How the legend of the Four Horsemen was born — and why it lives on 100 years later
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
“Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again.
In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.”
IT WAS A century ago today, in the early evening of Oct. 18, that Grantland Rice, the greatest sportswriter of his time or perhaps any time, rat-a-tat-tatted those words out from his typewriter high above the Polo Grounds. Barely one week earlier, the old ballpark had hosted the World Series between the New York Giants and the visiting Washington Senators. That’s why the red, white and blue bunting was still hanging from the rafters, flapping in the autumn breeze as the 44-year-old Rice pulled the final pages from the scroll of his instrument, having just authored what is still considered to be the greatest opening paragraph ever penned by an American sportswriter.
Even he, at the height of his powers, with a newspaper column that reached an astonishing 10 million readers per day, had no idea what he was about to unleash once those words began rolling off the printing presses of the New York Herald Tribune and beyond. The Tennessean-turned-New Yorker they called “Granny” was too preoccupied with processing what he had just witnessed, Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame foursome of running backs unleashing a ballet of shifts, blocks, rushes and passes upon the era’s golden college football standard, the Black Knights of West Point.
By morning, that quartet would be the United States’ most famous college athletes, with an overnight popularity that went on to rival even the most recognized faces of the 1920s, the decade that birthed the very idea of American celebrity, from Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey to Charles Lindbergh and Rudolph Valentino, with a sizable accidental assist from that last guy.
“I have often wondered what would have happened, how would I have spent all these years, had those words not been written about us,” confessed Four Horseman Elmer Layden during an interview in 1947, after retiring as the first commissioner of the NFL. “Do any of us become the coaches that we did? Do the four of us remain the great friends that we are? Does our beloved Notre Dame become the football team that it is and does Rock become the legend he was? I don’t know. And I am thankful to not know. All because of those words.”
Before they were Horsemen
OUTLINED AGAINST A very dark, aurora borealis-tinted sky, those who love the Four Horsemen rode again, in SUVs and Ubers to the Brown County Library in downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin. There, in an auditorium packed with, well, Packers, on Tuesday night, Oct. 8, 2024, the people of Titletown were learning about one of their own.
“Before he was Sleepy Joe Crowley, as Knute Rockne called him in jest, or a Four Horseman of Notre Dame, he was just Jimmy from Green Bay,” writer Jim Lefebvre, author of “Loyal Sons,” a book with a cover adorned with the famous Four Horsemen photograph, told the theater full of enthusiasts. Like Lefebvre himself, the room was mostly town natives. “Crowley learned the game of football in a city park that we all know, only a few blocks from where we are sitting right now.”
Crowley — he of the good looks, sharp wit and 162-pound frame — starred in every sport but was indoctrinated into the finer points of carrying the pigskin out of the T formation by his coach at Green Bay East High, Curly Lambeau. Yes, that Curly Lambeau, who in the early 1920s was holding down the dual head-coaching jobs at East and for a city-based semipro team he’d founded in 1919 and persuaded his meat-packing boss to sponsor. He called them the Green Bay Packers.
Lambeau learned the ways of the shifty Notre Dame Box offense from its originator, having played one season in the Fighting Irish backfield in 1918, Rockne’s first year at the helm in South Bend. Curly shared that backfield with George Gipp before health issues and homesickness sent Lambeau back home to Green Bay. When it was time for Crowley, a good Wisconsin Catholic boy, to attend college, Lambeau called his former coach and told him to give the kid a chance.
A similar call had come in from Davenport, Iowa. Walter Halas, brother of Chicago Bears godfather George, was Rockne’s top talent scout, joining the Notre Dame staff from Davenport Central High, and he told Rockne they had to bring in his star fullback, Elmer Layden. Layden stayed on at Notre Dame despite homesickness so awful that when Rockne said, “Don’t worry. I’ve never had a freshman quit,” teenage Layden replied, “Then I’m about to help you break another football record.”
He was joined by another bulldog of a back, but one who required no convincing to matriculate into northern Indiana. Don Miller’s three older brothers had already played for the Irish, including Harry “Red” Miller, Notre Dame’s first All-American. “I didn’t even know there were other places to go to college,” Miller joked years later.
The final future Horseman was also their anchor, athletically and spiritually. Harry Stuhldreher wasn’t big physically. During a Rockne-demanded weigh-in, Stuhldreher said of the smallish four-man backfield, “I don’t know who is more embarrassed, us or the scales.” He hailed from the only corner of the nation more football-crazy than Green Bay, having grown up watching and then playing on the vicious football field-turned-fighting rings of northeastern Ohio. That’s where the town teams of Canton and Stuhldreher’s hometown of Massillon held contests so infamously violent that Rice himself came from New York to cover them, writing: “But no fight ever fought before beneath the shining sun, will be like that when Canton’s team lines up with Massillon.”
In 1915, Rockne, fresh out of Notre Dame as a player, signed with the Massillon Tigers as an end. Over the next two seasons he went head to head with Jim Thorpe and his Canton Bulldogs. A local teenager took to Rockne and helped him carry his gear to and from the stadium. It was Harry Stuhldreher. A few years later, he was Rockne’s QB at Notre Dame.
As freshmen in 1921, the foursome never played together. As sophomores in 1922, Miller broke into the lineup, but the other three had to wait another year to become regulars. As juniors, they became a shape-shifting yardage machine. They lined up in the T formation, and, when the signal was given, they moved into the Notre Dame Shift. To the right, Crowley was left half (tailback), Miller was right (wingback), Stuhldreher would tuck in behind the guard and tackle, while Layden lined up behind the tackle. To the left, they’d do the same but to the other side. The snap could go directly to any of them, and they might run, pitch or pass, all while blocking to perfection.
