Some of them are noteworthy for the athletic record they compiled at other schools after transferring from UT, or their success at Texas in sports besides football. Other non-lettermen deserve mention for their accomplishments outside the realm of sports.

One such non-letterman of note is C.E. Scoggins, who was a reserve lineman on the 1906 Texas football team while he attended UT as an engineering student, then had a long and accomplished career as an author several years after leaving the University of Texas. He penned dozens of short stories that were published in popular magazines and periodicals from the late 1910s through the late 1940s, wrote eleven books that were all very well reviewed, and even had two of his stories adapted into movies. But even the most voracious reader of today could be forgiven for having never heard of him.

This is C.E. Scoggins’s story.

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Early life and college years

Charles Elbert Scoggins was born in 1888 in the city of Matazlan on the west coast of Mexico, where his father, the Rev. Jefferson Davis Scoggins, was a Methodist missionary. His father was born in Alabama in September of 1861 and named for Jefferson Davis, who had become the president of the Confederate States of America seven months earlier after the first seven (out of an eventual eleven) states that formed the Confederacy seceded from the United States, a secession that led to the Civil War.

Charles was the second-oldest of four children in his family, and he spent the first four years of his life in Mexico before his family moved to Texas due to his father’s health. The Rev. J.D. Scoggins was serving as pastor of the Methodist church in Henrietta, Texas (a town about 20 miles east of Wichita Falls and a short distance south of the Red River) at the time of his death in March of 1895. Different contemporary sources attributed his death to “congestion of the brain” or “la grippe” (a type of influenza).12 Charles turned seven just two days before his father’s death, and one of his younger brothers died from an illness only four months later. Charles, along with his mother, his older sister, and a younger brother (who was only ten months old when their father died) lived for periods of time in Henrietta and Ballinger before they eventually settled in Denton.

Charles Elbert Scoggins was commonly known by his middle name as a youth and into his college years, though his high school friends called him “Chuck”. Later, as a professional writer, he was almost always referred to as C.E. Scoggins, and occasionally as C. Elbert Scoggins.

Elbert Scoggins attended Denton High School, where he played guard on the football team and second baseman on the baseball team. He was notably the editor-in-chief of Denton High’s very first Bronco yearbook, which was published when he was a senior in 1905, some years before Denton’s athletic teams adopted the Bronco as their mascot.

His academic standing earned him a scholarship to the University of Texas, and he enrolled at UT as an engineering student in the Fall of 1905. At that time, it was common for the different academic classes at the University to form their own football teams for intramural competition, with a class champion team eventually being crowned. Such games might be played between the academic sophomores and the junior law students, or the freshman engineers and academic seniors, for example. Members of the UT varsity football team were not allowed to participate in the class games, but they often served as coaches for their classmates. Scoggins played on the freshman engineers football team in 1905, which won the class championship and had its picture featured in the 1906 Cactus yearbook.

Scoggins was the treasurer of the freshmen engineering class for the 1905-06 winter term, and that year’s UT catalog listed him as an electrical engineering student. During his freshman year he also contributed to The Texan, the campus newspaper that was published weekly at that time. Below are a few cartoons drawn by Scoggins that appeared in the “Freshman Issue” of The Texan that was published on January 26, 1906, and which were likely in reference to the engineering freshmen winning the class football title.

He also drew at least one of the cartoons featured in the 1906 Cactus yearbook. The one seen below was on page 88 and introduced the yearbook’s short section on the freshman engineering class.

In the Spring of 1906 he was initiated into the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and near the end of his freshman year he was named an associate editor of the Cactus for the upcoming 1906-07 academic year.3

In the Fall of 1906, Scoggins went out for the Longhorn football team. He was a reserve tackle on the varsity squad, and at 6’2” and 168 pounds he was only slightly undersized for the position at that time. He saw little playing time for the Texas varsity and was not awarded a letter for the 1906 season, and many years later when Lou Maysel wrote his exhaustive 1970 history of the program Here Come the Texas Longhorns, 1893-1970, the roster he included for the 1906 team did not name Scoggins as a member. But contemporary articles indicate that he appeared in at least two home games and traveled with the team for some away games.

Scoggins relieved starting left tackle Henry Fink during UT’s season-opening 21-0 victory over a team from the 26th Infantry (which was based at Fort Sam Houston) on October 6. Two weeks later on October 20 he reportedly scored on a touchdown run in the first half against San Antonio’s West Texas Military Academy in a game Texas won 28-0.4 In that era it was not unusual for tackles to be moved into the backfield and used as ball-carriers.

A week later, the Texas football team left Austin by train for a three-game road trip in which it played games against Vanderbilt, Arkansas, and Oklahoma all in the span of seven days. Scoggins was one of just 19 players selected to travel with the varsity for that grueling trip, which began with a lopsided 45-0 loss at Vanderbilt on October 27 (which would be the team’s only loss of that season), but concluded with wins at Arkansas and Oklahoma in games played just two days apart.

Scoggins was not mentioned in any published reports that I have found covering UT’s games following the West Texas Military Academy contest in late October, and he was not included in the varsity football team picture that was featured in the 1907 Cactus, but he was one of the identified players in a more informal team picture that was published in early December of 1906 in the San Antonio Light.

He also showed his early affinity for writing by contributing a story titled “The Scrub” to the November 1906 edition of the University of Texas magazine, which may have been inspired by his time as a “scrub” on the Texas football team.5

Scoggins did not complete his engineering studies at UT and was no longer a student after the 1906-07 academic year. Years later, an Austin American writer recalled that Scoggins had earned four A’s in his math courses during his time at UT, but — paradoxically, considering his eventual profession — received three D’s and one E grade in English. UT’s longtime engineering dean Thomas Ulvan “T.U.” Taylor credited (perhaps in jest) Scoggins’s success as a fiction writer to his calculus studies.6

C.E. Scoggins becomes a full-time writer

After leaving the University in 1907, Scoggins worked for the next few years on railroad and bridge construction jobs in Mexico and Central America. In 1912 he moved on from that livelihood and became a traveling salesman for a company that manufactured sawmill equipment, and his sales territory included Florida, Georgia, and Cuba. In December of 1913 he married Lois Durham, an Indiana native who he met through a mutual acquaintance who had worked with Scoggins in Mexico. Their only child, a daughter named Nancy, was born about a year later. Mr. and Mrs. Scoggins lived in Jacksonville, Florida for the next few years before moving to Lois’s hometown of Muncie, Indiana by 1920. By the time he moved his family to Muncie, Scoggins had made a significant career change.

In 1917, he had a chance meeting with the popular mystery author Mary Roberts Rinehart during a business trip while on a boat bound for Cuba. Rinehart — who would later be dubbed “the American Agatha Christie”, despite the fact that her first mystery novel preceded Christie’s by 12 years — had published over a dozen novels and had several of her stories adapted into silent films by that point in her career (the first “talkie” movies were still a decade away). In a conversation with Rinehart and her husband, Scoggins told them about his business travels and experiences living and working in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Mrs. Rinehart took a great interest in his accounts and encouraged him to write about them.

Up to that point Scoggins had dabbled in writing but had not seriously considered pursing it as a career, thinking that “authors were a special breed and not at all human.”7 “[Rinehart] talked as if, even I, might write,” he recalled nine years later.

Scoggins attempted to write a fictional short story soon after meeting Rinehart, and in a 1926 article in the Elkhart Truth, he talked about how a magazine’s rejection of it indirectly led to his first sale as a writer.

I wrote “Jerry Remembers Something.” A [magazine] refused it. I dropped it in the drawer of my desk and forgot it. My daughter, then at the paper-tearing age, discovered it. Collecting the fragments, I read a paragraph and found myself grinning. Said I to myself, “Why, it’s actually funny.” So I rewrote it and sold it to a popular weekly magazine for as much as I could earn in two months selling saws.

I’d found the thing I always yearned to do, without ever dreaming that I actually could. So I quit work and went to writing stories.8

The short story “Jerry Remembers Something” was published in The Saturday Evening Post‘s January 25, 1919 issue and was the first of many Scoggins-penned stories to be published in that magazine over the next 30 years. It was not, however, his first story to appear in print, as the year 1918 had seen three of his short stories published in other magazines. The first of those was “The Voice of Things Forgotten”, published in February of 1918 (a few weeks before Scoggins’s 30th birthday) in The Green Book Magazine, a story which can be read here.

As would be the case with most of his published stories, “The Voice of Things Forgotten” portrayed American characters in a Latin American setting, trappings he was very familiar with because of his early upbringing and his immediate post-college years. His protagonists were often Americans who came south to Latin America to work a construction job, to search for lost Inca or Mayan gold, or perhaps to hunt for the remains of a lost civilization somehow connected to Atlantis. Often the American hero would find a love interest among the women native to the story’s setting.

Scoggins’s career turn from traveling salesman to full-time writer was official by the time of the 1920 census, in which his occupation was listed as “author”, and his industry as “fiction”. In addition to the Saturday Evening Post and Green Book Magazine, he sold stories during his first decade as a professional writer to Collier’s, Ladies Home Journal, Romance, The Red Book Magazine, Smith’s Magazine, and Woman’s Home Companion, among others. C.E. Scoggins and Mary Roberts Rinehart had short stories separated by one page in the June 1920 issue of Ladies Home Journal, just three years removed from their fateful meeting that spurred the former’s interest in pursuing a career in writing.

Scoggins’s first book, The Proud Old Name, was published in 1925 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, a book publisher based in Indianapolis, Indiana. It had originally been published as a short story in the Saturday Evening Post’s November 13, 1924 issue. As far as books go it was very short, reportedly only about 25,000 words. A review of the book that was published in the Oakland Tribune described its plot as “the story of a youth, a miner from college, who falls in love with the daughter of a grandee across the border in Mexico and comes near to causing international troubles.”9

One year later saw the publication of his second book, The Red Gods Call, which had originally been serialized in the Saturday Evening Post under the title “The Country of Old Men”. The Red Gods Call was also published by Bobbs-Merrill, which would be the American publisher for Scoggins’s first six books.

