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 Jim 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. Eight 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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Jesse Rogers
GLENDALE, Ariz. — One team is a worldwide attraction, fresh off its eighth World Series title. The other just lost an MLB record 121 games and hasn’t won a playoff series since 2005. The one thing they have in common?
A spring training parking lot.
Both the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox reside at Camelback Ranch during February and March, but life couldn’t be more different as the two franchises prepare for a new season.
When Dodgers players reported to camp earlier this month, their clubhouse looked like a who’s who of MLB All-Stars, while a trip through the White Sox’s side of the building required frequent glances at the nameplates above the locker stalls to know who was who.
In the days since arriving, the Dodgers have been asked regularly about the opportunity to repeat. The White Sox are contemplating a host of other questions: How do you restore confidence in the clubhouse? What message of optimism can you deliver after a historic season of losing?
Even the Dodgers’ morning workouts, normally a mundane early spring ritual, have served as a celebration of the team that ruled baseball last October and dominated the offseason headlines again, with 1,000-plus fans showing up to get a glimpse of their favorite players. On the White Sox side of the facility, ESPN counted only 21 fans taking in one recent workout.
Still, entering a year in which their focus will be on finding the positives wherever they can, the White Sox are looking at the upside of sharing a spring home with the team certain to be the talk of baseball all season long.
“It’s a great opportunity to be matched up in a facility with a team that won the World Series, to have something to aim towards,” general manager Chris Getz said. “How do we get to beat them? How can we compete? So yeah, the Dodgers have been a very successful organization. With that being said, we know what we need to do and we’re set out to do that.”
For Chicago, the season will be measured mostly by the steps taken by young players, and despite the ups-and-downs that come with trying to integrate them into a major league roster, the on-the-field results must add up to a better record than last year’s 41-121 mark.
“I do think we’re going to win more games than we did last year,” Getz said as camp opened. “Unfortunately, there are going to be some growing pains along the way that at times is going to challenge your emotions, but that’s part of the development of some of these players.
“Last year provided a lot of clarity for a lot of people, including myself. We had a lot of work to do, a lot more changes that needed to be made and we were able to accomplish a lot of that this offseason and that started with hiring Will Venable.”
Venable is the first-time manager who checks all the boxes the front office was looking for when it set out to find someone to guide the White Sox through a fresh start. The 42-year-old former major league outfielder retired within the last decade and has since worked under some of the best managers in the business, including Joe Maddon, Alex Cora and Bruce Bochy.
“It’s really about being present and doing the things that we can control now,” Venable said of his opening message to his team.
Venable’s roster is missing last season’s best player, left-hander Garrett Crochet, who was traded to the Red Sox during the offseason. It does feature a smattering of holdovers, such as Luis Robert Jr. and Andrew Vaughn and Andrew Benintendi (although the start of the outfielder’s season will come later after suffering a broken hand on Thursday), who are hungry for an opportunity to be remembered for something other than last season’s futility.
“When I signed here, I signed for five years knowing that there could be ups and downs, but I’m here for it and it’s my job to go out there and perform,” Benintendi said. “And last year I didn’t do that. And not only do I feel like I let the fans or team down, I think (I let) myself down. You have such high expectations going into a season and when you don’t hit them, it’s frustrating, but you just gotta keep going.”
The White Sox also added a group of journeyman free agents looking to reboot their careers — including Joey Gallo, Brandon Drury and Michael A. Taylor — who were signed to short-term deals with an opportunity to compete for the playing time they weren’t as likely to get elsewhere.
But the real excitement on Chicago’s side of Camelback Ranch this spring is about a group of prospects — six of which appear on ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel’s top 100 list, including lefties Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith, the team’s top picks in the 2022 and 2024 drafts, respectively. Both made their spring debuts last Wednesday, but won’t break camp with the big league club. Also providing promise for the future is catcher Kyle Teel, who was the centerpiece of the White Sox’s return for Crochet, and shortstop Colson Montgomery, who homered in the team’s first spring game.
“We brought in a lot of really good veterans, so it’s really cool just to talk to them, pick their brains, not even about baseball, just kind of how they go about their business, how you go about yourself as a pro,” Montgomery said. “We also have a lot of really young talent and I think that’s what the fans and everybody should be really excited for.”
