Back in my army days an
oft-uttered platitude on the part of various sergeant types was “even a blind
squirrel finds a nut now and then.” They reserved this saying for those rare
occasions when a private did something right, which could then be explained away as a
simple probability not reflective of a soldier’s individual capabilities. While I
hated that particular military aphorism (just one among many), it accurately describes the
miraculous performance of the 1914 Antioch College football team, the only winner we ever
produced on the gridiron.Antioch’s recent familiarity with football has rarely extended beyond enough of an understanding of the game to protest it as a proto-fascist tool of the capitalist/imperialist establishment. However, for one year we somehow managed to figure the game out well enough to post a winning season. Actually, we took advantage of a loophole in football’s hopeless jumble of rules that allows teams to advance the ball by throwing it in a forward manner, and not having to plunge ahead exclusively on the ground. The development of the passing game greatly leveled a playing field once dominated by big bruisers, and allowed Antioch’s smaller, quicker (and, presumably, smarter) players to do their stuff as well.
Strangely enough, college football developed the forward pass, not to make the game more exciting, but just to make it safe. In 1906, following a year so brutal that numerous crippling injuries and several deaths had resulted from a style of play based entirely on size, strength, and massed humanity, the football rulemakers introduced the pass among other reforms in response to President Theodore Roosevelt’s call to make the game safer. Despite this, most college teams continued to use plays that kept the ball on the ground and guaranteed victory to the big boys and pain and suffering to smaller players.
Then, in a famous 1913 contest between the dominant West Point team and a comparatively puny squad from The University of Notre Dame, the pass came of age. Star halfback Knute Rockne, played by Pat O’Brien in the 1940 classic that forever made Ronald Reagan the Gipper, caught pass after pass, and ran wild on the West Pointers as Notre Dame defeated Army, 35-13. For the first time, passing the ball became a viable weapon, not just a trick. It also saved college football from extinction (to some perhaps a dubious event), and popularized the sport to such an extent that it nearly unseated baseball as the national pastime. A year later, the Antioch team experimented with the same tactic to compete with its larger, regional rivals.
The season to be remembered began inauspiciously, and in typical Antioch fashion, with a thumping at the hands of Muskingum College, 32-2. True to form, the boys got outmuscled on the road by a team employing what was known as “straight football,” and scorning the pass. The game gave reason for encouragement, however, as they had moved the ball through the air with, as reported in The Antiochian, “some very clever forward passes.” Their inability to score stemmed from “a week of indifferent practice, with no scrimmage,” perhaps due to the fact that the team had no coach. Lineman Mack Wallace (‘16) stepped in, however, and quickly demonstrated a talent for leadership. Described as “a royal, good fellow, popular with his mates, liked by opposing teams and admired by lovers of the football game,” Mack’s inexperienced team averaged a laughable 155 pounds, but had speed to burn, and expressed a certain willingness to follow him over a cliff.
Besides Wallace, the team starred Lowell “Red” Fess (‘15) at quarterback and his favorite receiver, halfback Gillie Funderburg (‘15). Fess, middle son of the College president and the biggest B.M.O.C. at Antioch since Hugh T. Birch, played baseball and basketball too, presided over student government and edited the college paper. Weighing in at only 146, Red possessed a “wonderful dodging ability” and the even smaller “Fundy” caught everything in sight.
They passed like mad in the second game, held at St. Mary’s College (now the University of Dayton), but the only score occurred when defensive end Byron McCracken (‘18) recovered a fumble and ran it thirty yards for the touchdown. It was the first of consecutive 7-0 victories for Antioch, for they achieved another four days later against Jacobs Business College of Dayton. This time the game was decided on a short touchdown run by Fess following a last-minute drive marked by Antioch’s rapidly developing air attack.
