Kazmaier's Day

The game of the week was Princeton v. Cornel-Ivy League, effete East and all. Neither team had been beaten or tied. Princeton, ranked eighth in the nation, had its work cut out for it: to stop a squad of fleet backs and the deadeye passing of Cornell Quarterback Rocco Calvo, whose 61% completion record was the nation's best. Cornell, ranked No. 12, had a theoretically easier job: to concentrate on one man. But the man was triple-threat Dick Kazmaier, an All-America back last year and a veteran of Princeton's 1950 championship team.

In one of the most versatile exhibitions of passing, running, blocking and kicking ever seen, Kazmaier put on a dazzling one-man show that turned a tight first-half game into a second-half rout. He threw 17 passes, all on the run, and completed an astonishing 15 for a total of 236 yards. He carried the ball 18 times and averaged 7 yards a crack. He personally accounted for 70% of Princeton's gains. He threw three touchdown passes, ran for two more (and added two points for Cornell on a second-half safety). And, when the devastating Princeton offense was slowed down once and forced to kick, Kazmaier, of course, booted the punt.

Cornell's Last Chance. Princeton's first score came on a sustained drive of 72 yards in twelve plays, three of them bull's-eye passes by Kazmaier. Cornell bounced right back with a 34-yard touchdown pass by Calvo. But the score was Cornell's last real chance to stay in the game.

Kazmaier took complete charge and set up two more touchdowns with five more pass completions in a row. The score at half time: 20-6. In the second half, while Princeton's hard-charging defensive line smothered the Cornell backs, the Tiger single-wing offensive burst the Cornell team wide open. The final score: 53-15, for Princeton's 18th straight victory, and the longest major winning streak in the nation. Said Cornell Coach Lefty James: "Kazmaier is the greatest back I've seen since I've been coaching football. I think he's far more valuable than Tommy Harmon was to Michigan or Blanchard and Davis were to Army."

Princeton's Specialty. Princeton Coach Charley Caldwell, 1950 coach-of-the-year and likely to be the coach of 1951, is frank to admit that, as a 155-lb. freshman, Kazmaier simply looked too frail to stand the gaff of big-time football. (Last week, a senior, he weighed 171.) "But," says Caldwell, "I never saw a player of such intensity, with such determination for perfection. He drives himself so hard that he carries the rest of the team with him."

Even on the practice field, with nothing at stake, Kazmaier frets & fumes during the ten minutes of each session devoted entirely to the Kazmaier specialty, the running pass. Just last week, barely overshooting his targets, Kazmaier complained to Caldwell: "Gee, I can't do anything right." Before a game, says Caldwell, "Dick gets so wound up that we never let him handle the ball on the first play from scrimmage-and all the scouts know it."

Caldwell's Mistake. But what the scouts were not prepared for was a new Princeton play, built around Kazmaier, and designed especially for the Cornell game. In Caldwell's balanced-line, single-wing formation, Dick is always given an option on his running-pass play. If the receivers are blanketed by the defense, Kazmaier, already on the dead run, can keep right on going. The ability to pass on the run-and few passers have i-makes Kazmaier even tougher to stop than the ordinary player. For Cornell, Caldwell designed something tougher still.

Instead of having Kazmaier's run-pass play develop from a balanced line, Caldwell overshifted (i.e., unbalanced) his line and put one backfield man as a flanker on the weak side. This shift put "an almost intolerable burden on the secondary defense unless Cornell changed to a five-man line," Caldwell explains. But when Cornell did switch to a five-man line, Kazmaier, instead of passing, ran right through it.

Canny Coach Caldwell made only one mistake last week. Before the game he was rash enough to say: "If we win this one, I'll let the players throw me in the lake." An hour after the game was over, with Kazmaier firmly grasping one of Caldwell's legs. Princeton's exultant footballers hurled their happy coach into Lake Carnegie.

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