Envisioning a future with Montgomery anchoring the lineup while Schultz and Hagen top the rotation has helped Getz stay the course in Chicago’s rebuild even as the losses at the major league level have piled up.
“There’s no time to complain. And there’s no one really to complain to,” Getz said. “We got our hands dirty and got to work. There honestly wasn’t a day to get away from it because we didn’t want to get away from it. We wanted to dive in and continue to build this forward.
“Physically, mentally you rid yourself of negative things, but I personally have just channeled it for motivation to get better. And I know that is a cliché, in itself, but it’s the truth of the matter.”
Across the parking lot earlier this week, after watching $325 million starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto throw a bullpen session, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman reflected on the plight of his White Sox counterpart.
Friedman and Getz sometimes meet on the backfields at Camelback Ranch. Friedman sympathizes with Getz, despite the vast disparity between their two rosters, which includes a payroll difference of more than $300 million. L.A. enters the season with a MLB-leading payroll that’s approaching $400 million, compared to Chicago’s 29th-ranked $83 million total, a number the franchise has pared down during its rebuild.
“It’s certainly a challenge, but in a lot of ways there are a lot of fun aspects of it, building up and growing the various departments. And it’s critical for everyone to work well together,” said Friedman, who helped build winning teams in Tampa Bay without high payrolls. “And it doesn’t mean you don’t disagree, but putting those processes in place and being more innovative when you’re at this point, it’s similar to how we were in 2006 and 2007 with the Rays.
“There is a lot of strong foundation you can build during that time period that while mired in it is not fun. But when you look back, when you’ve reached a point of a steady state of success where a lot of that can be attributed to those early years, it can be very rewarding.”
While Getz can only dream of those days for now, he is using his unique spring training vantage point to soak up how a model organization is run. Asked what he admires about the Dodgers, he pointed to the detailed ground-up approach that often gets overlooked amid the franchise’s splashy offseason signings.
“Being a former farm director and being attached to a complex with the Dodgers and seeing what they do on a regular basis, having conversations, seeing the work that’s being done, it’s almost a small-market mindset in terms of really valuing the development of players,” Getz said. “I respect how they go about it. It’s not just spending, they do a lot of little things.”
Of course, it is going to take more than little things for the White Sox to make up the distance between them and the Dodgers — or even most of the rest of the other 28 major league teams — and that was apparent as soon as the curtain dropped on a new season of Cactus League games.
Last Thursday, 10,959 fans dressed primarily in Dodger blue showed up for L.A.’s opener. Four days later, the White Sox played their first home game of the spring in front of an announced crowd of 2,636. The fans who did make their way to Camelback Ranch for the Monday afternoon matchup with the Texas Rangers were greeted with a familiar sight to anyone who followed the 2024 season: Chicago promptly gave up nine runs in the top of the first inning.
“Obviously, you’re not going to meet a fan that wants to be where we’re at right now,” Getz said. “But if they’re sticking by our side, when we get there, it’s going to be a really special moment for a lot of people.”
With spring football just around the corner, it’s time to look ahead toward next season and see who has the most to prove.
After suffering an injury that took him out of the College Football Playoff, quarterback Carson Beck returns for another season, but in a Hurricanes jersey this time. What does Beck have to do while at Miami to get back into the first-round draft conversation?
James Franklin and the Nittany Lions look like a top-caliber team this upcoming season as they return their top running backs and an experienced quarterback in Drew Allar. After losing in the CFP semifinal to Notre Dame last season, what do Penn State and Allar have left to prove?
Our college football experts give their thoughts on teams, coaches and players who have the most to prove.
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Freshmen | Non-QB player
1. Which team has the most to prove?
Jake Trotter: The Nittany Lions have not won a national championship in almost four decades (though they did go unbeaten in 1994). But they now have one of the most experienced quarterbacks in college football in Drew Allar, while Big Ten powerhouses Ohio State and Michigan are set to debut freshman passers. Last year’s other Big Ten playoff teams, Oregon (Dillon Gabriel) and Indiana (Kurtis Rourke), graduated their star quarterbacks. Penn State also boasts the nation’s top returning running back duo (Nicholas Singleton and Kaytron Allen) and even swiped Jim Knowles from Ohio State after he coordinated the top defense in the country. The Nittany Lions will never have a better shot to win the Big Ten — and national title — than they will this season.
