2000 Week 8
October 17, 2000
I really enjoyed the previous weekend of football action. Sometimes the middle of October gets pretty dull, what with tedious conference matchups like Virginia vs. Duke or Iowa vs. Nebraska.
This year the action has been non-stop from the beginning. I especially like this new trend of rematch games. This all started about 10 years ago when conferences started playing championship games. Sometimes teams that played earlier in the season got to play each other again and the rivalries were even more intense.
So I was excited to watch the Minnesota vs. Ohio rematch. The Buckeyes won the first game, up at the Hubert Horatio Hornblower Metronome, by a score of 23-17. But the Minnesota Golden Buffaloes got a chance at revenge in Columbus last week, and they paid 'em back and then some, winning 29-17. So Minnesota is now ahead on total points by 46-40, so if those teams tie for the Big Ten, Minnesota will get the Rose Bowl bid.
The other really exciting game was the matchup between Oklahoma and Kansas City State. The Okies really put on a show in that one, throwing the ball all over the field just like the old days, except this time they threw it forward, and, unlike the wishbone era, nobody fumbled these pitches.
It is kind of confusing to see a QB turn his back to the line of scrimmage, pivot, and pitch the ball out upfield 15 yards, but it seems to be working for OU. Barry Switzer must be rolling over in his grave.
Another incident which wasn't well-reported came at the end of the Mississippi State vs. Auburn game, where coaches Sherrill and Tubbieville refused to shake hands.
As I tried to explain on my halftime segment last Saturday, there's a long, strange tradition of handshakes between coaches. Unfortunately, ESPN cut me off and went to some promotion for "Monday Night Football" featuring that reporter Melissa Stark. That gal is almost as scrawny as that girl on "Bufu the Vampire Slayer", no wonder why no coaches ever talk to her, if they ever did they'd probably be force-feeding her milkshakes to get her up to 105 pounds.
As I noted on ESPN, centuries ago handshakes after battles were not common. Napoleon didn't shake hands with Wellington after Waterloo. But by the time of the Civil War handshakes had become traditional. At least until Confederate General Stonewall "Frank" Jackson shook hands with Union General James "Renta" Hooker after whipping his Yankee hiney.
One of "Hooker's girls" shook hands too, and Jackson came down with about four different types of social diseases and died soon afterward. The South ended up losing the war. That's why you won't see southern coaches shake hands with northern coaches much anymore. Since Sherrill is still considered to be a northern boy in the eyes of coaches like Tubbieville, there was no handshake last weekend.
The service academies, however, learning from the battlefield, took this warfare handshake tradition and started using it after football games early in the 20th century.
Back then the high-ranking officers often helped out with the coaching on game days, so you'd have some really famous names out there on the sideline.
Problem was, sometimes these bigwigs would start arguing on the sideline among themselves. There were some pretty big egos. I remember one Army vs. Notre Dame game in the 1930s when assistant coach General MacArthur got into a huge argument about defensive strategy with assistant coach General Nimitz. Nimitz was so upset by this that he took an assistant's job at Navy and became an admiral.
The events that led to the end of letting top brass help coach also occurred at West Point. Army was preparing for its annual battle with Princeton, then coached by auto magnate Fritz Chrysler. Chrysler, the best-selling author of "The Single Wing", was considered a budding genius in the coaching ranks, with his teams averaging almost 40 points per game.
But in this game Army shut out Princeton during the first two quarters and led 10-0. As the teams were leaving the field at halftime, Army defensive coordinator General George C. Scott Patton screamed, "Chrysler, you magnificent bastard, I READ YOUR BOOK!!!!"
Patton's loose lips sank the Army's ship that day, as Chrysler shifted strategies in the 2nd half and got his speed-reading players to leaf through "The T Formation in Football" by Newt Rockne. It turned out that Patton had not read that particular book, and Princeton breezed to victory, 28-17.
A few days later another controversy from that game came to light. One of Army's linebackers left the game complaining of a pulled groin. Coach Patton confronted him on the sideline, called him a yellow-bellied coward and threatened to put him out on kick return duty, and finally slapped the hapless Army player.
When word of this incident came to light, Patton was forced to resign from the coaching staff and the tradition of generals helping out on the sidelines came to an end.
The infamous slap did change that player's life. Tired of being subjected to abuse, he turned his life around and went into coaching himself, so he could be delivering the hits rather than taking them. Yes, the Army player who was slapped grew up to be none other than future Army and Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight.
And now you know the rest of the story.