Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/83706
dock defeated Baer in a bout that went on to become the centerpiece of the 2005 Russell Crowe movie "Cinderella Man." Of course, college football was differ- ent back then, especially with players having to play both offense and defense. The teams were much smaller, too, with usually about 30 or so men on the varsity squad. Freshmen were in- eligible. And there was only one post- season bowl game, the Rose Bowl, until 1935 when the Orange and Sugar bowls were created. Although Penn State had begun to de-emphasize before the results of the Carnegie study were released, other colleges criticized in the report began to curtail their athletic programs in the next several years. However, some of Penn State's prime rivals did not, including Pitt, Bucknell and Syracuse, and the results on the field showed. A losing streak against Pitt that started in 1922 lasted until 1939 with no games from 1932-34 when Penn State was in the midst of those seven nonwinning seasons. Bucknell won six in a row against the Nitttany Lions from 1927- 35, and beginning in 1931, the first season without a scholarship player, Penn State lost five in a row to Syracuse. Even a cutback on the schedule didn't help, as the Lions lost to Waynesburg, Dickinson and Muhelnberg in the dark- est stretch from 1931-37. The elimination of scholarships was not truly felt in 1928, the first year without incoming freshmen on schol- arship. But the 1928 team was already short on talent, with just seven re- turning lettermen, including Hamas and standout tackle Donn Greenshields. The team also had a new assistant coach, Bob Higgins, a two-time All- America end for the Nittany Lions in the previous decade. Since graduating, Higgins had been a head coach at two other small colleges, and the coach he had played for at Penn State, Hugo Bezdek, believed his playing and coach- ing experience would be especially help- ful in this new de-emphasis period. The turning point of the season may have been before the first game, when Greenshields was hospitalized with pneumonia. The team scored shutouts to win its first two games, but when Greenshields' illness forced him to drop out of school in mid-October, the team seemed shattered. The Lions won just one more game, lost five and tied one, and would score just one touchdown in six of their last seven games. It was Penn State's first losing season since a 2-6 record in 1926. However, the experience garnered by the sophomores and juniors on the 1928 team enabled the Nittany Lions to rebound in 1929. Five members of the last scholarship class of players had developed so well they were now the heart of the team. Earle Edwards and Mike Kaplan were already considered two of the best defensive ends in the country by sportswriters, while Red Du- vall was an outstanding interior lineman. Sportswriters also believed halfback Frank "Yutz" Diedrich and quarterback Cooper French had nearly as much all- around talent as Bezdek's All-America backs in the early 1920s: Glenn Killinger, Charlie Way and Harry Wilson. With an outstanding defense leading the way, the 1929 team won six of its first seven games and didn't allow an opponent more than seven points in a game, including two shutouts. Even in their 7-0 loss to favored NYU, the Lions outplayed the home team at Yan- kee Stadium in a game that the New York Herald-Tribune reported "the Violet was lucky to win." After NYU, Penn State upset Lafayette, Syracuse and Pennsylvania before being overwhelmed in crushing losses to once-beaten Bucknell, 27-6, and un- defeated Pitt, 20-7. The Panthers went on to earn a Rose Bowl invitation, losing to Stanford, 7-6. Many Penn State fans were stunned by what happened next. In mid-Janu- ary, Bezdek, the head coach since 1918, resigned to become the director of the new School of Physical Education and Athletics that had been in the works since 1927. That meant Bezdek was not only the academic head of the school but also the supervisor of ath- letics, and one of the requirements of the new position was that the director could not be the head coach of any team. Behind the scenes, however, several alumni factions had been urging the firing of Bezdek as head coach for dif- ferent reasons, including criticism of his on-field coaching, his obstinate and abrasive personality and – perhaps the ultimate transgression – he couldn't beat Pitt! Bezdek recommended Higgins as his successor, and the move would shape Penn State for the next 80 years. In 1936, Earle Edwards returned as an assistant, and when Higgins retired after the 1948 season he pushed heavily for Edwards to succeed him. However, the trustees gave the job to Joe Bedenk, an All-America guard in 1922 who had been an assistant since 1929. Edwards left immediately for another assistant position at Michigan State and later became the all-time winningest coach at North Carolina State. Meanwhile, after four games in 1949, Bedenk decided he would rather be an assistant and concentrate on the base- ball team, where he became a legend in the college baseball coaching world. It was then that the Penn State ad- ministration decided to go outside for a new coach, hiring Rip Engle from Brown. Engle brought along his grad- uating quarterback, Joe Paterno, in the spring of 1950, and as the saying goes, the rest is history. Higgins seemed cursed from the start. Despite the return of 10 lettermen, in- cluding the entire backfield and two starting ends, the team went into a tailspin after easily winning its first three games against inferior opponents. It didn't win another game, finishing with a 3-4-2 record that sportswriters blamed partially on injuries, player dissension and what they perceived as a sometimes indecisive coach who may have been in over his head. Things were much worse the next season, the first without a scholarship player. The 1931 team won just two of eight games, which is still the worst record in the 126-year history of Penn State football. The next season wasn't much better with a 2-5 record, blamed partially on an inconsistent field goal kicker who might have won two or three more games. Sound familiar? SEE PAST PAGE 61