But the team everybody was talking about was Cornell. Fueled by the most powerful offense in the country, the Big Red dominated the national rankings until, on a snowy field at Dartmouth, they eked out a win with a touchdown on the last play of the game-or did they? When it came to light that the touchdown had been scored on a grievous error by the officials, Cornell, undefeated and in the race for the national championship, faced a wrenching decision. The 1940 season was one of the most exciting on record-and one that taught America about the values that really matter.

Honor On The Line

The Fifth Down and the Spectacular 1940 College Football SeasonBy Robert J. Scott Myles A. Pocta

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Scott and Myles A. Pocta
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3208-9

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................ixINTRODUCTION............................................xiCHAPTER 1 THE CONTENDERS................................1CHAPTER 2 THE DISCOUNTED................................15CHAPTER 3 WAR CLOUDS....................................29CHAPTER 4 THE MONEY.....................................38CHAPTER 5 CONTROVERSY...................................45CHAPTER 6 HARMONIZED....................................50CHAPTER 7 DISCOUNTED NO MORE............................60CHAPTER 8 THE GENTLEMEN'S AGREEMENT.....................71CHAPTER 9 THE LEGEND....................................92CHAPTER 10 IT GETS PERSONAL.............................103CHAPTER 11 THE EAGLES SOAR..............................124CHAPTER 12 RANKINGS.....................................129CHAPTER 13 SETTLED ON THE FIELD.........................146CHAPTER 14 HONOR ON THE LINE............................168CHAPTER 15 TANGLED IN THE WEB...........................183CHAPTER 16 RESOLVED.....................................194CHAPTER 17 INTO HISTORY.................................200CHAPTER 18 THE CURTAIN COMES DOWN.......................217CHAPTER 19 ON DISTANT FIELDS............................225EPILOGUE................................................230NOTES...................................................251INDEX...................................................291

Chapter One

THE CONTENDERS

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men. —SENECA, Moral Essays

By the second week of September, while the warm days of summer dwindled to a last precious few, the leaves high on the hillsides of upstate New York had already begun to change colors. The fall of 1940, local residents later insisted, would be the most spectacular fall foliage season in many years. Already the crisp bite of autumn was in the night air, and the sumac and the goldenrod were staging their opening acts. First a random leaf would turn around the edges, then a lone tree would stand out from its neighbors still cloaked in their green summer hues. Soon the landscape would be awash in the vibrant russets of the oaks and the brilliant ochres of the poplars. On the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, overlooking Lake Cayuga, the ivy-covered walls prepared for a scintillating fashion show, when they would soon take on a brilliant scarlet hue. The leaves, it seemed, could hardly wait to burst forth. The early colors, shimmering in the late summer breeze, were a harbinger of a spectacular autumn to come.

When Coach Carl Snavely greeted the Cornell football team for the first day of fall practice on September 11, about two weeks before the rest of the student body arrived on campus for classes, he had every reason for optimism. Since his arrival in 1936, Snavely had presided over a resurgence of Cornell football that had lifted it from a winless season in 1935 under his predecessor, Gil Dobie, to a spot among the national elite by 1938, a year in which Cornell lost only one game. And 1939 had been even better. Cornell finished the season undefeated with a perfect 8-0 record and ranked fourth in the country by the Associated Press. Two rating systems, Sagarin and Litkenhous, had declared Cornell the national champion, and it counted among its victories an impressive win over the Big Ten champion Ohio State in Columbus. The team had received an informal bid to the Rose Bowl, which it declined. Its bowl policy, shared by a number of schools, including most of the schools of the Ivy League and the Big Ten, was that eight games per year was an appropriate limit. And Cornell had not lost since the 1938 Syracuse contest, an undefeated stretch of twelve games punctuated only by a Thanksgiving Day scoreless tie with Penn.

As Snavely sketched out in his mind the starting lineup for the Big Red, he had every one of the eleven spots tentatively taken by a senior, and every one of those seniors had started at least one game the year before. In 1939, the team captain, fullback Vince Eichler, had been hurt and lost for the season before the first game, and now, with him healed and ready to return, Snavely saw no opening for him among the starting eleven. Indeed, of the regular starters from the previous year, only halfback Whit Baker was missing due to graduation. The second team, tentatively, was nearly as experienced, with two juniors in an otherwise all-senior lineup. Of the projected traveling squad of 33 players, 24 were seniors. Several prognosticators were indicating that Cornell's team might be even better than the 1939 version.

But Snavely was not an optimistic man by nature, and his biggest obstacle in 1940 could have been the high expectations set by others. The success of the 1939 team, the return of veterans nearly three-deep at every position, and the nearly unanimous opinion of the experts that Cornell would be an eastern powerhouse left Snavely little room for failure. The toughest team on the schedule appeared again to be Ohio State, and the only question from detached observers seemed to be whether the Big Red could repeat its 1939 victory over the Buckeyes. Snavely would not be able to feign weakness. Too many people knew how good his team would be. Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune wrote, "Theoretically this Cornell team is one of the greatest that ever has stepped out ready made on a football field," and added, "Snavely maintains the same mournful mien that he has been so successful in projecting in the past...." Look, in its annual preseason football forecast, warned, "Carl Snavely is always moaning. Don't listen to him." Snavely was not beyond trying, however. "We ought to win at least two games this year," was his droll prediction for the season.

Snavely was unusual among major college football coaches of the day in that he was not himself a product of a major college program. Born the son of a minister in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Danville, Pennsylvania, he played his college football at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania, where he was team captain his senior year. California's Stub Allison and Colgate's Andy Kerr were, along with Snavely, among only a handful of major college coaches with small-college backgrounds. Snavely had coached at Bucknell and North Carolina before coming to Cornell in 1936. He shared with his Cornell predecessor Gil Dobie, nicknamed "Gloomy Gil", a dour outlook on life, though not Dobie's abrasive edge. His humor, only seldom coming forth, was of the driest variety. He was often tight-lipped with the press, and served as a brick wall of protection around his players. Though he often gave one-word answers to reporters hungry for a scoop, the press loved to tease him about his peculiar ways, and he seemed to take the ribbing well. He could, from time to time, open up to the point that he was generally well liked, despite his aloofness. John Kieran of the New York Times called him "an apple-a-day and early-to-bed fellow of simple rustic background and native habits." Though intense at times, often to the point of being considered unfriendly, he had outside interests, most notably golf. His friends complained of his slow play on the links, since his gridiron perfectionist tendencies carried over to the golf course.

One columnist noted that he had smiled twice during one...