The Red Gods Call took its title from a line that is repeated six times in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem “The Feet of the Young Men”. Its protagonist, Howard Pressley, is a young man from Milo, Indiana (a fictional stand-in for Muncie) whose fiancé is won away from him by a man who thrills her with tales of his travels in South America (this subplot may have been a slight fictionalization of how Scoggins met and married his wife). Howard then travels to South America himself and gets involved in the lumber and mahogany trade with the help of an old American expatriate, and has a duel and is framed for murder along the way.

The title character of Scoggins’s third book, White Fox (published in 1928), is a descendant of the 16th century Aztec emperor Montezuma. He is spotted by a Hollywood film production crew that has traveled to Mexico to shoot a movie about the ancient Aztecs, then is charmed by the movie’s leading lady and talked into taking a role in the film, which leads to him coming to New York.

By the late 1920s Scoggins was writing exclusively for the Saturday Evening Post, and between 1930 and 1940 he had seven stories published in the Post as multi-part serials. It was reported in 1932 that Scoggins “writes at the rate of about 10,000 words a month, or one full length serial every six months.”10 All of his books were first published in the Saturday Evening Post, either as short stories or serials.

His 1930 book The Walking Stick, which was set in fictional Mumford, Indiana, was his only book-length story that took place entirely in small town America. Scoggins enjoyed carrying a cane for his own amusement, and his writing The Walking Stick supposedly came about after the denizens of Muncie teased him about his cane and “he couldn’t take the banter so well.”11 A syndicated Gilbert Swan column from March of 1933 that was carried in newspapers around the country said that C.E. Scoggins “dislikes New York but comes here from Indiana or Colorado about once a year to indulge his fancy for carrying a walking stick.”12

After the Indianapolis-based Bobbs-Merrill published C.E. Scoggins’s first six books between 1925 and 1931, his last five were all published by various New York-based companies. He also attained a following across the Atlantic Ocean during his career.

Contemporary newspaper advertisements and reviews indicate that some of his books were published and sold in Canada and the United Kingdom, and at least one of them in Australia. A few were even translated into one or more Scandinavian languages (Danish, Finnish, and Swedish).

He wrote eleven books in all, and later in this post I will provide publication details for each of them accompanied by snippets of contemporary reviews.13 His last novel, Lost Road, was published in 1941 by Doubleday, Doran & Company. In preparation for that book he traveled extensively through South America and took multiple airplane trips back and forth over the Andes Mountains.14

Scoggins’s writing output primarily consisted of fictional stories, but he also wrote the occasional non-fiction article. The February 1927 issue of The American Legion Monthly featured a Scoggins article titled “What’s Become of Sergeant York”. The March 4, 1933 Saturday Evening Post included a Scoggins article titled “Romance or Realism?”, in which he wrote about an unexpected reunion in New York with a former colleague who he had worked with many years earlier in Mexico. An article by F. Scott Fitzgerald (“One Hundred False Starts”) appeared one page after “Romance or Realism?” in that issue. Scoggins also co-wrote an article about Venezuela’s Angel Falls with Ernest Thomas “E.T.” Gilliard called “The Eighth Wonder of the World”, which was published in the Saturday Evening Post’s July 26, 1941 issue.

Some of his stories were also featured in anthologies. The World’s Fifty Best Short Novels was a collection that was edited by Grant Martin Overton and published as a ten-volume set of books in 1929. One of the “novels” in volume nine was “The Tumtum Tree”, a short story by Scoggins that was first published in the Saturday Evening Post’s April 12, 1924 issue. Other authors whose work was featured in that anthology included Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Oscar Wilde.

The British author and bibliographer Phil Stephensen-Payne has compiled fairly exhaustive records of serials, short stories, novelettes, and articles published in various magazines at his Galactic Central website, which includes indexes by author. The last magazine piece by C.E. Scoggins that appears on Stephensen-Payne’s list is a novelette titled “Now I Have a Son”, published in the Saturday Evening Post’s October 8, 1949 issue.

C.E. Scoggins and the movies

Film studios took an interest in Scoggins’s work at least as early as 1923, when Universal Pictures bought the rights to “The Hog”, a short story that was published in the Saturday Evening Post in January of that year. Universal reportedly intended for it to be made into a film starring Hoot Gibson, the former rodeo champion turned prolific western film actor, but it appears that no film adaptation of “The Hog” was produced.15

C.E. Scoggins’s short story “Jungle” was published in the Saturday Evening Post in November of 1928, and it became his first story to be adapted for the screen when MGM produced a 1929 film version titled Untamed, which starred Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery. Crawford played a young woman raised in a South American jungle who is brought to New York after the death of her father, a wealthy oil explorer. There she encounters a much more modern and refined society and customs than she has grown accustomed to in the jungle. Untamed was the first non-musical sound film (or “talkie”) that Crawford starred in, and it can be viewed in its entirety on its Wikipedia page.

Scoggins’s serial “Tycoon” was published over six installments of the Post starting in November of 1932, and was published as a novel in 1934 by the New York-based publisher Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Tycoon was adapted into a 1947 film of the same name, which was produced by RKO Pictures and starred John Wayne and Laraine Day. Its story was centered on an American engineer (Wayne) who attempts to tunnel through the Andes Mountains to build a railroad track for a South American millionaire whose daughter he falls for.

C.E. Scoggins’s later years and death

After living in Muncie for about seven years, Scoggins and his family sailed to Spain in 1927, where he hoped to learn more about life in that country and obtain material and inspiration for future stories.

They lived for about two years in the city of Málaga on Spain’s southern coast. His daughter Nancy was on the cusp of her teen years at the time of their arrival, and during their stay she was educated in a Roman Catholic convent. Nancy Scoggins later wrote a short story of her own inspired by her time in Spain, which appeared in Liberty magazine in October of 1936 and was titled “The Nun Who Met the Rebels”.

The Scoggins family returned to the United States in 1929, but rather than resettle in Muncie they ended up moving into a newly built house in Boulder, Colorado within a year of their stateside return. Boulder would be C.E. Scoggins’s home for the rest of his life, and the city in which he lived longer than any other after living in multiple countries and at least three different American states during his first 44 years.

Boulder is a much larger city than Muncie today; its population at the time of the 2020 census was over 108,000, compared with Muncie’s 65,000. But when Scoggins moved to Boulder in 1930 its population was just over 11,000, less than one-fourth the number of residents who called Muncie home at that time. Though Scoggins liked Muncie and made many return trips there with his wife to visit friends, he explained that he moved his family west “because he believed he could think better, and therefore write better” in Boulder.16

On October 21, 1933, Scoggins and his wife traveled to Fort Collins, Colorado to attend a football game between the University of Colorado and Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State University), which was won by the latter by a score of 19-6. During that trip he “was an honor guest at a dinner given by Mrs. Grace Akin Naismith”, who was then an employee of Colorado Agricultural College and would later have a three-decade career as a writer and consulting editor with Reader’s Digest. A news blurb in the Fort Collins Express-Courier that told of C.E. Scoggins’s weekend visit to that city also mentioned his brief time as a football player at the University of Texas, and noted that he “speaks [the language] of football as well as that of the novelist.”17 I have not run across any other news articles from his years as a writer that mentioned him having played college football.

In addition to his own fiction writing, Scoggins taught other writers for over 20 years as a regular instructor and speaker at an annual writers conference hosted by the University of Colorado, at which he often spoke about the art of writing serials for magazines. His fellow speakers at the 1949 writers conference, to cite one example, included James Michener (who had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the previous year) and the Texan writer (and former University of Texas faculty member) J. Frank Dobie.18

In December of 1955, Scoggins checked in to a Boulder hospital due to what was described at the time as “a kidney ailment”. He died three days later, at the age of 67. His death was reported in newspapers around the country. Many of the stories about his passing stated that his 1936 novel Pampa Joe was seen as his best work, and erroneously said it had been adapted into a movie, likely mistaking it for Tycoon.

His books are almost all out of print now, and the first five or six are in the public domain, having been published in 1931 or earlier. If you search for C.E. Scoggins books online, you’ll find at least a few websites with used copies available for sale. First edition copies of his books can be found on eBay for as little as $10 or north of $60. A reputedly signed copy of his 1929 novel John Quixote is priced at $99.95.

C.E. Scoggins seems to be a largely forgotten name today, though his books evidently sold well and were reviewed very positively in their time, and two of his stories served as the basis of movies with very famous stars in the lead roles.

The public libraries in Denton, Texas (where he graduated high school), Muncie, Indiana (where he lived when he first came to prominence as a published author), and Boulder, Colorado (where he lived for the last 25 years of his life) have a combined two copies of his books in their respective collections if their online catalogs are accurate. The Norlin Library at the University of Colorado Boulder, however, has a copy of all eleven of his books, and that university’s archives are home to the “Charles Scoggins Papers”.

C.E. Scoggins bibliography, with selected contemporary reviews

The Proud Old Name (1925)

Published by Bobbs-Merrill Company (Indianapolis, Indiana). Originally published as a short story in the November 14, 1924 Saturday Evening Post.
It was republished in a “Special Annotated Edition” in 2023 by LBME Publishing along with “Not So, Bolivia”, a Scoggins short story that served as a sequel to The Proud Old Name and which was originally published in the April 24, 1926 Saturday Evening Post.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Page review:

“The Proud Old Name” is just a brief monologue about the double-barreled love affairs of a young American in Mexico. It might have been told in any one of forty ways. The cheerful fact is that Scoggins has told it in the best possible way. It’s quite the best bet on the shelf for something short and snappy.19

Miami Herald Books and Writers note:

“The Proud Old Name,” by C.E. Scoggins, will prove entertaining for half an hour. By then it will have been finished. No less a personage than John Cottan Dana, one of America’s most noted librarians, read the book and wrote that he hoped “it would live for a century or so.”20

The Red Gods Call (1926)

Published by Bobbs-Merrill Company. Originally serialized in six parts in the Saturday Evening Post under the title “The Country of Old Men”, beginning with its March 13, 1926 issue.
Published in Canada by McLelland & Stewart, and in the United Kingdom and Australia by Cassell and Company.
Translated into Danish and published in Denmark in 1938.
One of his books (likely The Red Gods Call) was translated into Swedish and published under the title Mahogny in 1939 by Wahlstrom & Widstrand.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Page review:

[Scoggins] has humor, a dry and detached humor such as we have not found in any other storyteller in a long while. He has force, yet he does not explode.

