Hillside Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia

4. Davis & Elkins Beats Navy: The Rise of College Football in the 1920s

Chapter 4 78 followings. So much support was garnered, in fact, that attendance at college football games increased by 150 percent during the 1920s.1 Major colleges were obviously enhancing their visibility through their football teams, and many small colleges began to see football as a way to gain publicity and recognition as well. The most enduring of the small colleges that rose to fame in the 1920s was Notre Dame. The small Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana, emerged as a national football power under the shrewd coaching and promotional ability of Knute Rockne. During the thirteen seasons that Rockne led the Fighting Irish, they had five undefeated seasons and a 105-12-5 record against a strong national schedule. In addition to his innovative coaching, he was able to skillfully use the new media of radio and film to enhance the team’s image. Rockne encouraged newsreel companies to film Notre Dames games, practices, and even halftime pep talks that he recreated for them after the games. He also provided numerous radio interviews and allowed the broadcasting of Norte Dame’s games. Its success playing a national schedule helped it become the team of Catholic America, with its victories symbolic of the opportunities for Catholic immigrants to become successful in America. The 1940 biopic, Knute Rockne: All-American, embedded the myths and legends of Rockne and the Notre Dame mystique in the minds of America forever.2 A few teams were able to duplicate Notre Dames success. In West Virginia three teams tried to gain national notoriety through football. * * * By the 1920s, all of the colleges in West Virginia had football teams. Three of them—WVU, West Virginia Wesleyan, and Davis & Elkins—had national aspirations. The state normal schools were evolving from twoyear teachers colleges into four-year, degree-granting institutions; this process made it difficult for them to mount a major effort in football. However , those schools did form the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Davis & Elkins Beats Navy 79 Conference (WVIAC) and played one another, and other small colleges, in very competitive games. In the late nineteen-teens, WVU had begun to strengthen its schedules by adding powerful Ivy League teams like Penn, Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton, as well as nationally recognized teams like Navy and Centre College in Kentucky. They also continued playing local rivals Pitt, Washington & Jefferson, and West Virginia Wesleyan. When WVU’s Ira Rodgers was named an All-American in 1919, and the Mountaineers handily defeated Ivy League power Princeton 25-0, they had a glimpse of national recognition in football. In 1921, WVU showed it was serious about football when it hired Clarence “Doc” Spears as its new head coach. Spears was twenty-seven years old when he took the job in 1921, but he had already been a successful college coach for four years at his alma mater, Dartmouth. Spears had been an All-American guard at Dartmouth in 1914 and 1915 and, following his graduation from the pre-medicine program in 1917, he was named head football coach. In his four years there, Spears guided the Big Green to a 21-9-1 record, playing a strong Eastern schedule. Spears’s success at Dartmouth caught the eye of WVU athletic director Harry Stansbury, who was able to lure him to Morgantown. After a 5-4-1 record in his first year, Spears’s second Mountaineer team was much more successful. The third game of the 1922 season, against a strong Pitt team, was a key moment. WVU had not beaten Pitt since 1903, but the team had lost by only one touchdown the previous year. The 1922 game, at Pitt, was tied at 6-6 with one minute to play. West Virginia was inside the Pitt forty-yard line facing fourth down and long. As a desperate measure, the Mountaineers sent Armin Mahrt back to attempt a thirty-nine-yard drop kick field goal. To the amazement of everyone , including his WVU teammates who had never seen him kick in practice, Mahrt made the kick—the only one in his WVU career—to give the Mountaineers a 9-6 victory. Mahrt was declared ineligible after the seventh game of the season because he had played the previous year at Chapter 4 80 the University of Dayton and was required to sit out one year, but the field goal with Pitt stood.3 WVU’s final game of the...