The salient focus of this podcast episode centers on the inaugural meeting of two prestigious college football programs, the Nittany Lions and the Fighting Irish. We delve into the historical context of their first encounter, which transpired in 1913 when both teams were still establishing their identities within college football. Through our discussion, we explore the evolving landscape of these storied institutions, examining how their early competition laid the groundwork for their future prominence in the sport. The episode not only recounts the details of this pivotal game but also reflects on the rich tapestry of college football history, highlighting the significance of rivalries and the emergence of teams within the national scene. We invite you to engage with this narrative, which encapsulates a football game and an era of transformation within collegiate athletics.

This information comes from his original post titled: The First Notre Dame-Penn State Game -

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• footballarchaeology.com
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You're getting ready to enter an episode where we're going to talk about some classic college football as the Nittany Lions and the Fighting Irish meet for the very first time.

Timothy P.

Brown comes on to tell us all about this story in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And welcome to another Tuesday where we talk with Timothy p.

Brown of footballarchaeology.com about some good history from the game of football.

Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey there.

Great to see you again.

Looking forward to chatting about an old rivalry, not really rivalry, but an old a series that began a long time ago.

How's that?

Yeah, that's, that's, that's fair to say.

And it's also been refreshed in this past season that we just, just recently in the college football playoffs.

And that will reveal the title of your tidbit that you had recently.

The first Notre Dame Penn State game.

And these are probably the two teams in college football I follow the most.

I'm a Notre Dame fan.

I live in Pennsylvania, so I followed them all through the season, every season.

And it was kind of exciting for me to have both teams playing in the College Football Playoff this year.

So I would wake up every Sunday morning and before charging off to Mass, or at least being taken to Mass, put it that way, I used to watch the Notre Dame highlights from the previous day.

And I think it was.

Was it Lindsay Nelson that did that?

But anyway, somebody did that and so it was.

I was a Notre Dame fan early on and then.

But my.

I'll just say the Notre Dame star has dimmed for me over the years and I was never a Penn State fan, so.

I'm sure.

Sure you weren't.

Especially since they joined the Big Ten.

I'm sure you weren't being wearing the big red W up there.

Yeah.

But I think we all have our faults.

But I think just like you, I mean, every young Catholic boy gets a lot of things beat into them from women wearing habits and going to Catholic school.

And one of them was the love Notre Dame.

And that's one of the things that stuck with me.

And I also don't chew glass gum in school anymore either.

So I learned two things from, from them.

That's good.

That's good.

Yes.

Yeah.

So this game, actually one of the cool things about, you know, they're both obviously storied programs, right?

And at the time, you know, one of, as I was doing research for that article and a couple others that were involved, there was an article talking about Notre Dame before they played.

And so some of the innovative things that he did at Notre Dame, he had developed, it's taken from Chicago, developed them further at Wabash, but they, the Wabash Notre Dame game was positioned in the newspapers as the Indiana small college football championship.

They weren't at the same level as Purdue or Indiana.

So Notre Dame was this dinky little band of Catholics up there in South Bend and Wabash.

I don't know what they are, Methodists or something like that, but.

And both all men, all male schools at the time.

So, you know, it's just one of those classic, you know, back then there were so many.

The small colleges were generally much more religiously affiliated than they are now.

And so, you know, like the newspaper headlines would say the Methodists beat the Presbyterians or whatever, which is just not something we typically think about with football headlines anymore.

But so the point is, you know, like, Notre Dame was brilliant.

I mean they, they had a couple of successful seasons.

They were undefeated in 11 and 12.

And then, and, and Penn State was too.

They were undefeated both of those years.

And so I think they were a little bit higher class team than Notre Dame.

You know, they, they'd had some pretty good seasons and they played a more competitive schedule, but they still were playing a lot of like the Indiana Normal schools and you know, the Muhlenbergs or whoever of the world, not teams that we now think of AS D3 schools.

So neither one of them was really, you know, they weren't at the same strata stratus that we associate with them today.

So.

So they just kind of blew the doors off of, off of army.

And then the next week they play at Penn State.

You know, so for Notre Dame, this is a big deal.

You know, they beat army and then they're going in, into, into Penn State.

And Penn State had a guy named Shorty Miller who was their quarterback.

And he was probably kind of like, you know, I've never been, been sure exactly how to pronounce the name, but Gus Darius, I believe is the pronunciation with Notre Dame's quarterback.