He is a romantic, in the best sense of the word. He doesn’t gush. He remembers all the time, of course, that he is telling a story.21

Miami Daily News review:

Once in a while there comes a book that is neither of the modern stamp nor of the old time conventional novel form, and its coming is a cause of pardonable happiness on the part of those who like to read. Such a book is this latest from the pen of C.E. Scoggins.

The Red Gods Call is a story of the tropics, Central America—containing enough of revolutions, duels, blood, intrigue and love to make it thoroughly satisfactory in every way. But is has something more, gained in the telling. For Scoggins, they say, knows about revolutions first hand; he was born in Mexico.

Just a plain, straightforward story, this book, and its charm lies greatly in the simplicity of its telling. It is about an American, a salesman, who unwillingly is drawn into the greatest of adventures in the little hot countries of Central America. Here and there among the Latin-Americans goes the thread of this amazing yarn, yet despite its windings, it is not difficult to follow.22

The poet and novelist Stephen Vincent Benét reviewed The Red Gods Call in The Saturday Review of Literature. Benét, who was 27 years old at the time, would later be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929 and 1944, the latter of which was awarded posthumously. After offering some light criticism of the book’s ending, he wrote:

But there can be no doubt of the fact that in “The Red Gods Call,” Mr. Scoggins has not only written what may well be the best American adventure story of the year, but displayed in the writing of it, a certain promise of genuine distinction in the particular field he has chosen that augurs well for his future. It is by far the best thing of its sort that the present reviewer has come across since T.S. Stribling’s “Fombombo”.23

White Fox (1928)

Published by Bobbs-Merrill. Originally published as a short story in the September 17, 1927 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

Salt Lake Tribune review:

Mr. Scoggins is a rare story-teller. His book, which is no more than a novelette, being less than 175 pages in length, is handled in a manner that calls for no criticism. The material from which he fashions his romance would no doubt have been spun to twice its length by the majority of novelists, but Mr. Scoggins evidently believes in no embroidering or padding. He gives you the essentials of a story, leaving you to employ your imagination in filling in such details as you desire. Sparse and compactly written as it is, it is lacking neither in color nor atmosphere, in humor nor human nature.24

From a Brooklyn Daily Times review:

White Fox, a descendant of Montezuma, becomes inveigled in the motion picture business through the allure and machinations of one Delores, a movie queen, who is Spanish purely by accident and whose knowledge of this tongue is considerably limited.

Mr. Scoggins contrasts in his tale the oldest civilization of America with the modern motion picture interpretation of such times. White Fox may be an uncivilized Inca, according to modern standards, but he turns a “first night” into a personal triumph by his unvarnished presentation of the life of his people as he has received its story from tradition, and not according to the white man’s standards.25

John Quixote (1929)

Published by Bobbs-Merrill. Originally published as a three-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its May 4, 1929 issue.

From a Gene Cohn book column that was published in several American newspapers:

In America, it has seemed to me that one C.E. Scoggins has long merited a leading position among story tellers… Scoggins has an absolutely swell idea to begin with. He pictures a romantic young Americano, John Hunter, Disillusioned at the commercialism and brutality connected with bull-fighting and generally disappointed at the lack of romantic flavor to be found in Spain when—presto!—he’s whisked on the trail of a beautiful senorita.

His trail takes him — of all places — to La Mancha and the immortal windmill of Don Quixote. Thereafter, the tale becomes a combination of amusing paraphrase of Quixotish adventure, plus real swashbuckling romance. Nor is Scoggins afraid of ironic pokes — such as the intrusion of tourist motor-busses and American concrete mixers into his scene.26

From an Elsie Ford book column in the Galt (California) Herald:

“John Quixote” is one of the really fine novels of the season… The story is marvelously well told and full of color and action.27

The Walking Stick (1930)

Published by Bobbs-Merrill. Originally published as a two-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its April 19, 1930 issue.

From a review in the South Bend Tribune:

Hoosiers will want to read Mr. Scoggins’ miniature novel if for no other reason than the story centers around an Indiana city called Mumford, which is strangely similar to another city in the state called Muncie, where the author resides. Mumford, in fact, could be also South Bend, Fort Wayne, Evansville, or any one of several Hoosier communities.

It is a miniature novel only in length; not, certainly, in the scope of its theme as conceived by Mr. Scoggins. “The Walking Stick” is a story of a small city and of a youth who discovers he is by temperament an alien.

Both sides of the familiar Main Street are thus portrayed; the sympathetic, we-are-all-fellow-men side, and the unsympathetic, critical viewpoint of American provincialism. Mr. Scoggins has been away from Muncie for several years. The Perspective of distance gave him a nice con-conception [sic] of “Mumford’s” limitations. His own experiences as a householder qualified him to present the opposite picture; he does it with a fine understanding and an artistic use of words.28

The House of Darkness (1931)

Published by Bobbs-Merrill. Originally published as a six-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its December 13, 1930 issue.

From a review of the serialized version of the story in The Southwestern of Weatherford, Oklahoma, a product of the journalism class at what was then called Southwestern State Teachers College (now Southwestern Oklahoma State University):

“The House of Darkness” certainly appeals to the mentally hairy-chested he-man type of reader with the average hankering for stimulating brain-fodder that includes something other than the outworn western two-gun character. As a yarn designed for such readers, this bit of fiction certainly has “it.”

…

Explorations of great importance to archaeology, fantastic discoveries of marvelous architecture and sculpture of a lost and forgotten civilization, and a grim battle against odds in the tenacious jungle combine in a gripping series of events to form a dignified background for one of the most unusual of love stories.29

From a review by Lee F. Heacock in the Buffalo News:

While the theme of romantic moderns discovering ancient civilizations, amid all sorts of peril, has been pretty well combed over, Mr. Scoggins has succeeded in building up a tale on this topic that puts him at once in a class with H. Rider Haggard. Under his touch the remote Mayan culture, while losing nothing of its mystic glamour, becomes vitalized as an actuality.

Into his story are woven adventure, romance, mystery and the cunning devices of imminent danger without departing from the modernistic realism of present-day fiction. His characters are people one might know, rather than figures of perfection arrayed against fiends in human form.30

From a San Antonio Express review, which will be amusing to anyone who still loves the printed word in this modern era when booksellers and authors have to compete with all manner of screens and other distracting technologies for the attention of potential readers:

C.E. Scoggins, who can spin an enthralling yarn, as he proved when he gave us “The Red Gods Call,” has hearkened once more to whispers from the jungles of Yucatan and has written “The House of Darkness.” It is thoroughly readable, even thrilling to any one not absolutely wedded to the movies and jazz and shrieking radio and all such other impediments of 1931.31

Flame (1932)

Published by William Morrow & Company (New York). Originally published as a six-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its December 19, 1931 issue.

Howard Rockey’s review in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

For a trip of a summer holiday, C.E. Scoggins’ “Flame” (Morrrow [sic]) is an ideal companion. In this sprightly yarn of tropical adventure, in which well-bred young moderns mingle with the scum of the earth and picturesquely polite and impolite villains, Mr. Scoggins has given us something a bit different and quite exciting. Of course it didn’t and couldn’t happen, but one does not care. Every moment, from that night in a disreputable Harlem speakeasy to the end of what happened on a romantic Caribbean island one is stirred through each fantastic chapter. If you like your romance straight you will get a kick out of “Flame”, even though its wallop is largely synthetic.32

From a review published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Scoggins’ novel, as the press agent would say, is a smash hit. It has enough smashing and hitting per page to satisfy even the most jaded appetite.33

Tycoon (1934)

Published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company (New York). Originally published as a six-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its November 26, 1932 issue. Published in Canada by Thomas Allen.
Published in the United Kingdom by Skeffington & Son.
It was later adapted into a 1947 film produced by RKO Pictures starring John Wayne, with the adapted screenplay written by Borden Chase and John Twist.

From a review in the Mayfield Messenger of Mayfield, Kentucky:

This book is for old timers who like a dashing hero, a lonely lady held captive in a tower and a cold unrelenting father. Though the setting is modern, the hero a construction man in Central America, the lady a lovely senorita, and the father a tycoon still the story is decidedly eighteenth century in tone…

Mr. Scoggins has never written a more interesting tale of the wide open spaces. Johnny O’Fallon is a very lakable [sic] Texas hero and his adventures prove exciting and endear him to his readers.34

The House of Dawn (1935)

Published by D. Appleton-Century Company (New York). Originally published as a six-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its February 17, 1934 issue.
A 2009 paperback version was published by Westholme Publishing (Yardley, Pennsylvania).
Published in the United Kingdom by Skeffington & Son.
Translated into Swedish and published in 1941 by Wahlstrom & Wistrand (Stockholm, Sweden).
Translated into Finnish and published in 1944 by Tammi (Helsinki, Finland).

A short review of The House of Dawn published in London’s Daily Telegraph:

To this story of a search for Inca gold in Peru the author has given such an air of authenticity that in its class the book is outstanding. A party under “Red” McDougall sets out to find Iscacinga, “the mountain riven to its base.” Here, he believes, the Incas obtained their gold and here they concealed the majority of their treasures during the Spanish invasion.

