Blue and Gold Illustrated

Nov. 4, 2013 Issue

Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football

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A Military Coup Notre Dame's 35-13 victory at Army on Nov. 1, 1913, was an epic event By Lou Somogyi Note: Many of the game accounts and facts came from author Frank Maggio's 2007 book Notre Dame And The Game That Changed Football. T he United States Military Academy class of 1915 is known as "The Class The Stars Fell On." There were 164 graduates from that group, and 59 of them (36 percent) achieved the rank of general, the most of any class at West Point. Two of them — future United States President Dwight David Eisenhower and Omar Bradley — achieved five stars (only 10 in history) while leading the crucial Normandy invasion forces on D-Day, June 6, 1944. On a different and far less worldchanging field of battle 100 years ago, Nov. 1, 1913, the heavy underdog Notre Dame football team had its programchanging moment at West Point, with Eisenhower and Bradley also present. The future five-star generals both played football at West Point. A knee injury truncated Eisenhower's football career, and he could only watch from the sidelines, along with Bradley, when the unheralded Catholic school from the Midwest came to town in 1913. It was the day that "the stars fell on Notre Dame," the first "military coup" in the university's history. Notre Dame did not actually introduce the forward pass to college football in the 35-13 upset at Army. The NCAA's legalization of the forward pass occurred in 1906 and had been used effectively by many schools, most notably St. Louis University. Furthermore, first-year Notre Dame head coach Jesse Harper had studied, developed and expanded the attack during his stints at Alma and Wabash prior to arriving at Notre Dame in 1913 and honed it further, especially with quarterback Gus Dorais and wideout Knute Rockne. "We worked on those pass plays that beat Army as a team and during the regular practice season," Harper told San Francisco Examiner writer Prescott Sullivan in 1951. "It is true, Dorais and Rockne did a little of it on their own. Rockne, an end, wasn't much of a pass receiver to start with. His style, fashioned after that of the day, was to catch the ball with his arms and stomach, and I told him he'd never be a good receiver

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