Bill Connelly: Yeah, it has to be Penn State. The Nittany Lions are going all-in and might have the most proven stars in the country. We still don’t know if their receiving corps is ready for prime time, but their schedule is extremely navigable outside of a Nov. 1 trip to Columbus to face Ohio State. There will never be a better time for a breakthrough than 2025.
Chris Low: When is there not something to prove at Alabama? Nick Saban won six national championships in Tuscaloosa, and there was always an embedded responsibility to continue feeding that monster the next season. Now, as Kalen DeBoer enters his second season at Alabama, the last thing anybody in and around that Crimson Tide program wants is to go a second straight season without making the College Football Playoff. DeBoer and his staff have recruited well, and he was able to bring back Ryan Grubb as offensive coordinator after Grubb spent last season in the NFL. DeBoer will have more of his fingerprints on the 2025 team, and there should be a better overall understanding among the players of how he rolls. Either way, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize how important this next season is for the program.
Andrea Adelson: Penn State is the most obvious choice, but I would argue Florida State has something more to prove after a disastrous 2024 campaign. It still seems unfathomable that the Seminoles could go from 13-1 and ACC champions in 2023 to 2-10 over just one season. But here’s the thing about Florida State in its recent history. The Seminoles have probably been closer to their performance in 2024 than what we saw in 2023. Over the past seven seasons, Florida State has had five losing seasons. Three of them belong to current coach Mike Norvell. So it is legitimate to ask whether the Seminoles’ back-to-back double-digit win seasons in 2022 and 2023 fall outside the norm for what history says should be expected. That is what makes this season so critical. Florida State appeared to turn a corner and had many believing it was ready to rejoin the elite. Last season said otherwise. So what will it be in 2025?
Adam Rittenberg: I love the Penn State answers, but I’m going across the Big Ten — and the country — with USC. Remember the excitement when USC went way outside the family to hire Lincoln Riley as head coach? The expectation was that championships and playoff appearances would follow. Perhaps those were unrealistic, given the program’s roster and resource challenges, as well as an unexpected move to the Big Ten in 2024. But Riley is just 26-14 with one division title and no league championships or CFP berths while at USC. The Big Ten is only getting deeper and tougher, and despite some key upgrades at personnel positions, USC ultimately must start delivering results. Can a team that struggled to win the close ones, especially away from home, start to break through this fall? We’ll learn a lot during a midseason stretch featuring Illinois (road), Michigan (home) and Notre Dame (road).
Ryan McGee: I’ll draft behind Rittenberg in the Pac-12-to-B1G genre, but I’m going up the coast to Oregon. The world, including me, has declared Dan Lanning as the future of college football, and looking at the W column and his recruiting prowess, we are right in doing so. But in two straight seasons, Oregon has exited the natty chase via bummer rematch losses, last year as the top-ranked team. So, new coach, but that’s the same Oregon close-but-no-title movie we’ve been watching for a few decades now.
Kyle Bonagura: After finishing in last place in the Pac-12 in 2023, Colorado took a massive step forward last season. It was a tiebreak away from reaching the Big 12 title game and went 9-4. Now comes the hard part. Travis Hunter, the Heisman Trophy winner, and Shedeur Sanders, the possible No. 1 NFL draft pick, buoyed the team at a level that is hard to quantify. Without those two this year, we’ll have a better sense of what life in Boulder will be like for Deion Sanders.
2. Which coach has the most to prove?
Bonagura: Cal coach Justin Wilcox hasn’t been messing around this offseason. He hired former Boise State and Auburn coach Bryan Harsin to be the OC; former Washington State and Hawai’i head coach Nick Rolovich as an analyst; and former NFL head coach Ron Rivera joined the program in an administrative role. Wilcox has been given a lot of chances to succeed. He’s about to start his ninth season in Berkeley and has yet to have a winning record in conference play. The last time Cal had a winning overall record was in 2019 (8-5).