“We don’t need big backs,” the always-clever Rockne would say, “because we don’t make big holes.”
They lost only two games together in two years, both to Nebraska, as they ran into 1924.
The fifth Horseman
OUTLINED AGAINST A perfectly cloudless Southern California blue sky, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery seems to go on indeed forever. There’s a statue of Johnny Ramone, a pyramid, a granite couch covered with bronze likenesses of the departed’s beloved dogs, and headstones for Cecil B. DeMille and Mickey Rooney. Hidden deep within a mausoleum is the crypt — No. 1,205 to be exact — of Rudolph Valentino, one of the biggest stars of silent film.
On a flawless day this past August, a religious tract was stuffed into one of the flower holders. It is a story taken from the Book of Revelation, Chapter 6, and had been the inspiration behind the million-dollar film that turned Valentino into a megastar, 1921’s “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
George Strickler, a devotee of that film, did not play football. He was also not raised in some Midwestern semipro-powered gridiron hotbed. He was from South Bend, having spent his entire life on the Notre Dame campus, where his father ran the college slaughterhouse. This feels like a good spot to illustrate exactly what that college was like at the time, and it wasn’t much.
The school was founded in 1842 by a 28-year-old French priest who had come into 524 frozen acres in the middle of what was known as the Indiana mission fields. Four decades later, as the soon-to-be Four Horsemen ran their drills ahead of the 1924 season, literally beneath the shadow of the Golden Dome, the student body was around 2,500 and the campus was little more than a handful of buildings surrounded by farms and bordered by 15,000-seat Cartier Field.
The school continued to grow despite a seething national resistance to all things Irish Catholic. That very spring, on May 17, 1924, thousands of white-hooded Ku Klux Klansman had marched on tiny South Bend with the intent of sending a streak of fear through the de facto geographic center of the American Catholic church, particularly the young men being educated as future leaders of government and industry.
Rockne and his boss, Notre Dame president Father Matthew Walsh, worked together to keep the campus and town from coming unglued. They knew their community and Catholics in America as a whole needed a rallying point, some sort of inspiration. And they both knew their 1924 football team could be great enough to step into that role.
Rockne’s football mind was outmatched only by his promotional talents. And he realized early on that his little school with the little stadium in the little town in the Indiana wilderness would never have the press coverage of the big-city teams. So he took his players on the road to those big cities, and when they got there, he charmed those metropolitan writers and reporters, chief among them Grantland Rice.
As part of that push, Rockne invented what is now known as the sports information department. Each season he would hire a student publicist, a kid who would write for the local newspaper but also get stories and ideas about the Fighting Irish sent out over Western Union and Postal Telegraph lines. It was a sweet gig. It paid good money (but only per amazing story) and it included a coveted traveling spot with the team as it jumped on trains for Chicago; Pittsburgh; Princeton, New Jersey; Madison, Wisconsin; and New York.
In 1924, that job belonged to the 20-year-old Strickler. On Wednesday, Oct. 15, on the eve of a train ride to New York, where 2-0 Notre Dame would play 2-0 Army at the Polo Grounds, Strickler and a handful of Irish players slipped into Washington Hall, where the college would show second-run movies. On this night, the feature was Rudolph Valentino in “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
The 2½-hour film concluded with a mourning father standing graveside and looking to the sky, where he witnessed famine, pestilence, destruction and death ride off into the heavens. As he sees this, a man speaks to him, “Peace has come. But the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity, stirring unrest in the world, until all hatred is dead and only love reigns in the heart of mankind.”
Strickler was flabbergasted. The next day, the college student thought about the film nonstop, throughout the entire 21-hour, 700-mile train ride to New York.
The power of suggestion
OUTLINED AGAINST A sunburst orange sky as day breaks through the Polo Grounds Towers, all that remains of the ballpark that a century ago had just been expanded is a rusted plaque affixed to the northwestern corner of the apartment buildings that overlook the Harlem River. It is the location of the home plate that was trotted upon by Giants, Yankees and Mets. There is no mention of the Oct. 18, 1924, football game between Notre Dame and Army. Only baseball.
And yet it must be noted that during that week, Rice chose not to travel to Washington, D.C., for Game 7 of the World Series. He was too excited for the upcoming football game. So was the entire city of New York, egged on by Rice and his fellow press box hype experts, and coverage of the game on the still-new commercial radio, which was a couple of weeks shy of its fourth birthday. By game day, 55,000 tickets were sold, thanks to the thousands of New Yorker Notre Dame devotees known as the “Subway Alumni,” Catholics who had latched onto the little college from Indiana as their flagship football team … exactly as Rockne and Father Walsh had hoped.
On the Army sideline stood head coach Cap McEwan, who had played against Rockne when the Knights faced off with Notre Dame in 1913, the first of the schools’ 51 meetings. Alongside McEwan was assistant coach Robert Neyland, aka the Legend Tennessee’s Stadium is Named For.
The game was a brawl. Notre Dame center Adam Walsh broke both hands but kept playing. Army failed to gain a first down in the first half. The Irish managed only one touchdown, a 1-yard dive from Layden, but Stuhldreher missed the PAT. Though they led only 6-0 at halftime, the Fighting Irish had thrilled the crowd with their running precision, routinely breaking off long runs that seemed to launch the ball carrier spring-loaded from out of a rugby scrum of bodies.