The Atmosphere becomes charged with very real suspense when, at the moment of the party’s success, modern gunmen arrive and refuse to make a move until the gold is forthcoming, and then, upon its discovery, calmly await a suitable opportunity to massacre the entire outfit. The situation throughout and the ultimate solutions are handled with easy skill and restraint, and Mr. Scoggins has succeeded in making a very convincing story from an old theme.35

Pampa Joe (1936)

Published by D. Appleton-Century Company. Originally published as a six-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its July 13, 1935 issue.
Translated into Swedish and published in 1943 by Wahlstrom & Wistrand.
Translated into Finnish and published in 1944 by Tammi.

A short review that appeared in Winston-Salem’s Twin City Sentinel:

C.E. Scoggins, in “Pampa Joe” tells of adventure on the great pampas of the Argentine. In its setting of vast treeless plains, the story has the vigor and color of one of the most picturesque of South American landscapes. Love, romance, knavery, fighting, speculation, and humanity are joined to form a tale notable for the author’s ability to people the adventure with characters who are truly alive and distinctive.36

Lost Road (1941)

Published by Doubleday, Doran & Company (New York). Originally published under the title “Man Lost” as a six-part serial in the Saturday Evening Post beginning with its October 12, 1940 issue.
Published in Canada by McLelland.

From a review by Milton Hopkins that was published in the Daily Oklahoman:

Lost Road is something out of the ordinary in the way of adventure stories. It starts in casually for a page or two but quickly gains momentum so that at the end of the second chapter you are well along in its narrative and anxious to continue. The suspense gets better and better, but a satisfactory conclusion leaves one contented and happy…

Scoggins has written a really grand story of jungle life. A great deal of archeological and anthropological information is included as well so that one feels that one really is not wasting time reading light fiction. It is recommended as a very readable thriller and one which you will enjoy.37

I would love to hear from any actual readers of C.E. Scoggins’s work who might happen to run across this post.

The city of Granbury is the seat of Hood County, which was created by the Texas legislature in 1866 by carving it out of what had formerly been parts of Johnson County and Erath County. Hood County itself is named for another Confederate general, John Bell Hood, who was also the namesake of the U.S. Army post Fort Hood in central Texas from 1942 until 2023.

The same act of the Texas legislature that created Hood County also deemed that its seat be called Granbury, though it took five years to settle on the location that would become the town of Granbury. A small portion of southern Hood County became Somervell County by a further act of the state legislature in 1875.

Hiram Granbury was buried in Tennessee after his death, but several years later officials in the town of Granbury obtained clearance from his surviving sister (who lived about 100 miles away in Brownwood, Texas) to have his remains moved to a new gravesite in town of which he was the namesake. A re-burial ceremony of General Granbury’s remains was held on November 30, 1893, exactly 29 years after his death at the Battle of Franklin, and the very same day that the University of Texas played its first football game.

Granbury was a small farming town for many years, and its population in 1940 (1,166) was essentially the same as it had been fifty years earlier. Its population grew steadily in the following decades, and after the construction of the DeCordova Bend Dam on the Brazos River created Lake Granbury in 1969, several new neighborhoods were built on or near the shore of the new lake. Granbury’s population reached five digits for the first time with the 2020 census, which showed 10,958 residents living there, though its city limits cover a relatively small area and there are far more people than that who would claim Granbury as their residence if asked. The 2020 census showed that over 58,000 people lived in the area that is served by the Granbury Independent School District.

Granbury High School, the town’s only high school, has been one of the largest schools in Class 5A over the past several years, and with the University Interscholastic League (UIL) realignment last month it was moved up to Class 6A (currently the UIL’s highest classification) for the 2026-28 competition years. GHS has an enrollment of 2,264 students according to the figures the UIL used for this year’s realignment.

To the extent that Granbury High School has a prestigious athletic tradition, it is in sports other than football. Its boys’ soccer team won the first Class 4A state championship in 19991. Its girls’ basketball team, which for many years was the school’s second-biggest athletic draw behind the football team, has reached a state championship game on three occasions (most recently in 1978) and had some elite teams in the late 1990s and early 2000s led by future WNBA veteran Jia Perkins, but the Lady Pirates have never won a state title. The majority of state champions that Granbury can claim are individuals who won events at state track & field meets.

The Granbury Pirates football team has produced one NFL player: Johnny Perkins, a wide receiver who played for the New York Giants from 1977 to 1983, and was the father of the aforementioned WNBA player Jia Perkins. Several other Pirates have suited up for college football programs at various levels over the years, but very seldom in recent memory has a GHS alum played at the NCAA Division I level.

Granbury has a minimal number of connections with the Texas Longhorns football program. At least three Texas Longhorn football lettermen lived in Granbury before their college years, and they had varying levels of connection with the town.

James William “Red” Goodwin, who was UT’s starting center for most of the 1939 and 1940 seasons, was born in 1916 to parents who were native to the Granbury area, and he lived there for his early years. Goodwin’s family moved to Amarillo while he was still very young, and he spent the rest of his childhood there. During his last two years of high school he played on Amarillo High’s state champion football teams of 1934 and 1935. I wrote a post on Goodwin’s life and football career at Burnt Orange Nation in 2021. That’s the last I’ll mention of him in this post, since he left Granbury long before his high school years.

Jerrel Bolton played tight end at Texas in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he is the only Granbury High School graduate to win a letter playing football for the Longhorns.2

Ty Templin, a wide receiver with the Longhorns in the mid-2010s, grew up in Granbury and lived there during his high school years, but he went to the private Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth for his high school education.

This post will primarily be about Bolton, who attended high school in Granbury and was part of the greatest period of football success that GHS ever experienced before attending UT and seeing the Longhorns win their conference during each of his years in Austin.

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Texas Longhorns from Granbury

Ty Templin

Templin grew up in Granbury and played his earliest pee-wee football seasons there. He was a three-sport standout as a high school student-athlete at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, and as a sophomore he was a member of its 2009 football team that won the Southwestern Preparatory Conference (SPC) Division II state championship. He enrolled at the University of Texas after graduating from Trinity Valley in 2012 and walked on with the Longhorn football team. He was a reserve and scout team player for his first two years with the program, then played in 11 games as a redshirt sophomore in 2014 and made his only career catch in UT’s 23-0 win over Kansas.

He was awarded a scholarship before the start of the 2015 season, his junior year, but was sidelined due to injury for almost all of his last two seasons with the team. He is a recognized letterman for the 2014 season. Templin, an engineering student, graduated from UT with both a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degree, and now works as a biomechanics analyst with Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians.

Jerrel Bolton

Jerrel Bolton was born in 1949 and was a two-way standout on the football field for the Granbury Pirates in the mid-1960s. Granbury had a middling history of success in football going into the 1960s, but that began to change with the hiring of Fred Weir as its football coach in 1961. Weir, a UT alum who had been a reserve halfback and quarterback on Longhorn teams of the early 1950s, led Granbury to a 2-7-1 record in his first season at the helm, which would be the only losing season he experienced in his 14 years as a high school head coach. The Pirates’ fortunes steadily improved over the next five years.

That 2-7-1 record in 1961 was followed by a 5-4-1 campaign in 1962, and a 6-4 season a year after that. Bolton played on the Pirate “B” team as a freshman in 1964, a season in which the varsity finished with a record of 8-2 but did not advance to the playoffs since both losses came against district opponents. (Prior to the 1982 high school season only district champions qualified for the Texas playoffs, and many an 8-2 or 9-1 team in the preceding years missed out on the postseason due to not winning their district.)

Jerrel Bolton made his first impact on the Pirate varsity as a sophomore in 1965, when he started at tackle. Granbury went unbeaten in the regular season that year, but was defeated in the first round of the Class 2A playoffs by Fredericksburg by a 12-6 score. Bolton was named to the honorable mention all-district team at the conclusion of that season.

The 1966 Pirates returned several top contributors from their 10-1 team of 1965. Bolton and a few fellow juniors joined with one of the most impactful senior classes of football athletes Granbury has ever had, and the resulting 1966 season was one that the town would never forget.

1966 Granbury football season

Many towns whose high schools don’t have a long tradition of football success will still have “that team” to look back on. The one that local legends and stories are told about that one season where the right ingredients all came together and a singularly talented roster trained by a good coaching staff produced the best team their school has ever had. Some of those stories end with the team in question plowing through all opposition, having some breaks go their way in tight games, and advancing all the way to the state championship, where they emerge victorious and have their accomplishment immortalized on the town’s water tower or a sign prominently displayed at the entrance to their football stadium.

Other versions of those stories end with a heartbreaking loss in which the difference might have been a ball bouncing a few inches the wrong way, a pass eluding the hands of a wide-open receiver, an untimely injury that felled a key player, a bad call by an official at a key moment in a big game, an unwise tactical decision by the head coach that proved to be disastrous to an otherwise well-planned scheme, or inclement weather that neutralized the advantages the team would have had in ideal conditions. And like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, the denizens of these towns will look back on the year of that team with the utmost certainty that if that one thing had gone differently their team would have won it all.

At least that’s the way the story might be told to ease the pain with how the season in question ended. But sometimes it all boils down to that team simply getting beaten by a superior opponent, perhaps some other town’s version of that team.

Granbury was a much smaller town in the 1960s than it is today, and its high school had one of the smallest enrollments out of all the schools in Class 2A in 1966, but entering that year’s football season the Pirates were ranked third by Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine in its summer edition. DCTF noted that the Pirates would return 6 offensive and 7 defensive starters from the previous year’s team and picked them to win District 7.

The first player mentioned in the magazine’s preview of that year’s Granbury team was senior offensive and defensive tackle Harold Ames, who was 6’3” and 225-230 pounds and had received honorable mention all-state honors as a junior.3 Those physical measurables might not be impressive by today’s high school standards, but a player of that size in 1966 would have been the biggest player on the vast majority of high school fields and would have also been among the 3-5 heaviest players on that year’s Texas Longhorns team. Granbury coach Fred Weir told Texas Football magazine that Ames had played better the previous year than Dublin’s Richard Stevens, a lineman who would go on to star at Baylor and play for five years in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Other Granbury players spotlighted by the magazine included senior quarterback Jimmy Tidwell, senior tailback James Hodges, junior wingback George Rains, and junior tight end Jerrel Bolton. Bolton was listed at 205 pounds on the team’s 1966 roster, making him the third-heaviest player on the team. Rains, though 5’10” and 165 pounds, was both a punishing blocker and an explosive playmaker as a runner, receiver, punt returner, and defensive back. In a story on the 1966 team that was published several years later it was said that the team’s starting linemen had to be able to bench press 300 pounds, and Rains was just as strong as most of them and could squat over 500 pounds.