Trotter: After losing to Notre Dame on a last-second field goal in last season’s playoff semifinal, James Franklin fell to 1-14 vs. AP top-five teams — and 4-20 vs. AP top-10 opponents — as Penn State’s head coach. It’s past time for Franklin to win the big game. To his credit, he has compiled a loaded team that should be able to go toe-to-toe with anyone in college football in 2025. That won’t amount to much if Franklin continues losing against the best.
Connelly: Oklahoma has suffered just two losing seasons in the past 26 years, and Brent Venables was in charge for both of them. The Sooners faced a ridiculous schedule during last season’s 6-7 campaign, and they enjoyed a bright spot with their late-November pummeling of Alabama. But that was their only win over an FBS opponent after September, and they fielded their worst offense of the 21st century. Venables has recruited well enough to fend off any major hot seat issues, but you eventually have to turn recruiting potential into on-field production, and OU’s schedule won’t get any easier in his fourth season in charge.
Low: Gotta be Lincoln Riley, right? He enters his fourth season at USC and has yet to win a conference championship. He had quarterback Caleb Williams for two seasons, and after Williams won the Heisman Trophy in 2022, the Trojans dropped off to 8-5 in 2023. Then in their first season in the Big Ten a year ago, the Trojans finished with a losing record (4-5) in league play. Riley didn’t just all of a sudden forget how to coach. He won four Big 12 championships at Oklahoma and won 11 games in his first season at USC. But the rub is that the trajectory has trended the wrong way at USC since he arrived, and there’s also the matter of the Trojans proving they can consistently be a contender in the Big Ten. The Trojans will be breaking in a new quarterback in 2025, but this should also be USC’s best defense under Riley with D’Anton Lynn returning for his second season as coordinator.
McGee: Bill Belichick needs to figure out how college football works, but Brian Kelly needs to figure out how Week 1 works.
Rittenberg: Brian Kelly for me. He left Notre Dame for LSU with the express purpose of winning national titles. But the Tigers haven’t even made the CFP under his watch, while Notre Dame just recorded its first three CFP victories under Kelly’s successor, Marcus Freeman, taking down SEC champion Georgia en route to the national title game. Each of the past three LSU coaches — Ed Orgeron, Les Miles and Nick Saban — won a national title by the end of their fourth season at the school. LSU had some obvious talent deficiencies during Kelly’s first few seasons, but the Tigers have rectified that through the portal and improved recruiting. Anything short of a CFP appearance this fall will create major doubt around Kelly, a Hall of Fame-caliber coach who hasn’t fully delivered yet in the Bayou.
Hale: The two biggest hires of the 2022 coaching carousel were Lincoln Riley and Brian Kelly. As Chris Low notes, the pressure on Riley to turn things around at USC is immense, but things aren’t exactly easy for Kelly at LSU either. In three seasons in Baton Rouge, Kelly has been … fine. He has won 29 games, which is tied for the 15th most over that span, right alongside fellow SEC coach Lane Kiffin, who’s viewed as far more successful. But the problem is, LSU didn’t hire Kelly to lead a top-15 team. It hired him to win a national championship, and he has not come close. LSU has lost its opener in each of Kelly’s three seasons, letting the air out of the balloon before it ever got off the ground. LSU has been ranked eighth or better in each of Kelly’s three seasons, too — but hasn’t finished inside the top 12. And last year, it was Kelly’s former team, Notre Dame — a program he suggested couldn’t win it all in the modern era — that made it to the College Football Playoff final. Kelly might not be on the hot seat exactly, but the clock is absolutely ticking.
Adelson: Is it strange to say Bill Belichick? This has nothing to do with whether he can coach X’s and O’s. We all know that he can. This has everything to do with whether he can win in college doing it his way. I would argue there is no coach with a greater spotlight on him than Belichick because we are all completely fascinated to see how this is going to play out. Does Super Bowl success automatically translate into college victories at a place that has traditionally underperformed based on its talent? North Carolina has not won an ACC title since 1980 — not even College Football Hall of Famer Mack Brown could bring home that elusive title. Belichick says he wants UNC to be run just like an NFL team. Is that feasible in college? The entire roster has been overhauled and there is no clear-cut quarterback at this point. What about his long-term future? Only a few months into the job and there was already speculation he wanted back in the NFL. No matter what happens this season, Belichick will have proved either that his way works or that it might not be the answer in college. Either way, people will tune in to watch.