During the halftime break, the sportswriters of New York gathered in a corner to smoke, sip and discuss. As always, the center of gravity was Rice, who sang in his Murfreesboro, Tennessee, lilt about the scalpel precision of the Notre Dame Box and the four young men at the corners of that box. (Oh, by the way, these same young men were immediately turning around and playing the stonewall defense that had Army completely befuddled. Remember, platoon football and player substitutions were still two decades away.)
Eavesdropping on the beat writer breakdowns was George Strickler, doing just what Rockne had instructed. He listened, he took the temperature of the press box and then, if the moment seemed right, he would perhaps nudge that temperature up or down in the Irish’s favor.
“Yeah,” Strickler interjected after hearing yet another Grantland Rice mention of Notre Dame’s backfield foursome. “They’re just like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!”
‘Dad, I need four horses …’
OUTLINED AGAINST A very gray October Indiana sky, four ice truck tow horses had no idea they were about to become famous. But not nearly as famous as the kids climbing atop their bulky backs.
Notre Dame had won the day, beating Army by a score of 13-7, and won over a city in the process. Back in South Bend, where there was no radio coverage, thousands of fans packed gymnasiums to watch scoreboard operators move a light bulb along a “football field” as they tracked the game by newswire. The contest swallowed up so much energy that a second threatened Klan march scheduled to take place that day had fizzled out.
By the time their train made it back to Indiana to a greeting party of thousands complete with a marching band, the Fighting Irish were also winning over an increasingly celebrity-obsessed nation. Early Sunday morning, as the bandaged-up victors were headed for the train station, Strickler had stopped at a newsstand and snatched up copies of all the New York newspapers. There, on the very front page of the New York Herald Tribune, he saw the byline of Grantland Rice. Then he read the first paragraph. “Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. …”
He did it! Granny actually did it!
Moments before the Irish train churned west, Strickler found a telegraph station and excitedly sent a message ahead to his father in South Bend. He needed four horses, with saddles, on the Notre Dame campus that Monday. Stop.
“I wasn’t so sure about that and none of us were,” Don Miller admitted in 1949, at a 25th anniversary celebration of the 1924 season. “George came and pulled us out of practice, Rock came with us, and there were four horses lined up next to the practice field. They were no thoroughbreds, either. These were workhorses and we weren’t so sure they wanted anyone on them, let alone four football players in helmets and pads.”
But there they were. College kids without any equestrian experience to speak of, except for Stuhldreher, who had handled a bridle while doing deliveries for his father’s store, all understandably nervous. A head coach who was all about publicity but was also all about not having his starting backfield suddenly on their backs, thrown off their mounts. The helmets. The chunky outfits. Holding onto footballs instead of holding onto the reins. The whole moment was so uneasy. That’s why it lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for a local commercial photographer to snap a couple of shots, before the Four Horsemen got the hell off their horses.
As they returned to practice, Strickler went to work sending his photo out onto the wires, eager to see if any papers might pick it up. Every pic published meant a little pocket money for the kid. He had no idea he had just conjured up perhaps the most famous publicity photograph in the history of college football.
When the team returned east the following weekend to face powerhouse Princeton, they immediately noticed a change in chatter whenever the train stopped for coal, water and passengers. Now there were people waiting at every station. And they weren’t asking, “Are you the Notre Dame football team?” They wanted to know where they could see the Four Horsemen.
Notre Dame beat the Tigers 12-0. Then they drubbed Georgia Tech, Wisconsin and finally exorcized their Nebraska demons. Everywhere they went, they won. And everywhere they went, different versions of the Subway Alumni were waiting. They finished the season undefeated, earning an invitation to the 1925 Rose Bowl, only the third edition of the game played in the still-new-at-the-time stadium that bears its name, to face Stanford.
Rockne, always promoting, took the Irish on the long route to Pasadena. Like, really, really long. The team traveled south to New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee; Houston; El Paso, Texas; Tucson, Arizona; and, finally, Los Angeles. At every stop, people clamored to see the Horsemen, holding up newspapers featuring Strickler’s photo. Part joke, part tribute, the other members of Notre Dame’s 11 first-stringers began referring to themselves as the Seven Mules.
On New Year’s Day, the Irish ran past Pop Warner’s Stanford team 27-10. It was a big moment for a program that had been unable to schedule any California teams to that point. The official reason was “low academic standards.” To Rockne that was code for “We don’t play Catholics.”
In 1926, the rivalry with USC began.
The train ride home for Notre Dame’s first national championship team made the trip out west seem like a walk to the store. From Hollywood and San Francisco to Salt Lake City and Cheyenne, Wyoming, revelers in every city shouted cheers about the Four Horsemen, sang songs about the Four Horsemen and asked whether their favorite local college might one day play against the alma mater of the Four Horsemen. The team was gone so long, practically the entire month of January, that angry administrators declared Notre Dame would no longer participate in bowl games because it kept the players out of too many classes. That self-imposed ban lasted until 1970. But the team added seven more national titles during that span.
“As much as I wondered about how different life would have been without Mr. Rice’s story,” Layden continued in that 1947 radio interview, “I have also wondered what would have happened had we not held up our end of the bargain and won all of our games. Even one loss, and I wonder, would anyone know who the Four Horsemen are today?”
‘But the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity…’
OUTLINED AGAINST A hard winter white sky, American GIs were pinned down somewhere in the forests of Western Europe. It was early 1945, and the troops were in particular danger because the Nazis had deciphered their latest codes and were infiltrating the confused U.S. platoons one at a time. So the officers devised a foolproof plan of friendly identification, a question that every single true-blooded American would be able to answer, even if they hadn’t been told of the new protocol.