And so both kind of smaller, jitter buggy kinds of guys who could really throw the rock.

And so, you know, Miller kind of kept them in the game, but, you know, ultimately, you know, Notre Dame just wore him down.

So it was what we would now call homecoming at Penn State.

Then they called it Pennsylvania Day because, you know, the homecoming thing hadn't quite caught on yet.

So, you know, it's just one of those great games.

They're in this dinky little town, State College or whatever, you know, whatever the name of it is, out out there in the hills somewhere in Pennsylvania.

And you know, I mean, I don't know what their, you know, what their enrollment was at the time, but you know, dinky little place it was then.

I think it was Beaver Field.

Maybe it was Beaver Stadium by then because they, they had built, I think they built the thing just prior to then.

But you know, one of the fun things was who scored the first touchdown in the Penn State Notre Dame series.

You have a guess?

Shorty Miller.

Nope.

New Rockney.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, so he caught a.

Notre Dame, intercepted the pass.

I think, I think he, maybe Rockney caught like a 35 yard pass and they had a 40 yard pass in a 35 yard run and then, you know, then they tossed it in, you know, to him for the touchdown.

But so then, you know, Penn State actually they didn't have a great team that year.

They ended up, I think they were two and three entering that game and they lost one or two more, whereas, you know, Notre Dame ended up 70 after beating Penn State.

I think they beat like Christian Brothers College down in St.

Louis.

That doesn't exist anymore.

And then they, then they went down to Texas and beat Texas, which at the time was Not a real great football team either.

Right.

Again, these are, you know, a little bit different story now.

But so anyway, it's just for me the fun thing about that game is that it was a good game.

Some, you know, some really top notch players involved in the game and then.

But just that it was, you know, nobody really cared too much at the time about Notre Dame and Penn State, you know, so they were both emerging kind of onto the national scene.

Penn State probably really came on with when Bezdek, you know, became their coach and they go to the Rose bowl in like 24.

I think it was 23 or 24.

You know, Notre Dame's in the Rose bowl at 25 and 25 when rock needs to coach.

And so you know, they were, they were both, they were both serious players by the 20s, but in the teens still, still kind of marginal, still not quite there.

Yeah, I guess something I recall back doing research for a book I wrote last year on when Greasy met the wonder coach Andy Smith.

The coach ended up being the coach of the Cal Wonder teams attended Penn State his, his first couple years if I remember correctly.

And he left Penn State to go to a much more established college team of the University of Pennsylvania, the Pen Quakers, who I, I guess at the time was the largest enrolled university in the United States.

And now you look at them today, I'm, I'm, I don't know have the attendance figures, but I'm sure Penn State in State College, that campus is much bigger than University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia by enrollment or anything right now, especially as a football power.

So it's just amazing.

And that's only probably six or seven years.

So definitely I know Penn was the biggest school in the country when World War I started just because it came up in a, in my first book, they had 7,000 students.

So you know, Yale and Harvard were among the biggest.

And then like Michigan was really big, Cal was big, Wisconsin was big.

So some of the, the Midwest, you know, Land Grant schools were pretty big.

But otherwise, I mean, but you know, still Penn, 7,000 students, you know, so schools were just much smaller, you know, back then.

But you know, and they got, took whatever kids they had on campus and tried to make a football team out of them.

Yeah, that's just some amazing facts.

And amazing what with the history of the game, how it's changed, and some of these forgotten facts from yesteryear that we, you know, it's hard for us to appreciate now, but when you bring them to light in your tidbits, it really shed some light on an amazing story of what football really is and some of the people that did it.

Maybe you could share with the audience how they can partake in some of your tidbits.

Yeah, just, you know, my, my site is footballarchaeology.com it's a substack site.

So just go there, take a look around, and if you like it, you can subscribe.

You know, there's, there's free and paid subscriptions.

Basically the free subscription you get about a third of the things that I post.

You'll always get the, the podcast.

Those are always available.

And then, but, and then there's, you know, paid subscriptions as well.

And then you can follow me on, on Blue sky as well.

Well, Tim, we definitely, we appreciate what you do@footballarchaeology.com we really appreciate these nuggets of knowledge that you share with us each Tuesday and we to talk to you again next Tuesday.

Looking forward to it.

Thank you.

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