Several of the team’s players worked hay-bailing jobs during the summer that kept them in great shape. The seniors on the 1966 team had been seventh graders during Fred Weir’s first year as Granbury’s head coach. That group had lost very few games between their junior high years and first three years of high school, and they were a close-knit group off the field.

The Pirates blew through their 1966 regular season schedule with nary a challenge, outscoring their ten opponents by a combined 392-67. Ten of their starters played both ways and the team didn’t have much top-flight depth that could be counted on when a game’s outcome was in doubt, but they usually built big leads by the 2nd or 3rd quarter that allowed their starters to rest late in games. Granbury outscored opponents 245-7 during the 1st and 2nd quarters of their regular season games, and seven foes were held scoreless going into the 4th quarter.

Jerrel Bolton was primarily a blocker while playing tight end on offense, and his only touchdown of the season came while playing linebacker on defense when he returned an interception 25 yards to the end zone against Eastland in a 60-6 district win in October. He also served as the Pirates’ kicker, and he was successful on 23 extra point attempts and one field goal during the regular season.

The Granbury Pirate offensive scheme was based around the Arkansas I-formation, with a tailback, fullback and wingback in the backfield, and a tight end and a split end flanking the interior linemen. Tailback James Hodges, who won all-state honors that year, was the team’s biggest offensive star and scored 26 total touchdowns in the regular season. He broke the school’s single-season record for rushing yards during the seventh game, and was Class 2A’s leading rusher in 1966 with over 2,000 yards gained by the end of the Pirates’ playoff run.

Granbury, the champion of district 7-2A, was ranked seventh in Class 2A by the Associated Press going into the playoffs. The Pirates dispatched with Ballinger 28-0 in the bi-district round behind three touchdowns from James Hodges and two defensive interceptions from George Rains. A week later they were tied 6-6 at halftime against district 5-2A champion Stamford, and after a Stamford field goal in the 3rd quarter they trailed for the first time all season, 9-6. Hodges put Granbury back on top with a 4-yard touchdown run with 8:40 left in the 4th quarter, then two plays later the Pirate defense recovered a fumble to get the ball back. Hodges’s third touchdown of the game gave Granbury a 19-9 lead, and that was the final score.

In the state quarterfinals loomed Iowa Park, who had reached the state semifinals a year earlier before losing to eventual state champion Plano. Iowa Park went into the 1966 playoffs ranked third in Class 2A by the Associated Press and second by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the latter of which ranked Granbury fourth in its final ratings. Iowa Park was a slight favorite, but Granbury’s defense ruled the day, recovering four Iowa Park fumbles and returning an interception for a touchdown in a game the Pirates won 31-16. Granbury led 18-0 at halftime and 24-0 after scoring on their first drive of the second half.

In the state semifinals they faced Daingerfield, an east Texas team that had gone 8-2 in the regular season but advanced to the fourth round of the playoffs after consecutive wins over fourth-ranked Mineola (Texas Football magazine’s preseason pick to win Class 2A) and second-ranked Plano (the defending 2A state champion). The Pirates rode the legs of tailback James Hodges and quarterback Jimmy Tidwell for a combined 276 rushing yards, and their defense had a pair of very timely interceptions deep in their own territory.

The Pirates took a 7-0 lead into halftime, and when Daingerfield threatened to tie the score early in the second half an interception by linebacker (and future Metroplex car dealership mogul) Tommy Durant on or near the goal line ended the threat. Later in the 3rd quarter, a George Rains interception in the end zone ended another Daingerfield drive, and his return after that pick gave Granbury the ball at its own 12-yard line. Shortly afterward, Tidwell ran for an 85-yard touchdown to increase the lead to 14-0.

Daingerfield scored mid-way through the 4th quarter to cut the deficit to 14-6, but Granbury recovered an attempted onside kick, and with 4:31 left in the game a Hodges touchdown and extra point kick by Bolton made the score 21-6 and effectively put the game away.

The 1966 Class 2A state championship

Awaiting Granbury in the 2A state championship game was top-ranked Sweeny. Sweeny’s 1966 roster returned 8 starters from the previous year’s team, which finished second in its district. Its football program had also received a big infusion of talent in the offseason via integration.

Racially segregated school districts were, sadly, the norm in Texas well into the 1960s. Some districts had either fully desegregated or at least taken their first steps toward integration by the end of the 1950s, but many districts resisted integration into the mid-1960s.

Sweeny, which is located about 60 miles southwest of Houston, maintained segregated campuses through the 1964-65 school year, only beginning to allow black students to enroll at formerly all-white schools in 1965, though its high school athletic teams were reportedly not integrated until the following year.4 The George Washington Carver School, which served all of Sweeny’s black students in grades 1 through 12 prior to the 1965-66 school year, won the Class A football state championship of the Prairie View Interscholastic League (PVIL) in 1965. Sweeny’s school district fully desegregated the following year, and the returning high school students who had formerly attended Carver (including 21 lettermen from the 1965 PVIL championship football squad) began attending Sweeny High School at the start of the 1966-67 school year.5

(For its part, Granbury High School had an integrated student body at least as early as the 1963-64 school year, and two of its football teams prior to 1966 had included black players. But the 1966 team had an all-white roster because all of the black students attending GHS during that school year were female, assuming the 1967 Pirate yearbook is an accurate representation.)

The Sweeny Bulldogs were second in Texas Football magazine’s 1966 preseason rankings for Class 2A, and after going undefeated while allowing just 18 points during the regular season they went into the playoffs as their classification’s top-ranked team. The Bulldogs won a hard-fought first round matchup with Edna, who had lost in the previous year’s Class 2A state championship and whose 1966 roster had similarly benefited from integration. The teams had previously met early in the season, with Sweeny winning 27-6, but the rematch was a much tougher fight, with Sweeny winning by a mere 6-0. The Bulldogs advanced through the next three rounds of the playoffs with wins against Kenedy (43-0), San Antonio Randolph (21-14), and Bastrop (15-7) to reach the state championship. Thus did the Hoosiers-like Granbury Pirates of 1966 collide with a Remember the Titans-esque Sweeny Bulldogs team.

Granbury’s roster was talented but also very thin in terms of depth. Jerrel Bolton was one of eight Pirates who were named to the 7-2A all-district team, and three of that group (James Hodges, Harold Ames, and George Rains) were named to the all-district team on both offense and defense. Sweeny, by contrast, was able to play separate platoons of offensive and defensive players, which was emphatically illustrated by the fact that they had 15 players voted to the 25-2A all-district team, along with four other players who received votes and got honorable mention recognition.6

Granbury had survived four rounds of the Class 2A playoffs after never having previously advanced beyond the first round, but that playoff run took a physical toll. Wingback and leading receiver George Rains, who Jerrel Bolton would later recall as, “Pound for pound… the toughest little s.o.b. on the whole team”, had suffered broken ribs earlier in the playoffs and was playing through that injury while wearing special fiberglass pads covering his sternum that had been fashioned by the trainer of TCU’s football team. Other vital body parts on the team that were operating at under 100% included one of Bolton’s ankles, Hodges’s shoulder, and Tidwell’s elbow.

The 2A state championship was played on December 17 at Nelson Field in northeast Austin, which had been built only three years earlier. The first half was a defensive struggle. The game was scoreless after one quarter of play, but Granbury began the 2nd quarter deep in Sweeny territory after having recovered a fumble on the Bulldogs’ 37-yard line late in the 1st quarter. A three-yard touchdown reception by James Hodges and a Jerrel Bolton extra point put Granbury ahead 7-0 just two plays into the 2nd quarter. The Granbury defense kept Sweeny from getting any momentum in the first half and held the Bulldogs to just two first downs, but the Bulldogs did get onto the scoreboard courtesy of a 57-yard punt return touchdown by speedy wingback Louis Helm, who would later sign with Oklahoma. Tommy Durant blocked the extra point attempt to keep Granbury ahead 7-6, and that remained the score at halftime.

But nothing went right for the Pirates in the second half. Though they went into the 3rd quarter holding a lead against the top-ranked team in their class, Bolton would state years later that by halftime the team was “just flat worn out”. Granbury had beaten Daingerfield in the semifinals on a cold night in Mesquite on December 10, and in the previous round had beaten Iowa Park in Abilene on a December 2 night with temps in the low- to mid-30s, but it was warmer and unseasonably humid in Austin on the night of the state championship. In a 1994 Hood County News profile of Bolton and his high school career, he recalled it being “65-70 degrees with about 70-90 percent humidity” that night.7 The Austin American-Statesman reported that the high temperature that day was 66 degrees, though it had dropped to the low 50s by the time the game kicked off at 7:30. The already depth-poor and out-manned Pirates tired more easily in that night’s humidity, but even in more favorable weather conditions it would have been a very tall task for Granbury to hold that Sweeny lineup at bay for four quarters.8

Contemporary news accounts of the game did not mention this detail, but in stories that were told to later generations of Granbury kids it was said that Sweeny sent in a fresh unit of players to start the 3rd quarter, or at least a group wearing what appeared to be clean jerseys.

After a Granbury punt in the 3rd quarter, Sweeny went on an 8-play, 65-yard scoring drive that ended with a five-yard touchdown run by quarterback Jim Lindsey, and a successful two-point conversion attempt gave Sweeny its first lead of the game at 14-7. Later, a Granbury fumble near midfield gave Sweeny the ball back, and eight plays later the Bulldogs scored again to extend their lead to 21-7 a few minutes into the 4th quarter. The score became 29-7 with 4:12 left in the game after a fourth Sweeny touchdown, this one scored five plays after a botched Granbury punt attempt on 4th-and-7 from their end of the field gave the Bulldogs the ball at the 28-yard line, and it was all academic from there.910 Granbury’s magical season ended with the Pirates as the runner-up in Class 2A, and no Pirate team in the 60 years since then has come close to reaching those heights.