What team did the Four Horsemen play for?
The story was told this summer in South Bend, where a Stuhldreher was once again quarterbacking activities at Notre Dame. But it wasn’t Harry. It was Mike, great-nephew of the Fighting Irish great and member of Notre Dame’s Class of 1991, bellied up to the bar at the Morris Inn, the on-campus hotel. He was in town with other parents of Notre Dame students as part of the annual family volunteer camp. Every year, the university bookstore sells an item titled “The Shirt” and every Irish fan scrambles to get one. This year it featured the Four Horsemen.
Mike’s time as a student coincided with the resurgence of modern Irish football success. Lou Holtz was the head coach. Tim Brown won the school’s seventh Heisman Trophy. Catholics vs. Convicts. A natty. Rudy. The nation was digging back into the echoes.
“I suppose there are a lot of Crowleys and Laydens who can claim they are related to a Four Horseman. If you’re a Miller, they may or may not believe you. But there’s no faking it when your name is Stuhldreher,” he said, laughing. “When people know, they know. When I was a student, people knew, and when I am on campus, like this summer, I get Four Horsemen questions. I love it. As the years go on, you get it less and less. But now, with the 100th anniversary, there’s definitely been an uptick.”
The descendants of Jim Crowley can be spotted frequently strolling through the freshly refurbished Crowley Park in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which features a monument and plaque commemorating its football ace namesake. Scranton is where Jim ultimately landed as a television station manager, following a long coaching career that included time as head coach at Michigan State and Fordham, where he and his right-hand assistant — and future Notre Dame head coach — Frank Leahy coached the legendary “Seven Blocks of Granite” line that included a youngster named Vince Lombardi. Crowley died in 1986.
Don Miller served as an assistant coach at Georgia Tech and Ohio State before practicing law in Cleveland. In 1925, his first year as a coach and first year out of South Bend, his Ramblin’ Wreck hosted Notre Dame in Atlanta and lost to Rockne’s team 13-0 at Grant Field. This Friday, only 1 mile away, the College Football Hall of Fame, into which all Four Horsemen were inducted, will host a ceremony commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Notre Dame-Army game. (On Saturday, the Irish play Tech in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.) Miller died in 1979.
Elmer Layden was head coach at three schools, including Notre Dame, where he posted 47 wins in seven seasons. He was asked to serve as the first NFL commissioner in 1941, and among his first hires was a publicity director for the burgeoning league, George Strickler. Among his challenges was navigating the formation of a rival professional football organization, the All-American Football League. The AAFL’s commissioner? Sleepy Jim Crowley. Layden died in 1973.
The Four Horsemen gathered whenever they could over the years. In 1926, Stuhldreher and Layden were teammates on the short-lived Brooklyn Horsemen of the American Football League. All four played together one last time on Dec. 14, 1930, at the Polo Grounds, as part of a Notre Dame alumni team organized to play a charity exhibition against the New York Giants. More than 50,000 tickets were sold, with newspaper ads declaring: SEE THE FOUR HORSEMEN RIDE AGAIN.
They were back together only four months later, at Rockne’s funeral after he was killed in a Kansas plane crash, and they also served as honorary pallbearers for Grantland Rice in 1954. They reunited for anniversaries of the 1924 season, various speaking engagements and private dinners. In 1965, when Harry Stuhldreher became the first of them to die, it was Layden who wrote that the Horsemen had been “left without a quarterback in every sense of the word.”
Next month, the families of the Four Horsemen will ride again, into New York and into another ballpark. On Nov. 23, Notre Dame and Army will square off at Yankee Stadium, just over the Harlem River and within view of the Polo Grounds site. The Black Knights are currently undefeated. The Irish and their lone loss are knocking on the door of the top 10. That means their late-season contest might not merely be for bragging rights or Horsemen nostalgia but for a spot in the College Football Playoff.
“The Stuhldrehers will be there, coming into town 39 strong, multiple generations,” reports Mike, quarterback of the invasion. He’s hoping his family can meet up with the extended families of the other three Horsemen. “It’s always amazing to watch the Irish play, to see what the program has become. But it will be particularly emotional to see them in New York that night, in a huge game, thinking about how it all started. Not just Notre Dame or football, but Catholics in America. I can’t speak to whether or not people will always remember the Four Horsemen. But it’s been 100 years and here we are talking about them. But what they started? I don’t think that’s ever stopping.”
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Bill Connelly
Editor’s note: On Sept. 2, ESPN writer Bill Connelly’s book “Forward Progress: The Definitive Guide to the Future of College Football” will be released. This edited excerpt looks at whether the sport needs central leadership like professional leagues.
In 1920, professional baseball was in crisis. The Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox — star outfielder “Shoeless Joe” Jackson; co-aces Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams; four other starters (first baseman Chick Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver, and outfielder Happy Felsch); and a key backup infielder (Fred McMullin) — were indicted and accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, had, along with allegations of other fixed games, shaken the sport to its core. Baseball had been governed by a National Commission consisting of three parties with extreme self-interest: National League president John Heydler, American League president Ban Johnson, and Garry Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds team that had beaten the White Sox in the World Series. Its leadership proved lacking in this moment, and its questionable independence severely damaged perceptions. Herrmann resigned from the commission in 1920, and the commissioners couldn’t agree on a new third member.