3. Which quarterback has the most to prove?
Hale: This time last season, Carson Beck was the clear-cut No. 1 quarterback in the country and a likely first-round draft pick. Then he had a mediocre campaign in which he got hurt late in Georgia’s SEC title game matchup against Texas and missed the playoff, and suddenly a lot of the shine is off the once-touted prospect. After a brief flirtation with the draft, Beck opted to return to college for one more year — and a boatload of money — at Miami, a move that caught the Dawgs by surprise. Now he’ll follow in Cam Ward‘s footsteps, and that’s no simple task, either. Beck has shown what he can do when things are clicking, and the truth is, he didn’t have a full assortment of playmakers around him last year at UGA. But expectations are high at Miami, and Beck needs to get back to his 2023 form if he wants to rekindle that first-round draft pick hype.
Trotter: Texas quarterback Arch Manning has become one of the most hyped players in recent college football history. And yet, he has played only sparingly backing up Quinn Ewers the past two years. Ewers is now gone, and all eyes will be on Manning as he attempts to lead Texas to its first national championship since 2005, when Vince Young propelled the Longhorns to an undefeated season. Behind Young’s game-winning touchdown pass, that Texas team knocked off Ohio State in Columbus early in the year, setting the stage for the Horns’ magical run. Manning will lead Texas back to the Horseshoe in the season opener with a prime opportunity to make his own statement.
Rittenberg: I saw the tears from Penn State’s Drew Allar after the loss to Notre Dame in the CFP semifinal. Quarterbacks and coaches are often linked through the attention (good and bad) they receive, and Allar and James Franklin will feel the burden of not having won the big game until things change on the field. Penn State having arguably its best team under Franklin increases the pressure on Allar, who, with a strong season, could be the top quarterback drafted to the NFL in 2026. I’m also fascinated to see how Oregon’s Dante Moore plays in taking over for Dillon Gabriel, who helped the Ducks win the Big Ten and go 13-0 but struggled against Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Who will be the quarterback to finally lead Oregon to a national title? Perhaps Moore is that man.
Adelson: I am looking forward to seeing how Miller Moss does at Louisville. The former ESPN 300 quarterback waited his turn at USC, got his opportunity to start a year ago, and it did not quite go the way both he and the Trojans had planned as he was ultimately benched. But Louisville coach Jeff Brohm has a long track record of success with his quarterbacks — especially with his transfers in his first two seasons with the Cards. In Year 1, transfer Jack Plummer led Louisville to the ACC title game. Then last season, Tyler Shough had a career year, throwing for more than 3,000 yards with 23 touchdowns to six interceptions. Moss said Brohm was a huge reason he decided to join the Cards. With ACC Rookie of the Year Isaac Brown returning to the backfield, top receivers Chris Bell and Caullin Lacy back and an improved offensive line, there is reason to believe Moss can take Louisville back to the ACC championship game.
McGee: Arch Manning has been hyped since he was in middle school. He’s the only backup quarterback I’ve ever seen attract more reporters than the starter at a CFP media day, and I’ve seen it happen multiple times. Texas fans just told the quarterback who took them to two consecutive CFPs that he should just go on and leave. Oh, and when Arch was in high school, I was at an Ole Miss game when it painted the end zones with “MANNING,” supposedly because Uncle Eli was being honored, but everyone knew it was to try to catch the eye of Arch should he be in town for the festivities. If he does anything less than win the SEC title and make the CFP, Austin will turn on him like he’s overcooked brisket.
Connelly: Drew Allar finished the 2024 season with 3,327 passing yards and a 24-to-8 TD-to-INT ratio, and while he had a wonderful security blanket in tight end Tyler Warren, he also produced those numbers with a weak set of wide receivers. It was a lovely step forward for the former blue-chipper, but the campaign ended with a dud: In a semifinal loss to Notre Dame, he went just 12-for-23 passing for 135 yards and a devastating and ill-advised interception in the final minute. He proved his upside to a certain degree, but he was also a merely solid 17th in Total QBR. If he genuinely transitions into a top-tier quarterback in 2025, Penn State will be ridiculously hard to beat.