The team traveled to Ada for its next game against Ohio Northern University, a school accustomed to delivering crushing defeats to Antioch. While they most assuredly looked forward to dealing out a little payback, heavy rains and an even heavier ONU team combined for a 26-3 loss. The soggy field and slick ball robbed Fess and his receivers of their only advantage, and they narrowly avoided a shutout with a late field goal.
Antioch went into its first game against Wilmington College that year with two wins and two losses, and in each of the defeats had fallen to teams of superior size and strength. On paper, this one looked to be a repeat performance of the loss to Ohio Northern -- wet field, bigger team -- but that’s why they play the games. For the first time the passing of Antioch outshined an opposing giant, and Fess won it on a touchdown pass to left halfback Ode Wells (‘18), 7-6. Antioch rode the golden arm of Red Fess once again in a rematch against St. Mary’s held on Halloween, and won a nail-biter, 20-19. The game featured a spectacular 75-yard grab for a score by Gillie Funderburg as Antioch got out to a big lead, and then held off a ferocious rally by St. Mary’s at the end.
Antioch brought a modest two game winning streak into the Otterbein game and got modestly stomped, 71-0. The details of the game are quite sketchy, as The Antiochian refused to report on the debacle, but an often told (though likely fanciful) story did survive the massacre at Westerville. Supposedly, with the game well in hand, an enormous Otterbein ball carrier met Red Fess, who was playing defense at the time, at the forty yard-line. Red tried vainly to tackle him around the neck, but his disparity in size permitted the guy to carry both ball and defender halfway down the field for the score. If true (and I am skeptical), this play is nothing short of the most comical and ridiculous in college football history.
What Antioch needed after Otterbein was a little home-cookin’, which the team got against Wilmington, but early on it didn’t look good. Wilmington sprinted out to a 14-0 lead in the first half, but Antioch came alive in the fourth quarter, with a series of pass-dominated scoring drives and some uncharacteristically tough defensive work. When the gun sounded, Antioch had an 18-14 come from behind victory, and had swept the season series from a tough in-state rival.
They then lost at Heidelberg College, 34-7. Once again Antioch moved the ball impressively through the air, yet failed to score, fumbling the ball several times. Perhaps the boys had been “looking ahead,” still a common affliction among football teams, to their next game, and did not have their heads about them for this one. If ever Antioch had a mortal enemy on the football field, Wittenberg University was it, and they represented the final obstacle on the road to our first ever winning season.
The highlight of the season was always the Thanksgiving weekend game, and having Wittenberg on the schedule made the 1914 contest all the more anticipated. Antioch’s lone victory over the Lutherans way back in 1892 had become a distant memory, and student player/coach Mack Wallace’s team hungered for revenge. Playing on the hostile Wittenberg campus before “a record breaking crowd” and outsized at every position, Fess and Funderburg hooked up for six touchdown passes in the most thrilling football game in Antioch history. Besides the offensive heroics of Fess, who averaged nearly 45 yards per pass, and Funderburg’s career day, the man of the moment was Bill Nye ( ‘15, not the Science Guy), who dominated play on both sides of the line, containing one of the best guards in the state. The high-scoring affair went well past nightfall, the field bathed in an eerie glow from scores of automobile headlights, and the Antioch team upset favored Wittenberg, 49-32.
Sporting a final record of six wins and four losses, Antioch’s heretofore unheralded footballers returned to campus as conquering heroes. President Simeon Fess honored the team with a three-course banquet at his home, an exquisite Second Empire mansion at Xenia Ave. and South College St. They decorated the table to look like a football field, complete with tiny goal posts done in the team’s colors. The December Antiochian profiled each member of the historic team.
1914 was the be-all and end-all season for Antioch football. Five star players graduated the following spring, including Nye, Funderburg and Fess, and the team returned to its bumbling, ineffective ways in time for the 1915 season. Soon after a new Antioch under Arthur Morgan emerged from the shambles of the old, one with little use for its traditionally bad football teams. Bad, of course, except for the 1914 squad of blind squirrels that found a nut.