In early October 1920, days before the start of that season’s World Series between the Brooklyn Robins and Cleveland Indians, leaders of the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, New York Giants, and Pittsburgh Pirates proposed a tribunal of, in the words of the New York Times, “three of America’s biggest men, with absolute power over both major and minor leagues.” A letter sent to every major and minor baseball club said, “If baseball is to continue to exist as our national game (and it will) it must be with the recognition on the part of club owners and players that the game itself belongs to the American people, and not to either owners or players.”
The letter stated that “the present deplorable condition in baseball has been brought about by the lack of complete supervisory control of professional baseball,” that “the only cure for such condition is by having at the head of baseball men in no wise connected with baseball who are so prominent and representative among the American people that not a breath of suspicion could be ever reflected.” It concluded, “The practical operation of this agreement would be the selection of three men of such unquestionable reputation and standing in fields other than baseball that the mere knowledge of their control of baseball, in itself, would insure that the public interests would first be served, and that, therefore, as a natural sequence, all existing evils would disappear.” This tribunal would have the power to punish players, strip owners of their franchises, “establish a proper relationship between minor leagues and major leagues,” you name it.
This proposal, first discussed by Cubs shareholder A.D. Lasker, became known as the Lasker Plan. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of clubs — particularly, those in the American League still loyal to the strong-willed Johnson — initially balked at the idea, to the point where the National League considered beginning an entirely new league with a few insurrectionist AL clubs, including the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. But all necessary parties eventually came to the table, and figures as grand as former president William Howard Taft, General John J. Pershing and former treasury secretary William G. McAdoo were under discussion for the tribunal.
The search pretty quickly began to revolve around a single figure: Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. A known baseball fan and an occasional showman on the bench, the 54-year-old Landis was known primarily for his antitrust judgment against Standard Oil, issuing the corporation a $29.2 million fine in 1907, equivalent to almost $1 billion today. (The U.S. Court of Appeals would eventually strike down the verdict.) He was regarded as tough but thoughtful, a grand figure but a supporter of the everyman. He would go on to serve as the sport’s first commissioner, a one-man tribunal, until his death in 1944.
Landis proved ruthless and uncompromising when he felt he needed to be. Despite all of the indicted “Black Sox” being acquitted in a criminal trial, Landis still banned them from baseball for life, stating, “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing ball games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.” For better or worse, he stuck to that decision through the years despite both legal and emotional appeals.
Landis wasn’t a ruthless traditionalist, however. The All-Star Game was created under his watch in the early 1930s and proved to be a big hit, and while he didn’t seem to approve of the development of farm systems, in which minor league clubs developed affiliations with major league clubs to develop and promote their talent through the ranks, he also didn’t stop it, choosing only to step in on a case-by-case basis. He was far from infallible — you can certainly find inconsistency in some of his decisions, and Lord knows baseball didn’t exactly speed toward integration under his watch. (Jackie Robinson’s major league debut came two and a half years after Landis’ death. He might not have stopped that from happening had he still been in charge, but he certainly wasn’t pushing owners to become more progressive in this regard.) But he provided as steady a hand as possible, and both the trust in and popularity of baseball grew under his watch.
Absolute power? A dictatorial hand over the sport you’ve loved since childhood? Man, sign me up. That sounds amazing. Sure, I’ve never issued a billion-dollar fine to anyone, and my strongest bona fides regarding my general incorruptibility probably stem from the time I went on “The Paul Finebaum Show” and proclaimed that Cincinnati should have ranked higher than the SEC’s Texas A&M in the 2020 College Football Playoff rankings. But that qualifies as speaking truth to power, right?
In 2017, while at SB Nation, I indeed decided to run for college football commissioner. Granted, there was no such election and no such position, but it felt like a good use of time all the same. “College football needs someone to make long-term decisions,” I wrote. “College football needs someone who can reflect the interest of programs at every level: Alabama, Alabama-Birmingham, North Alabama, and all.”
There was an explosion of commish talk in 2016, thanks to a number of issues like College Football Playoff selections, conference schedules (mainly that some conferences play eight conference games and others play nine), and high school satellite camps, an issue that was all the rage for a few months and then vanished from consciousness altogether, to the point where I don’t even feel the need to define it here. “There needs to be somebody that looks out for what’s best for the game,” Alabama‘s Nick Saban said at the time, “not what’s best for the Big Ten or what’s best for the SEC or what’s best for Jim Harbaugh, but what’s best for the game of college football — the integrity of the game, the coaches, the players, and the people that play it. That’s bigger than all of this.” (Harbaugh was at the center of the satellite camp issue that I’m still not going to explain further.) But even with Saban’s high-visibility comments, nothing came of it. Nothing ever comes of it.
Through the decades the only thing everyone has seemingly agreed on in this sport is the need for a commissioner figure.