Low: It should be a fascinating season in the world of SEC quarterbacks with several promising players returning, others getting their first shot as a starter and some talented new faces. Tennessee‘s Nico Iamaleava has elite arm talent and showed some real toughness last season. Now, in his third season on campus and pulling in a reported $8 million in NIL money, it’s time for him to go from being solid to being a difference-maker in a Tennessee offense that desperately needs more pop in its downfield passing game. Iamaleava is 11-3 as a starter going back to the bowl game at the end of his freshman season and has protected the football well, but he passed for more than 200 yards only twice in his nine games last season against SEC foes and then Ohio State in the playoff. The Vols will need more from him next season if they’re going to make a return trip to the playoff.
4. Which transfer has the most to prove?
Low: In one season as Tulane’s starting quarterback, Darian Mensah put up impressive numbers (2,723 yards and 22 touchdowns) and, as a result, received a massive payday of a reported $8 million over two years to transfer to Duke. Even by today’s NIL standards, that’s some serious cash. Clearly, Duke thinks he’s worth it, and Mensah’s best football would seem to be ahead of him. The spotlight will be exceedingly bright as he does his part to take Duke from a nine-win team to potentially a playoff team.
Connelly: I thought Patrick Payton was going to be a breakout star for Florida State in 2024. Some of his rate stats were better than his former teammate Jared Verse‘s in 2023, and I thought both Payton and the Seminoles’ defensive front could withstand the loss of Verse and others and still thrive. I was incorrect. Payton’s sack total fell from seven to four, his TFLs from 12.5 to 11 and his pressure rate from 12.4% to 10.1%. Now he’s heading to LSU for a rebound year, and if he still has a breakthrough in him, he could transform both his own draft stock and LSU’s CFP prospects.
Trotter: Carson Beck entered the 2024 season as a favorite to become the No. 1 pick in the 2025 draft. Beck, however, battled through an up-and-down season at Georgia before suffering an ulnar collateral ligament injury in his throwing elbow that knocked him out of the playoff and prompted him to return to college. Beck has since transferred to Miami, where he’s succeeding Heisman Trophy finalist Cam Ward, who could become the top draft pick instead. The pressure is on Beck to live up to his talent for the Hurricanes and show NFL scouts he’s worthy of first-round consideration.
Rittenberg: The excitement around John Mateer is real, and so is the pressure on him. He could be the quarterback to reboot Oklahoma‘s offense, get the Sooners competitive in the SEC and CFP races and possibly secure coach Brent Venables’ future. Mateer dazzled for Washington State in his lone season as the primary starter, passing for 3,139 yards and 29 touchdowns, while adding 15 rushing touchdowns and 826 yards. He will once again play under coordinator Ben Arbuckle, who also made the move to OU, but faces much tougher competition in the SEC. Oklahoma hit big with quarterback transfers such as Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray and Jalen Hurts under coach Lincoln Riley. Venables needs a similar impact from Mateer this fall.
Bonagura: Devon Dampier‘s transfer from New Mexico to Utah might not have generated the most headlines this offseason, but it could end up being one of the most consequential. Utah’s offense was a disaster the past two seasons as Cam Rising couldn’t shake the injury issues. Dampier showed he can produce in the Mountain West, and a lot will be riding on him as questions about how long coach Kyle Whittingham will postpone retirement continue to linger.
5. Which freshman has the most to prove?
Low: Dakorien Moore is one of the highest-ranked recruits ever to sign with Oregon and plays a position, wide receiver, that could use an influx of talent. It was big for the Ducks that Evan Stewart decided to return for another season, but they’re losing Tez Johnson to the NFL. Moore (5-11, 182 pounds) plays bigger than his size and has elite speed. He’s dynamic after the catch and scored 18 touchdowns his senior year of high school in Duncanville, Texas. Moore, ESPN’s No. 1-ranked receiver prospect nationally, could have gone anywhere in the country. The Ducks would love it if he can make a similar impact as Ohio State’s Jeremiah Smith and Alabama’s Ryan Williams did a year ago as freshmen.