Sweeny rushed for 152 yards and scored 23 points in the second half after Granbury had limited them to only 41 rushing yards and no offensive points in the first half. Remarkably, Sweeny did not complete a pass on a scrimmage play the entire game, going 0 for 6 on pass attempts despite having as strong of a passer-receiver combination as a high school team of 1966 could ask for in quarterback Jim Lindsey and receiver Elmo Wright (more on them in a bit). Sweeny’s only completed pass of the night came on a two-point conversion in the 3rd quarter.

Sweeny’s 1966 squad was far from the first integrated team to win a UIL football state championship (that distinction went to Corpus Christi Miller’s 1960 team), but it may have been the only team to feature a group of players who were part of both a PVIL and UIL state championship. Notably, one of Sweeny’s assistant coaches in 1966 was Ebbie Neptune, who was later the longtime athletic director at Austin’s Westlake High School and the father-in-law of Todd Dodge, a 1980s Texas Longhorn quarterback who went on to win seven state championships as a high school head coach.

One month after the 1966 Texas state championship games, the National Football League (NFL) champion Green Bay Packers defeated the American Football League (AFL) champion Kansas City Chiefs in the first Super Bowl.

Granbury’s quarterback Jimmy Tidwell, running back James Hodges, and tackle Harold Ames were all named to the 1966 Class 2A all-state first team by the Texas Sports Writers Association (TSWA). Tidwell and Hodges both signed with TCU in February of 1967, and both were two-year lettermen with the Horned Frog football program. Ames forsook offers from bigger colleges to enroll at Howard Payne College, a small Baptist school in Brownwood. But his college football career ended before it really began when he tore ligaments in his knee early in his freshman year.

Seven seniors on Sweeny’s 1966 state championship team received college football scholarships, five of them to present-day NCAA Division I schools. The aforementioned Jim Lindsey and Elmo Wright had very successful careers at Abilene Christian and Houston, respectively. Lindsey was the NCAA’s all-time passing yardage leader at the end of his collegiate career, and he was later named the Southland Conference’s Player of the Decade for the 1960s. Wright was a consensus All-American receiver as a senior at Houston in 1970 and was the 16th overall pick in the 1971 NFL Draft. He finished his college career with 3,347 receiving yards and 35 total touchdowns, and 55 years later he remains third among Houston’s all-time leaders in career receiving yardage and second in receiving touchdowns. Fullback Larry Chandler and tackle Jack Kemp (who won all-state honors in 1966) signed with Texas A&M, and wingback Louis Helm signed with Oklahoma and played on its freshmen team in 1967 before giving up football to focus on track.

1967 Granbury football season

Jerrel Bolton was a starter on Granbury’s basketball team once the 1966 football season ended, and the next fall he was one of several returning contributors from the state finalist football team who arrived for fall practices. The team had lost six seniors from the previous year’s squad, as well as head coach Fred Weir, who resigned in February 1967 to become head coach at Andrews High School in west Texas. Victor Prince, who had been an assistant coach throughout Weir’s head coaching tenure, was subsequently promoted to the head coach position.

Despite the graduation of three all-state players, the 1967 Pirates still had 15 returning lettermen, five of whom had been regular starters the year before. Coach Prince hyped incoming senior Jerrel Bolton (who was reported by then to be 6’2” and 230 pounds) as the “finest linebacker in the state”, while the strong and shifty George Rains took over the feature tailback role from the graduated James Hodges.

Granbury was not ranked to begin the 1967 season, and Texas Football magazine didn’t even pick the Pirates to win their district, instead predicting 7-2A’s champion to be Hamilton. The Pirates suffered a 7-0 loss at the hands of fellow 2A team Burleson in their second game, but rebounded from that setback and won their last seven regular season games, most of them in blowout fashion.

Bolton was a menace at linebacker, reportedly averaging 15 tackles per game. He also continued to serve as the team’s regular kicker and was more involved in the passing game as a tight end than he had been in previous years. In a dominating 46-0 win over district foe Cisco in October, Bolton caught a 26-yard touchdown pass and kicked four extra points.11 He had a 47-yard touchdown reception two weeks later in an even more lopsided 60-0 win over Clyde.12

George Rains averaged over nine yards per carry and reached the end zone frequently in 1967, finishing that season with 33 total touchdowns. In the Pirates’ regular season finale against preseason district favorite Hamilton he scored six touchdowns, with four of those being on rushes, one on a punt return, and the other on a returned interception. Bolton was successful on seven extra point kicks and recovered a fumble on defense in the 63-12 win over Hamilton.13

Granbury easily won its district for a third straight year, outscoring its five opponents from District 7-2A by a combined 262-18. Awaiting the Pirates in the first round of the playoffs was undefeated Brady, which was ranked #1 in Class 2A by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the end of the regular season. Brady had been a football powerhouse during the latter half of the 1950s, reaching the state championship three times between 1956 and 1959 and losing in the state semifinals to eventual state champion Donna in 1961. But Brady’s 1967 district championship was its first in six years, and Granbury was the first playoff obstacle to its return to football glory. The Brady Bulldogs were powered by a senior backfield duo of running back Nathaniel “Puddin’” Jones and fullback Ronnie Neves, who combined to rush for over 2,100 yards during the regular season. Neves signed with Texas A&M in 1968, while Jones was a two-year letterman at Houston.

The game was anything but closely-contested, as Granbury’s defense forced eight turnovers and took advantage of several of them to win 31-8. Jerrel Bolton recorded four takeaways by himself, picking off two passes and recovering two fumbles. His first fumble recovery came on a Brady punt return and gave Granbury the ball just nine yards from the end zone. Rains scored the first of his three touchdowns in the game shortly afterward to put the Pirates up 7-0 with 5:15 left in the opening quarter. Bolton added a 24-yard field goal early in the 2nd quarter to make the score 10-0. His second fumble recovery again gave the Pirates the ball deep in Brady territory, and the score was soon 17-0.

Brady got the ball first in the 3rd quarter and scored a touchdown followed by a two-point conversion to get as close as 17-8, but the Bulldogs would not score again. One play into the 4th quarter came another Rains TD run and the score became 24-8. Bolton had an interception later in the final frame and took the ball back to the Brady six-yard line, setting up Rains’s third touchdown (and the final one of his high school career) two plays later, which padded the lead to 31-8.14

Having dispatched with the state’s top-ranked team in the first round and starting to look like state championship contenders again, the Pirates next took on Crane, whose team had scored a narrow 7-6 first round win over Stamford despite achieving just seven first downs.

The Granbury-Crane matchup was a heartbreaking story of punts, penalties, and missed opportunities. The game ended in a scoreless tie, and since it was played almost thirty years before overtime rules were implemented for Texas high school football, the winner was determined by a series of tiebreakers. The first was the number of penetrations inside the opponent’s 20-yard line. On that count, Crane had a 2-1 advantage, and thus it was the winner and advanced to the next round.

The Granbury Pirates got the ball at their own 25-yard line late in the 4th quarter. It is unclear whether or not they knew Crane had a 2-1 advantage in penetrations at the start of that possession, as some reporters who covered the game believed that Granbury had no penetrations, but the officials’ record showed they had one earlier in the game. Whether the Pirate coaches knew it or not, Granbury needed to either score to take the lead or get inside of Crane’s 20-yard line to achieve a tie in penetrations and potentially win the game on the second tiebreaker: total first downs.

The Pirates drove as far as Crane’s 23-yard line and had a first down with 15 seconds left on the clock. Quarterback Pat Thomas fired a pass out of bounds to stop the clock, but was penalized for intentional grounding to push the ball back to the 28-yard line. After an incomplete pass it was 3rd-and-15 with only enough time on the clock for one play. Granbury elected to attempt a 44-yard field goal to win the game, but Jerrel Bolton’s kick was both wide and short.15 Had the Pirates made it past the 20-yard line on that drive they would have tied Crane in penetrations 2-2. Had the teams finished with the same number of penetrations the next tiebreaker was first downs, and according to published box scores for the game the teams were tied on that statistic with each having 11 first downs. The third tiebreaker was total offensive yards. Different newspapers published very different figures for the teams’ offensive production, but all had Granbury ahead in offensive yards by at least 50.

But based on the rules in place at the time, Granbury was the loser and Crane advanced on penetrations to reach the state quarterfinals. The Crane Golden Cranes would lose the following week to Phillips by a 21-13 score, and Phillips lost 15-13 one week later in the semifinals to eventual state champion Plano. Had Granbury advanced to the 19-yard line instead of the 23 in its final drive against Crane it would have come out ahead once all the math and tiebreakers were checked, and there’s a very good chance the Pirates could have gone all the way to the state championship once again, though things would have had to go right for them in two more rounds to get to that point. The bi-district round win over Brady in 1967 remains the last time Granbury won a playoff game in football.

After the end of the 1967 season, Jerrel Bolton and six other Pirates were named to the 7-2A all-district team. Bolton and four of his teammates made the all-district team on both offense and defense, with Bolton named an all-district offensive end and linebacker.16

In December, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram named Bolton (at linebacker) and Rains (as an offensive back) to its Class 2A all-state team, and both were also selected by that paper for its all-state “Super Team”, which was made up of players from all classifications and regions.1718 In early January 1968, Bolton was voted to the TSWA’s Class 2A all-state first team at linebacker, while Rains made the second team at running back.19

In the winter of 1967-68, Bolton and Rains were both starters on Granbury’s boys basketball team, which won the championship of its district. The Pirate basketball team was led that season by first-year coach Curtis Allen, who would spend 32 years on the GHS faculty coaching various sports and teaching history before retiring from the classroom in 1999. He was also a driver’s education teacher for multiple generations of Granbury kids before retiring from that role in 2015. Granbury advanced to the 1968 basketball playoffs but lost in the first round to Brady. Twenty-five years would pass before the next time a Granbury boys basketball team won a district title. Bolton was named to the all-district second team, and Rains was one of two Pirates to make the first team.