“Charley Trippi, one of the all-time greats in college and professional football … said college football today needs a national commissioner to direct the game on a national basis. Trippi … charged that the National Collegiate Athletic Association is ‘controlled by the Big Ten.’ He said he felt no conference in the nation should have any kind of monopoly in the game.” — Macon News, 1958
“You don’t think we need a commissioner and a set of rules to make things even? We’re the only sport in America that doesn’t have the same set of rules for everybody that plays … Everybody goes to their own neighborhood and makes their own little rules.” — Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher, 2016
“I think there’s a perception with the public that perhaps college football doesn’t have its act together because there are so many different entities pulling in different directions.” — former Baylor head coach Grant Teaff, 1994
“… If you’re biased by a specific conference or if you’re impacted by making all your decisions based on revenue and earnings, then we’re never going to get to a good place.” — Penn State head coach James Franklin, 2024
“What this business needs is a commissioner who has the best interest of the game in mind. There needs to be somebody who creates a structure in which people just don’t cannibalize each other. … The NCAA president doesn’t have any legal authority to do much, in his defense, because they’ve given away that authority over the course of the last 60 years.” — West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck, 2011
“I think we need to have a … commissioner. I think football should be separate from the other sports. Just because our school is leaving to go to the Big Ten in football … our softball team should be playing Arizona in softball. Our basketball team should be playing Arizona in basketball. … And they’ll say, well, how do you do that? Well, Notre Dame’s independent in football, and they’re in a conference in everything else. I think we should all be independent in football. You can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Power 5, and you can have a 64-team conference that’s in the Group of 5, and we separate, and we play each other. You can have the West Coast teams, and every year we play seven games against the West Coast teams and then we play the East — we play Syracuse, Boston College, Pitt, West Virginia, Virginia — and then the next year you play against the South while you still play your seven teams. You play a seven-game schedule, you play four against another conference opponent, division opponent, and you can always play against one Mountain West team every year so we can still keep those rivalries going. … But I think if you went together collectively, as a group, and said there’s 132 teams and we all share the same TV contract, so that the Mountain West doesn’t have one and the Sun Belt doesn’t have another and the SEC another, that we all go together, that’s a lot of games, and there’s a lot of people in the TV world that would go through it. … But I think if we still do the same and take all that money … that money now needs to be shared with the student-athletes, and there needs to be revenue sharing, and the players should get paid, and you get rid of [NIL], and the schools should be paying the players because the players are what the product is. And the fact that they don’t get paid is really the biggest travesty. Not that I’ve thought about it.” — UCLA head coach Chip Kelly, 2023
Kelly’s spiel, spoken at a pace faster than his fastest old Oregon offense at a press conference before UCLA’s LA Bowl appearance, made waves. In a way, he was basically calling for a College Football Association of sorts, an all-of-FBS league that could negotiate a huge television contract to be divvied out in a fair manner. In a perfect world, maybe that’s what would exist. But as with any other “In a perfect world …” construct, the real world prevailed instead.
The waves continued after Kelly’s comments. In January 2024, Nick Saban retired in part because he was frustrated with all the different demands of the NIL era. In February, Saban told ESPN’s Chris Low, “If my voice can bring about some meaningful change, I want to help any way I can, because I love the players, and I love college football. What we have now is not college football — not college football as we know it. You hear somebody use the word ‘student-athlete.’ That doesn’t exist.” A company man until the end, Saban suggested that either SEC commissioner Greg Sankey or Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne might make a good commissioner for the sport. (“They would be more qualified than I am. They’re in it every day and know all the issues.”) In December 2024, Penn State head coach James Franklin expressed frustration with the state of the college football calendar and the fact that his backup quarterback, Beau Pribula, felt he needed to hop into the transfer portal before the Nittany Lions’ College Football Playoff journey began to make sure he had a solid home for the winter semester. His solution? “Let’s get a commissioner of college football that is waking up every single morning and going to bed every single night making decisions that’s in the best interest of college football. I think Nick Saban would be the obvious choice if we made that decision.”
Did anything come of that? Of course not. But that just means I’m still a candidate, right?
Back in 2017, my campaign platform consisted of nine pillars intended to maximize both the athlete’s experience and the fan’s enjoyment of the sport:
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A student-athlete bill of rights to ensure proper health care options, guaranteed undergraduate scholarships, and freer transfer rules.
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A modernized definition of amateurism that allowed players to profit off of their name, image, and likeness.
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The return of the EA Sports video game. (Hey, you have to throw some red meat to the base, right?)
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A fairer recruiting landscape that allowed players easier releases from their letters of intent if a coach left and explored changes to signing periods and regulations surrounding official visits and other recruiting rules.
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A system of promotion and relegation that incorporates actual merit into the sport’s power structure. (This one’s always on my mind.)
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An expanded playoff.
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Ditching unequal conference divisions in favor of a system of permanent rivalries and a larger rotation of opponents.
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Increasing creativity and flexibility in nonconference scheduling. (One idea: a “BracketBuster Saturday” in November in which everyone in FBS gets paired off based on in-season results.)
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Changes in clock rules that stemmed the recent increases in average game times, which had reached nearly three and a half hours per game.
It’s been about eight years since I put that list together, and damned if I haven’t gotten a lot of what I wanted: We’ve seen either partial or complete success for items No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 9. That’s a hell of a success rate, especially considering how hard it is to actually institute change in this sport at times. But it feels like a lot of the forces I was responding to at the time — mainly, massive disorganization within the sport and an ever-increasing imbalance between haves and have-nots — have only gotten worse since 2017. Why? BECAUSE WE STILL HAVE NO COMMISSIONER! Any change that could have produced progressive outcomes only made the imbalance worse because when no one’s in charge, that really means that the most powerful and self-interested figures in the sport are in charge. And their only goal is to reinforce the power structure.
“I can’t tell you how many times I heard [former Big Ten commissioner] Jim Delany say two things,” former Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson said. “One: ‘You didn’t bring the Rose Bowl, or the Orange Bowl, or the Sugar Bowl, or the Fiesta Bowl, so [you get] whatever we decide you are worthy of.’ He also used to say, ‘The world cares more about 6-6 Michigan than 12-0 Utah, and until you realize and understand that and accept that …’ and I got it. But we always seemed to find a way to work together for the good of the cause, the good of the overall enterprise. Great, you started the Rose Bowl, but was it all bad that TCU beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl [in 2011]? That Utah beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl [in 2009]? Did the enterprise come crumbling down? No. We’re trying to look at the good of the cause and what’s best for the second most popular sport out there, and what I always had in the back of my mind trying to protect was how we could make sure that people give a damn about college football.”