Trotter: Quarterback Bryce Underwood, the No. 1 overall recruit in the country, was given millions to switch his commitment from LSU and sign with Michigan, just a 20-minute drive from his hometown. With all of that come immense expectations. The Wolverines brought in veteran Mikey Keene from Fresno State to serve as a bridge quarterback. But ultimately, the onus is going to fall on Underwood to prove he’s worth the hype and money.
Adelson: Keep an eye on Clemson running back Gideon Davidson, an early enrollee with a big opportunity to not only play as a true freshman but potentially earn a starting spot. This is the biggest area on the Clemson offense without a proven returning player. Phil Mafah is gone to the NFL, while backup Jay Haynes will miss spring rehabbing from a knee injury sustained in the ACC championship game. Clemson is going to have receiver Adam Randall play running back this spring, after he played there in the CFP quarterfinal against Texas, to see if he should permanently move to the position. That leaves Keith Adams Jr. as the only running back on the roster with significant carries — 30 last year — available for the spring. So, Davidson will no doubt be in the mix at a position that has produced 1,000-yard backs at a frequent clip.
Rittenberg: Julian “Ju Ju” Lewis’ drawn-out recruitment process brought added attention to the quarterback, who continued to visit schools despite his commitment to USC, and eventually flipped and signed with Colorado. Coach Prime and the Buffs need a new on-field face of the program following the NFL departures of Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter. Lewis, ESPN’s No. 12 recruit in the class, could be the front man for Phase 2 of the Deion Sanders experience in Boulder. He must beat out a more experienced quarterback in Liberty transfer Kaidon Salter, but at some point, Lewis should get an opportunity to run an offense that last season ranked No. 6 nationally in passing.
Connelly: Underwood’s the most obvious answer, but he might not be the only true freshman with a chance to shine for a highly ranked team. Alabama would probably benefit significantly if Keelon Russell, the No. 2 overall recruit in the country, pulled a Jalen Hurts and seized control of the starting job in Tuscaloosa. He’ll have to beat out two-year backup Ty Simpson and Washington transplant Austin Mack, both of whom are former blue-chippers themselves. But it’s fair to guess that Russell has the highest upside of the bunch, and Bama’s ceiling rises if Russell’s ready from day one.
6. Which non-quarterback player has the most to prove?
Trotter: After a pedestrian regular season, Notre Dame wide receiver Jaden Greathouse exploded in the playoff. In the semifinal and national championship, Greathouse totaled 13 receptions for 233 yards and three touchdowns. In the title game loss to Ohio State, he ignited a second-half comeback that came up short with a series of electric plays. Can Greathouse build on those postseason performances and prove he’s one of the top wideouts in the country? If so, the Fighting Irish also have the players elsewhere for another deep playoff run.
Connelly: Kyron Hudson was a top-10 receiver prospect in the 2021 class but produced just 807 receiving yards in parts of four seasons at USC. That makes him a little bit disappointing … but it also makes him nearly the most proven member of the Penn State receiving corps. He and Troy transfer Devonte Ross will need to make immediate impacts for Drew Allar and PSU to meet their 2025 hype. They don’t have to be Jeremiah Smith-level good, but they have to produce.
Low: Francis Mauigoa has already proved that he’s one of the most promising offensive linemen in the country as he enters his junior season at Miami, but he has everything it takes to blossom into the best tackle in the country in 2025. The 6-foot-6, 320-pound Mauigoa was a second-team All-ACC selection last season. He came to Miami as a five-star prospect and ranked No. 1 nationally at his position. The Hurricanes are hoping to see him showcase that kind of dominance every time out next season.
Hale: Peter Woods is a force up front, but he wasn’t at his best for much of 2024. He battled an early injury, and he was playing out of position at edge rather than on the interior of Clemson’s D-line. Moreover, the entire Clemson front struggled — which led directly to the decision to part ways with coordinator Wes Goodwin. Now, Tom Allen arrives with the express purpose of rejuvenating the Tigers’ pass rush, and he’ll have some fun players to incorporate — including a healthy Woods. With more depth surrounding him and a scheme that should play to his strengths, Woods has the tools to turn his five-star pedigree into All-America production. If he does, it could mean Clemson’s defense looks more like it did during its playoff heyday from 2015 to 2020. If he doesn’t, Woods risks becoming one of the more disappointing prospects on the Tigers’ defense in years.
