 |
| Red Grange and Robert Zuppke. Photo from the Illinois Distributed Museum. |
The playoff is relatively new creation, just arriving on the
scene with the 2014 season, and coming after a few other attempts to develop a
system for crowning a national champion. Before the advent of a genuine
national championship game there were seasons in which the debate raged over
who was truly the best college football team in the nation. President Richard
Nixon even intervened in the argument to use the power and prestige of the
White House to declare the Texas Longhorns as national champions in 1969.
While there were many seasons in which the identity of the
best team in the country was up for grabs, there have been other seasons in
which there was no debate. One of these was all the way back in 1914 when the
gridiron squad from the University of Illinois dominated opponents on their way
to an undefeated season and Coach Robert Zuppke’s first national championship.
Zuppke was born in Germany and came to the United States at
the age of two. He played college football at Wisconsin and then became a high
school coach in Michigan and in Oak Park, Illinois, where he led his teams to a
pair of undefeated seasons in 1911 and 1912. The next year he was hired at the
University of Illinois for $2700 a year. His first season at Illinois was
unremarkable as the Illini finished 4-2-1 and came in fifth in the Big Ten
(then commonly known as the Western Conference). But things were about to
change.
The 1914 squad roared out of the gate on opening day,
October 3, by crushing Christian Brothers 37-0. A week later they put on an
even more dominating performance in the conference opener against Indiana,
winning 51-0. The Illini employed a new 5-4-2 defense which stymied opponents
and held them scoreless in game after game. A key element was the placement of
defenders far back from the line of scrimmage to give them an extra second to
react to plays, the position which came to be known as a “linebacker.”
The Illini were led in scoring by halfback Bart Macomber. Guard
and team Captain Ralph Chapman and end Perry Graves were consensus first-team
All-Americans that season and halfback Harold Pogue was a second-team All
American. A hallmark of Zuppke’s teams was creativity and innovation. The coach
once said that “the greatest athlete is one who can carry a nimble brain to the
place of action,” and Zuppke’s teams were known for being led by players with nimble
brains.
“The agile brain of Bob Zuppke gave more to the game of
football than most could ever hope to donate,” begins his biography from the College
Football Hall of Fame. Zuppke developed creative passing plays such as the
screen pass and the use of the pocket. He also unveiled a strange play in which
the quarterback would hand off the ball to a running back who would take a few
steps and toss it back to the QB who would then throw a long pass. This
dazzling misdirection play is known today as the “flea-flicker.”
 |
| Robert Zuppke. |
The final game of the season was played the Saturday before
Thanksgiving at Wisconsin, Zuppke’s alma mater. That day the Badgers scored
more points against Illinois than anyone else that season (nine) but once again
the Illini dominated the game, winning 24-9 to complete the perfect season.
Illinois’ 1914 team finished 7-0 and won the conference
title by a wide margin over Minnesota and Chicago. But Illinois would have to
wait almost a half century for its national title, as a national champion was
not crowned in those early days of college football. In the 1960s a publication
called the Billingsley Report began analyzing past college football seasons to
retroactively determine a national champion. Using a formula devised by its
founder, Richard Billingsley, the report established a national champion for
every season going back to the beginning of college football in 1869.
The Billingsley formula caught on and became a key part of
the NCAA’s efforts to reconstruct the history of college football and its past
national champions. It was also included as part of the ill-fated Bowl
Championship Series mathematical formula used to pick a champion in the years
before the college football playoff. Billingsley’s study determined that the
1914 Illinois squad was the best in the country, and thus awarded the Illini
their first national championship.
Even though a national champion banner would not fly over
the field for the 1915 season, Illinois fans greeted the new season in record numbers.
Where attendance in years past had come in at around 4500, fans now filled the
stands at 17,000-seat Illinois Field for a look at the Illini. In 1915 Illinois
again put together an undefeated season, but Minnesota battled them to a 6-6
tie to end up as co-champions of the conference.
A couple of down years followed for Zuppke, but in 1918
Illinois took another conference title and in 1919 (once again retroactively)
clinched its second national championship with a 6-1 season. Notably Zuppke did
all this without offering scholarships to players. “The honor of playing for
Illinois is payment enough,” he said.
Attendance continued to surge with the Illini’s success, and
Zuppke pushed for construction of a new stadium with much larger capacity. It
was out of these efforts that Memorial Stadium was born, opening its doors for
the Homecoming game in November 1923 on the south end of the U of I campus.
Zuppke and athletic director George Huff led the fundraising drive that helped
build the new stadium. It was dedicated in honor of Illinois students who lost
their lives in World War I.
With the new stadium, attendance soared. Illinois games
routinely drew as many as 60,000 fans and they did not often leave
disappointed. During that inaugural 1923 season at Memorial Stadium a new star,
Red
Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” would lead Illinois to another undefeated
season and what would later become its third national title. A fourth followed
in 1927.
 |
| 1927 U of I Championship Football Team. Photo from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum. |
He was one of the inaugural members of the college football
hall of fame when it was created in 1951. Coach Zuppke died in 1957.