Pure Little Pitt

A team that had not won a game all season rose up and beat a team that had not lost a game all season. It was the greatest upset of 1941.

"Get your rose-colored glasses so they won't look so bad," bawled butchers in Pittsburgh's 70,000-seat stadium last week as a scant 27,000 football fans trickled in to watch Pitt play Fordham.

Sportswriters had already awarded this year's Panthers the booby prize of big-time college football: they had been beaten 6-to-0 by Purdue, 40-to-0 by Michigan, 39-to-0 by Minnesota, 27-to-7 by Duke 21-to-14 by Ohio State. In Fordham they were tackling a powerhouse that was rated the third-best college team in the U.S.

Man of the day was the Panther halfback Edgar ("Special Delivery") Jones, son of a Welsh coal miner. In the first quarter, Jones threw a daring 28-yard pass that set up one touchdown. In the last quarter, with the Rams trying desperately to tie the score, Jones intercepted a pass, streaked 30 yards for a second touchdown and a 13-to-0 victory that blasted Fordham's dreams of a Rose Bowl bid. It was the first time Fordham had failed to score since 1939.

Though Jones was the hero, Pitt's victory was sweetest for John Gabbert Bowman, its 64-year-old chancellor. When Educator Bowman became head of the university in 1921, he discovered that alumni seemed more interested in a better football team than better teachers. Alumni insisted on building a bowl seating 70,000, getting one of the best football coaches money could buy (Jock Sutherland), and getting players much the same way. In the early '30s, Pitt football teams became fabulously powerful. Rival coaches whispered that Pitt players, besides getting free tuition and books, received a salary of $65 a month. In 1937, when Pitt was invited to the Rose Bowl for the second year in a row, the team voted to decline the bid, allegedly because no personal expense money was included in the offer.

Rumor put their demands at $200 apiece.

Irked at the unfavorable press that ensued, Chancellor Bowman first engineered the dissolution of the Alumni Athletic Council, put Pitt football under faculty control. Then, three years ago, after the freshman football team went on strike be cause they were asked to work for their pay (then $48 a month), he introduced the Code Bowman. Stricter than most college codes -- even those of the Big Ten and the Big Three -- the Code Bowman stipulates that no coach may approach a high-school athlete before his entrance to Pitt, that athletes may receive no scholarship except those awarded for scholastic attainments and available to nonathletes.

In 1939 Coach Sutherland resigned,* snorting that the Code Bowman was "athletic evangelism gone wild." Pitt football, coached by cheery Charley Bowser, went into a decline.

Up to last week's amazing victory over Fordham, this season had been Pitt's worst since 1903. The victory was manna for Chancellor Bowman.

*He is now coaching the professional Brooklyn Dodgers.

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