The all-stater Jerrel Bolton was recruited by college football programs during the winter of his senior year. Texas Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal made a trip to Granbury in mid-January to visit with Bolton, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported on January 18 that Bolton had told Royal he would sign with Texas.20

He made his future at UT official when he signed a letter of intent with the Longhorns on February 13. Coach Royal flew to Granbury’s small municipal airport to personally bring the letter of intent for Bolton’s signature.

News articles covering college football signings in February of 1968 all listed Bolton as a linebacker, and he was one of nine linebacker prospects signed by the Longhorns in that class.21 It was a historic group in one way, as one of Bolton’s fellow linebacker signees was Killeen’s Leon O’Neal, who became the very first black student-athlete to receive a football scholarship from the Longhorns. Texas was one of the last Southwest Conference schools to integrate its football program, and at the time of O’Neal’s signing only Arkansas and Texas A&M had yet to award a scholarship to a black player.

The Longhorn program was not exactly riding a wave of enthusiasm at the time it recruited the class of 1968, having finished with four losses in three consecutive seasons (1965-67) and compiling a record of 12-9 in Southwest Conference play over those years. But UT’s fortunes would begin to turn around in a big way in 1968 when it switched to the wishbone triple-option offense and won the first of six consecutive SWC titles.

Jerrel Bolton’s Texas Longhorn career

Before enrolling at the University of Texas in the fall of 1968, Jerrel Bolton participated in not one but two prestigious postseason all-star football games. He played in the 34th annual Texas High School All-Star game, which was played at TCU’s Amon Carter Stadium on August 1. Bolton started at linebacker for the North team and also served as its kicker. The North team won 17-9, with its two touchdowns coming on a 2nd quarter pass and a 3rd quarter run by Abilene Cooper’s Jack Mildren, who later won All-America honors as a wishbone quarterback at Oklahoma. Bolton kicked the extra points following both touchdowns and made a 23-yard field goal in the 4th quarter, which was reported to be just the fifth made field goal in the 34-year history of that game.22

Later that month he played for the Texas squad in the annual Oil Bowl, a charity all-star game that pitted recent high school graduates from Texas against a team of stars from Oklahoma. Bolton started at defensive guard for the Texas team, which won 39-7 before a crowd of 18,000 spectators in Wichita Falls.23

Bolton suited up for the UT freshmen football team in 1968, and he was a starter at offensive guard and mostly a backup at linebacker. He was often shuffled from one position to another by the Longhorn staff in the seasons that followed. He began the spring of 1969 as an offensive guard, was shifted to linebacker, then moved back to right guard. During fall practices that year he was listed as the backup left guard behind Bobby Mitchell, but the last local news article to mention him said he might be redshirted. He evidently did not play in any games in 1969, a season in which the Longhorns went unbeaten, defeated Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl, and were named national champions by both the Associated Press and the Coaches Poll.

By the spring of 1970 Bolton was finally back at his old tight end position, but he suffered an injured knee while running downfield with the punting unit during practice in April. In that same month he served as a pallbearer at the funeral of his friend and former Granbury teammate George Rains, who was killed in a car accident on April 10. Bolton began 1970 fall practices as a backup offensive tackle, but was the third-string tight end by the time the season began. Different reports indicate that he wore either #25 or #84 that season.

Bolton recorded his first collegiate reception in the season-opening 56-15 win over California. Three weeks later he appeared in the annual rivalry game against Oklahoma at the Cotton Bowl and recovered a fumble by Oklahoma’s punt returner late in the 4th quarter, which gave Texas the ball at the OU 7-yard line. A Longhorn touchdown run with 21 seconds left sent the Sooners home with a 41-9 loss. He later made two catches for a gain of 54 yards in UT’s 52-14 Thanksgiving Day win over Texas A&M.

The Longhorn offense was built around the wishbone triple-option and passed the ball only sparingly. The team had just 53 pass completions for 936 yards during the 1970 regular season, and Bolton’s 67 yards on 3 receptions were the fourth-most on the team that year. Texas, which had been the undisputed national champion in 1969, went undefeated in the 1970 regular season and finished atop the Coaches Poll and Associated Press rankings going into a second straight Cotton Bowl matchup with Notre Dame. A 24-11 loss to the Fighting Irish ended the team’s 30-game winning streak and the Longhorns did not repeat as AP national champions, but since the final Coaches Poll was still conducted before the bowl games at that time, Texas was recognized as the 1970 United Press International (Coaches Poll) national champion. Jerrel Bolton was awarded his first varsity letter after that season.

Not content to let Bolton remain at the same position for too long, the Longhorn coaches moved him to offensive tackle during spring practices in 1971. Depth charts published during different weeks in the 1971 season listed Bolton as a backup at tight end or left tackle. The Longhorns passed the ball even less in 1971 than they had in 1970, completing just 45 of 104 pass attempts for 699 yards and two touchdowns in ten regular season games. Bolton did not record a catch, while regular tight end starter Rick Davis was second on the team with nine receptions for 166 yards. Texas won the Southwest Conference for a fourth straight year, but lost a pair of October games to Oklahoma and Arkansas after being ranked as high as third. The team ranked 12th at the end of the regular season, but lost 30-6 to tenth-ranked Penn State in the Cotton Bowl and finished 16th in the final AP poll.

Program records list Bolton as a letterman for both the 1970 and 1971 seasons.

Jerrel Bolton’s post-college years

Jerrel Bolton married a fellow UT student in 1973, and they had two children together and eventually made their home in West, a small town about 15 miles north of Waco. He has been a longtime businessman and rancher in his 46 years as a West resident. He owned and operated Jerrel Bolton Chevrolet in West for 27 years and also built the Czech Inn hotel in the mid-2000s on land near his dealership just west of I-35. The former Czech Inn is now a Holiday Inn Express & Suites.

Bolton has also held elected office in his adopted hometown. He was elected mayor of West in 2007, and is currently serving a term on the West city council.

The Granbury High School Athletics Hall of Fame was established in 1994, and Jerrel Bolton was one of 17 athletes, coaches, and teams that were inducted in its inaugural class. In looking back at his football career that year, he said, “I had to be one of the luckiest guys in the whole country.” Between his four years at Granbury High School and his four years with the Texas Longhorn football program, his teams amassed a record of 83-11-2. Granbury won three district titles and was a state runner-up in Bolton’s three years on the Pirate varsity, and the Longhorns won four straight conference championships and claimed two national championships (1969 and 1970) during his four years in Austin.

The 1966 Pirate football team was one of five teams named to the GHS Athletics Hall of Fame in 1994, and four of Bolton’s teammates on the locally legendary 1966 Pirate football squad were inducted individually: Harold Ames, James Hodges, Jimmy Tidwell, and the late George Rains.24 The coach of the 1966 football team, Fred Weir, died in 2022 and was posthumously inducted in 2025 into what was by then rechristened the Granbury ISD Academic & Athletic Hall of Fame.

The memory of that 1966 team has also been kept alive though several of its standouts serving as the namesake of annual awards given to members of modern day Pirate football teams. The Jerrel Bolton Award is given to the team’s Defensive Most Valuable Player, the Jimmy Tidwell Award to the Offensive Most Valuable Player, and the Harold “Poggie” Ames Jr. Award to the Outstanding Offensive Lineman. There is also the George Rains Fighting Heart Award, and the James Hodges Pirate Leadership Award.

The surviving members of the 1966 team are in the latter half of their 70s now, and this fall will bring the 60th anniversary of that memorable season. That team remains the standard of football excellence in Granbury, one that has been unreachable for every generation of Pirates that has followed them. Their alma mater now has about eight times as many students as it did in the mid-1960s, but in the past 50 years the Pirates have recorded seven or more wins in a season only five times.

Since the 1967 team that lost on penetrations to Crane in the second round of the playoffs, the closest a Granbury team has gotten to affecting a state championship race was the 1977 squad. That year’s team won its district and faced Wylie in the first round of the 2A playoffs. Granbury led Wylie 14-9 with less than a minute remaining and Wylie possessing the ball on the Granbury 9-yard line but facing a 4th-and-6. A touchdown pass with 32 seconds left on the clock gave Wylie a 16-14 lead that they held to the end. That Wylie team went on to win the Class 2A state championship over Bellville by a 22-14 score, and no Granbury team reached the playoffs again until 2010.

In the years since Jerrel Bolton played his last game with the Texas Longhorns very few Granbury High alums have suited up for UT in any sport, and none in football that I’m aware of.

Anissa Hauser is the most notable of that small group. She moved from Oregon to Granbury before her junior year of high school and was entering her senior year at Granbury when it fielded a volleyball team for the first time in 1987, but she was recruited by several colleges while playing for a select volleyball team after that 1987 season and signed with Texas as part of a highly-touted 1988 recruiting class. She was a three-year letterman with the Longhorn volleyball program from 1988 to 1990 and was a member of three Southwest Conference champion teams, including UT’s 1988 NCAA championship team.

Eric Tomlinson was a baseball star at Granbury who transferred to UT from Navarro Junior College in 1999 and was a letterman as a relief pitcher on the 2000 Longhorn baseball team that reached the College World Series.

And Lilley Vander Zee was a star on the Lady Pirate basketball team for four years before signing with Texas in 2013. She played in 21 games across two seasons with the Longhorns before transferring to West Texas A&M in 2015.

Author’s note

This post is dedicated to the memory of my father Tom Wells, who died one year ago today.

I lived in Granbury for most of my first 24 years and graduated from GHS in 2001, while dad was a Granbury resident for nearly 53 years. Dad spent several years on the faculty at Granbury High School in the 1980s through the early 1990s before spending almost three decades as a U.S. history teacher at the junior college level. He had a particular way of telling stories about significant historical events or football games or long-ago family members, often injecting esoteric factoids as a way of highlighting the uniqueness of a particular event, and going to some effort to place these events in their historic context.