For somewhere between 10 and 30 years, Delany was the sport’s most powerful figure. He kick-started multiple runs of conference realignment, and the Big Ten’s creation of the Big Ten Network turned out to be a game-changer. But college football’s most powerful figure was also doing everything he could to keep other conferences’ ambitions in check, to almost limit the sport’s potential growth in other areas of the country.
“When people talk about wanting a commissioner, what they’re really asking for is someone whose job it is to look out for the betterment of the sport as a whole,” said NBC Sports’ Nicole Auerbach. “I know it sounds really pollyannaish and idealistic, but you don’t have someone whose job it is to look out for the greater good. So you have competing interests. You have an NCAA president who has certain motivations and goals — and major college football is not even under their purview. And then you have all these different commissioners, and it makes a lot of sense that we ended up in a position where conferences started hiring outside of college sports. They hired businesspeople, they hired media executives, and then those people believe that their goal is to advance the interest only of their conference because that’s how those jobs work.”
“Lately, it seems like we’ve morphed into, ‘I’ve gotta feed the beast,'” said Thompson. “‘I’ve got 18 schools, 16 schools …’ In 2023, there were five autonomous conferences with an average membership of 13 schools each. Now we’ve got four autonomous conferences with an average membership of 17. We’ve gone to that consolidation, and a commissioner is paid to protect his 14, 16, 18 school interests. But, man, it just doesn’t seem like we care as much about how we just keep this thing going, how we keep 80,000 people, 50,000 people, hell, even 30,000 people coming to games.”
Now, professional sports have proven rather definitively that you can be disorganized and inequality-friendly with a commissioner atop the organizational chart. Just look at the last 35 years for most of Europe’s biggest soccer leagues or large swaths of Major League Baseball’s history — baseball had all the inequality a fan of capitalism could possibly crave, especially in the 1990s. And, hey, having an occasional tyrant like David Stern in charge didn’t stop the NBA from basically being ruled by three teams for decades — from 1980 to 2002, the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, and Chicago Bulls won 17 of 23 titles. Even in the NFL, all the parity measures in the world couldn’t stop the teams that employed either Tom Brady (New England, then Tampa Bay) or Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City) from winning 10 of 24 Super Bowls from 2001 to 2024.
It’s also not hard to see how a dictatorial figure like the Landis-style commissioner I dream of becoming could get corrupted. (I wouldn’t, of course — you can trust me — but others might.)
You can obviously manage things quite poorly with a commissioner in charge. But the only thing worse might be not having one. Professional organizations have commissioners, and at its highest level college football is now a professional organization of sorts. But a quote from Notre Dame president Father John J. Cavanaugh from the late 1940s still rings impressively true: “The type of reformers I refer to are those who play with the question for public consumption, who seem to say that an indefinable something has to be done in a way nobody knows how, at a time nobody knows when, in places nobody knows where, to accomplish nobody knows what. I wonder if there are not grounds to suspect that the reformers … protest too much, that their zeal may be an excuse for their own negligence in reforming themselves.”
Of course, there’s no place for a commissioner in college football’s structure. There’s no National College Football Office for him or her to occupy. England has spent the last few years working toward an “independent football regulator” (IFR) to oversee soccer as a whole in the country — in a lot of the same ways we’re talking about here — and it might create an intriguing model to follow. Or it might prove to totally lack independence from either partisan government or financial influence. We’ll see.
The creation of the College Football Playoff as an entity might have produced an opportunity for a leadership structure of sorts — imagine a situation in which schools must opt in to CFP membership (which features a set of rules and protocols you must follow) to compete for the CFP title — but it doesn’t appear we’re anywhere close to that at the moment. Among other things, expanding the CFP’s governance potential would again require a vote from Sankey and Petitti to strip themselves of power. “It could come through the CFP,” Auerbach said. “They already have a governance structure. In theory, they could build that out and add all of the bureaucratic pieces they would need to truly govern the sport. But you would need the people who are powerful now to be willing to give up some of that power for the collective good of the sport — you would need to have a willingness from the SEC and Big Ten commissioners, or those schools in their leagues, to give up power to have a collective, centralized, powerful figure. … It’s just hard to imagine that that would happen.”
“I think any governance system probably has to shift power away from the presidents,” said Extra Points’ Matt Brown, “… That could be a centralized commissioner. That could be a different board.” Right now, however, it’s nothing. And without anyone atop the pyramid, any change that could be good for the sport just exacerbates the haves-versus-have-nots divide that already exists.
Writing about the possibility of interleague play in Major League Baseball in the early 1970s, Roger Angell wrote, “The plan is startling and perhaps imperfect, but it is surely worth hopeful scrutiny at the top levels of baseball. I am convinced, however, that traditionalists need have no fear that it will be adopted. Any amalgamation would require all the owners to subdue their differences, to delegate real authority, to accept change, and to admit that they share an equal responsibility for everything that happens to their game. And that, to judge by their past record and by their performance in the strike, is exactly what they will never do.” He was right and wrong: it did come into existence, but it took 25 years to do so. We’ve been talking about a college football commissioner for far longer than that, and there doesn’t yet appear to be much of an appetite for subduing differences or delegating real authority. And it’s hard to imagine that changing without some sort of Black Sox-level emergency.