Adelson: LSU linebacker Harold Perkins Jr. saw his past season cut short by an ACL injury in Week 4, yet another setback for a player who is looking to return to the potential and production that saw him be named to multiple Freshman All-America teams in 2022. There is little doubt Perkins has the physical gifts to prove to the nation once again why he made such a celebrated debut. But much of what has happened since then has been out of his control — a move from edge rusher to inside linebacker in 2023 limited his game-changing ability, and the injury last season obviously hurt. Defensive coordinator Blake Baker recently said he plans to have Perkins play the hybrid safety/linebacker position this season. LSU will need Perkins to be the best version of himself, particularly after the team’s defensive struggles at times last season. That leaves him with plenty to prove.
Rittenberg: Zachariah Branch was among the buzziest players entering the 2024 season, as he had become USC’s first-ever true freshman All-American, returning a punt and a kickoff for a touchdown while leading the nation in punt return average. But his encore fell a bit flat, as he averaged 10.7 yards per reception with only one touchdown, and didn’t have a punt return longer than 20 yards. Branch transferred to Georgia along with his brother, Zion, a safety. Georgia needs more playmakers at wide receiver and returns, where Zachariah should slide right in. A big season awaits the former top-10 national recruit in Athens.
WASHINGTON — Brayden Schenn played his 1,000th regular-season NHL game when he and the St. Louis Blues beat the Washington Capitals 5-2 on Thursday night.
Older brother Luke played his 1,000th game Oct. 17 with the Nashville Predators. The Schenns are the eighth set of brothers to each reach that milestone and the first to do so in the same season.
“I’ve always said you don’t get there without the help of tons of people,” Brayden said after his team’s morning skate. “Family being one and coaches and players and teammates and people in the organization. Obviously, you have to embrace the day-to-day grind of the ups and downs and just how hard this league is, but, yeah, pretty special that we have best buddies that push each other every day and get to do it in the same year.”
Blues players celebrated the occasion with Schenn shirts and hats with the captain’s No. 10 on them. Father Jeff gave a pregame speech in the locker room after coach Jim Montgomery said, “Schenner and his bro both getting 1,000 games in the same season is a tribute to the great family raised by Jeff and his wife.”
Jeff Schenn said Brayden was his favorite player on the Blues and tied for his favorite overall, of course, with Luke.
“Honored and privileged and very proud to be part of the big day and the big journey that goes along with it,” their dad said. “You see the hard work and the dedication and the bumps and the bruises and everything you guys put into it. … Just so excited and happy to be here and awful proud of him.”
Montgomery said after the win that Jeff Schenn looked very comfortable speaking in front of the group.
“Jeff and his wife, Brayden’s parents, they raised four great kids and two have played 1,000 games in the NHL,” Montgomery said. “His message was well-received, and you could tell by our start that we wanted to play for our captain.”
Dylan Holloway, who scored twice, said because it was Schenn’s 1,000th game, the Blues “wanted this one bad.”
The Capitals acknowledged the milestone with a message on arena videoboards and an announcement during the first period.
Brayden getting to 1,000 comes amid talk ahead of the March 7 trade deadline that teams are interested in acquiring both of them in separate moves. The Blues are on the fringe of the playoff race in the Western Conference, while the Predators are far out of contention.
“The times I’ve gotten traded, I didn’t expect to get traded, so you really never know,” Brayden said, adding he has loved his time with St. Louis. “It’s a business and that just comes with the flows of kind of where we’re positioned, five points out of the playoffs. But it’s the trade deadline, so some people make rumors. … You just take it a day at a time and just focus on your game and play.”
Brayden, 33, has three years left on his contract at an annual salary cap hit of $6.5 million. Luke, 35, has one more season left after this one at $2.75 million.
The Schenn brothers have played together in the NHL before, spending 3½ seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers from 2013 to 2015. Brayden won the Stanley Cup with the Blues in 2019, then Luke back to back with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2020 and 2021.
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