Then again, we can only envision what we know to envision. “Our imagination is bound by our experiences,” The Athletic’s Ralph Russo said. “And that’s making it hard to see where all this could possibly go. I feel like there’s a conclusion here that nothing in our collective experience could have brought us to. There’s just something, some other event, that is going to influence college football, probably an outside event. I say that because the history of college football is riddled with outside events totally influencing the power structure. It’s demographic movement — where the population goes within the United States. It’s wars. It’s segregation and desegregation. All of these things. So is the next thing something that completely disrupts the university system? Is it something that disrupts the U.S. government?”
At best, a commissioner figure could for the first time give the sport a vision to follow and a steadying hand for guidance. At worst, he or she would reinforce the divides and inequality that have already been established, furrowing his or her brow and talking about how great and deep college football is and how hard it is to satisfy everyone before simply giving the SEC and Big Ten whatever they want.
Regardless, I’m keeping my hat in the ring. CONNELLY 2025 (or 2036, or 2048, whatever it ends up being).
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Dave Wilson
As the No. 1 Longhorns head to Columbus to face No. 3 Ohio State in what coach Steve Sarkisian called an “epic matchup,” all eyes are on Texas’ new starting quarterback, Arch Manning.
Manning, the preseason Heisman Trophy favorite according to ESPN BET, has made just two starts in two years — against UL Monroe and Mississippi State last season — and this will be his first start on the road or against a ranked team.
With all the noise, Sarkisian said his message to Manning has been just to be himself.
“We’re not asking any superhuman efforts of you to do anything that is extraordinary,” Sarkisian said Monday about what he told Manning. “Just go be you. What you’ve done is good enough to get us to this point and to get him to this point in this juncture of his career. Now go play the way he’s capable of playing to the style that he’s comfortable doing it.”
Manning threw for 939 yards with nine touchdowns and two interceptions in spot duty last season, also rushing for 108 yards and four touchdowns. His best performance was off the bench against UTSA last year, when he replaced Quinn Ewers and threw for 223 yards and four touchdowns on 9-of-12 passing while adding a 67-yard touchdown run — the longest by a Texas quarterback since Vince Young in 2005.
Now that he’s got the job full time, he said he won’t take the opportunity for granted.
“This is what I’ve been waiting for,” Manning said Monday. “I spent two years not playing, so I might as well go have some fun.”
The game marks just the second time since the AP poll debuted in 1950 that two top-3 teams will meet in their season opener, according to ESPN Research. The last time was 2017, when No. 1 Alabama beat No. 3 Florida State 24-7 and went on to win the national championship.
It’s also a rematch of last season’s College Football Playoff semifinal, when the Buckeyes beat the Longhorns 28-14 in the Cotton Bowl.
Sarkisian said these are two different teams from the end of last season.
“If you look at last year’s game, 26 players got drafted off of the two teams,” Sarkisian said. “If you include free agents, 32 players that were playing in that game a year ago are now in the NFL.”
The Longhorns return nine starters and 30 players from last year, but they still are the preseason No. 1. Sarkisian said both teams’ rankings are a testament to their quality, and he touted Ryan Day’s 70-10 head-coaching record.
“They’re not a gimmick team at all,” Sarkisian said of the Buckeyes. “I don’t mean to offend anybody, but the things that they do are sound and so you have to beat them.”
But the Buckeyes have two new coordinators and, like Texas, are breaking in a new starting quarterback, sophomore Julian Sayin in their case.
“He’s a natural passer; he’s got a quick release,” Sarkisian said of Sayin. “He’s a better athlete than you think, and he can run. So we definitely need to be alert to that. … This is going to be one of those where, when you go into the ring with somebody, what’s the plan? As the rounds go on, you’ve got to have to be able to adjust.”
The Longhorns have won their past 11 true road games, which Sarkisian said is a result of their process, focus and game-day routine. But neither he nor Manning has ever been to Ohio Stadium. Manning said he knows he’s got a talented team around him and doesn’t feel any pressure going into such a hostile environment.
“I always have to remind myself, it’s not all about me; it’s the whole team,” Manning said. “It’s going to be a fun one.”
Manning said he doesn’t feel a target on his back as he steps into the role of full-time starter.
“I think that’s all of us at Texas, and I think we kind of try to shift the narrative,” Manning said. “We’re going for everyone else. Target’s not on our back, but we got the red dot on everyone else.”
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Jake Trotter
True freshman Bryce Underwood has been named Michigan‘s starting quarterback, coach Sherrone Moore said Monday.
“He’s earned the opportunity,” Moore said. “It was not given to him.”
Other Michigan quarterbacks were informed Sunday that Underwood will start, a source told ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
Moore said sophomore Jadyn Davis, who appeared in one game last season, had a strong camp and will serve as the backup to Underwood as the No. 14 Wolverines open the season Saturday against New Mexico before traveling to Oklahoma on Sept. 6 to face the No. 18 Sooners.
Underwood, from nearby Belleville, Michigan, was ESPN’s No. 1 overall recruit in this year’s signing class, flipping his commitment from LSU last November.
He beat out Fresno State transfer Mikey Keene and Davis for the starting job. Davis Warren is still recovering from a torn ACL in his right knee suffered in last season’s bowl win.
The 6-foot-4, 228-pound Underwood won two state championships with Belleville and won 38 straight games in high school.
“Just did the things the right way and used his skill and never tried to do too much,” Moore said. “For a young guy, he was very mature beyond his years, and he’s only 18 years old. He’s going to make mistakes, but that’s what we’re here for, coaches and players. We’re all going to support him.”
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