When I first began to take an interest in sports as a young boy it was dad who told me the earliest sports-related stories I ever heard. By the time I was nine I was a big fan of our local pro sports teams: the Texas Rangers, Dallas Cowboys, and Dallas Mavericks. Dad had been a fan of the Rangers and Cowboys for many years by then and shared a lot of stories about their respective histories from the years he had followed them. Both franchises had begun operating within his lifetime after all. The first time I remember ever hearing the names Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett spoken aloud it was from dad’s lips.

Dad was not responsible for my becoming a Texas Longhorns fan, that more or less happened on its own when I first watched a football team on TV that had a longhorn logo on their helmets and the word “Texas” emblazoned on the front of their jerseys. Dad had received his bachelor’s degree from Howard Payne and his master’s from Tarleton State, and did some doctoral work studying history at Texas Christian University, where one of his professors was former Longhorn football star Ben Proctor, the team’s leading receiver for three straight seasons from 1948 to 1950. He had no particular favorite in the realm of major college football and no family connections with the University of Texas, but he was always up to watch a Longhorn game with me when one was on TV once it became clear that they were my favorite team.

He brought me to my first Texas Rangers game in September of 1990 and my first Dallas Mavericks game in November of 1991. I didn’t attend my first Dallas Cowboys game with dad, but he was with me on the first (and still only) occasion that I watched them play at their current home, AT&T Stadium in Arlington.

He also took me to the earliest Granbury Pirate football games that I can remember attending. It was the fall of 1991 and the team was not good at all that year. It was hard for my nine-year-old self to imagine that the Pirates had ever been very good given that they went 0-10 and scored just 42 total points during that season. Indeed, during my lifetime Granbury has had more than twice as many football seasons with one or fewer wins (11) as it has playoff appearances (5). But from 1991 onward if I was in Granbury and it was a Friday night between September and early November, there was nowhere I’d rather have been than at Pirate Stadium watching our gridiron heroes valiantly attempt to defend their home field. The first public address announcer I can distinctly remember the voice of was Granbury’s longtime PA man U.L. Tidwell, a 1937 GHS alum who worked Pirate football games for almost 60 years and served as the PA announcer in a number of other sports for several years before retiring in the late 1990s. He was the father of the aforementioned 1966 all-state quarterback Jimmy Tidwell.

At some point in my infancy as a fan of our hometown Pirates dad told me about the 1966 football team that had made it all the way to the state championship before losing their only game of that season, and that story has fascinated me ever since.

Coming from dad these were necessarily second-hand stories. Though he was the same age as the men who had been seniors on the 1966 team, he was not from Granbury and did not move there until the early 1970s, a year or so after he and mom got married and graduated from college. He did not witness the 1966 team’s exploits, but he had heard first-hand accounts of that season, most likely from church friends, co-workers at Granbury High School who’d been on the faculty in that memorable year, or perhaps from one or more of the actual players. I had intended to ask him at some point just who his sources were for the accounts he shared with my young self about the 1966 Pirates, but since I had no immediate plans to write about my hometown and its Longhorn connections at this publication I made the fatal assumption that there would always be time for that conversation later. So I never brought up the subject before he suffered a stroke early last year that ultimately led to his death at age 76.

I was familiar with the broad outline of the story of the 1966 Granbury Pirates from around age nine, but didn’t know much detail about that season or the name of a single one of the players until the Granbury High School Athletics Hall of Fame was created in 1994. Over the course of several weeks in the summer of that year the Hood County News (which dad was a longtime subscriber of) did full-page features on each of the Hall’s initial inductees. I was 11 years old at the time but already read HCN religiously, and it was while reading those features that I first learned the names of Jerrel Bolton, James Hodges, George Rains, and many of the other notable contributors to the 1966 team. I cut out the Hood County News pages with those GHS Hall of Fame features and kept them for several years in my closet at home along with other saved news articles and various athletic keepsakes. For all I know they might still be there.

I owe a great deal of my interest in history in general and sports history in particular to dad’s influence. A lot of young boys who get into sports will try to impress their dad by showing him how high they can jump, how hard they can hit a baseball, how far they can stand from a basketball hoop while making a shot, etc. I would more often try to impress dad by trying to teach him some fact or story he had no previous knowledge of.

In the five years that I’ve spent researching Texas Longhorn football history I got to have conversations with him about a number of the stories and topics I’ve written about, and there will be far more posts in the future that I’ll wish I had a chance to talk about with him. On some level, practically every piece I’ve written that’s centered on Longhorn history was organized and worded in such a way that I hoped dad might find interesting. And if anyone besides dad happened to find them interesting as well, that was a bonus.

Look at a map of Val Verde County and in the northwest corner you’ll see Pandale, a place that Henry Mills, a Texas Longhorn tackle of the late 1920s, called home for much of his life. Pandale, which was near the Pecos River, is now referred to as a “ghost town” by both Wikipedia and the Texas Escapes website, though the use of “town” in that label is probably a bit generous. The histories and first-person accounts of life in Pandale that I have read paint it not as a town with an established square or main street on which most local business was conducted, but as a sprawling community of ranches in a very remote area of the state that were tied together by a post office, one-room schoolhouse, and general store.

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Henry James Young Mills Jr. was born in Ozona (the seat of neighboring Crockett County) in 1907 and was raised in the Pandale community. He was the second oldest of the six children in his family — all boys — who survived infancy. The Mills boys all grew to be 6 feet or taller with the exception of Herbert, the third oldest, whose World War II draft card listed his height as a mere 5’8”. Their father Henry James Young Mills, Sr., who was also known as H.J.Y. Mills or “Alphabet” Mills, served as the first sheriff and tax collector of Schleicher County in west Texas before moving to Val Verde County in the first decade of the 20th century, and he was among the first settlers in what became known as Pandale. Henry Mills Sr. and his descendants were ranchers in that area for several decades afterward, mostly raising goats and sheep.

Josephine Mills, the wife of Henry Mills Jr., gave a talk on Pandale’s history to the Comstock Study Group in April of 1974, and the text of her remarks was published across multiple issues of the Del Rio News-Herald that month. She had lived in Pandale for over four decades by that time, but she told the group that she had never met anyone who knew the origin of Pandale’s name. That was the name given to the community when an application was made for a post office to serve the area in 1909. According to Mrs. Mills, the woman who sent in the post office application and ultimately became Pandale’s first postmaster said that the proposed location for that post office — her own home — “was not close to a village but believed that Pandale would soon become a [village]”.1 Pandale’s post office had six different locations during its history, and each time it moved locations the town, such as it was, effectively moved closer to the new location.

The younger Henry Mills was put to work on the family ranch at a young age. At age 12 he was sent alone by wagon to a ranch at the nearby Juno community (which may have been some 20 miles away from the Mills ranch) to bring home some goats that his father had bought from another rancher.

He most likely received his earliest education either at home or at the one-room school in Pandale. His mother had been a teacher before her marriage, and she was the first teacher hired to educate the children of Pandale’s families in 1914. A year later, a new 18’ by 20’ schoolhouse was built to serve as Pandale’s school. Some of the families from the area who had school-age children did not live close enough to the schoolhouse for their children to walk there or otherwise have a reasonable daily commute. So during the earliest years of the Pandale school a virtual tent city sprung up near the schoolhouse where the mothers and children of these families stayed during the week before returning to their homes by wagon on weekends.2

Pandale’s school educated children from first through eighth grade, and Henry Mills Jr. would receive his high school education at Del Rio High School, which was over 70 miles away from his family’s home. He further prepared for college by attending the Schreiner Institute in Kerrville, a private military school that had been established in 1923 and operated both a prep school and junior college. He was a member of Schreiner’s varsity football team in the 1925 and 1926 seasons and played under head coach Howard “Bully” Gilstrap, a recent University of Texas graduate who had been a three-sport athletic letterman while at UT and would later be a longtime assistant football coach at his alma mater. Mills was merely a reserve while playing for Schreiner and was not awarded a varsity letter in either of his seasons with the team. In May of 1927 he was one of 15 graduates in Schreiner’s junior college department, and he went on to enroll at the University of Texas that same year.3

Despite not being a football letterman while at Schreiner, Mills made the Texas Longhorn varsity football team in 1928 as a tackle. He wore jersey number 39 and was listed at 6’2” and 190 pounds on a team roster that was published late in the 1928 season, and that roster had only two players with a higher listed weight.4

Henry Mills had a tire stolen from his car (described as a Ford “Ramona”) during UT’s 12-0 win over Texas Tech on October 2, 1928.5 That same month he was elected as a student representative from the school of business administration. He substituted in for starting right tackle Jack Cowley on a pair of occasions during UT’s 20-7 win over Arkansas on October 16. A week later he got the start at right tackle in a 13-6 road win over Rice. He was seldom mentioned in published recaps from the other games of the 1928 campaign, but he got enough playing time that he was one of 25 Longhorns awarded varsity football letters that year. According to the Athletic Council’s requirements for varsity football letters at that time, a player could earn one by playing in two quarters of at least half the games in a season, or by merely playing in two quarters in the annual game against Texas A&M. Players not meeting the playing time requirement could also be awarded a letter on “special merit” at the recommendation of the Council.

The 1928 Texas Longhorns won the Southwest Conference and finished with an overall record of 7-2, with their two losses coming by a combined margin of five points.

Henry Mills was a member of the Longhorn track & field team in the spring of 1929, but was not awarded a letter in that sport. The highlight of his 1929 track season was an appearance at the Drake Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, where a special 440-yard relay was organized featuring relay teams exclusively composed of football lettermen from various conference or sectional champion teams. Mills ran the third leg on the Texas “football relay” team, the other members of which were Leo Baldwin, Herbert Tigner, and Curtis Beaty. The Texas quartet finished 4th in the race behind teams from West Point, Nebraska, and Notre Dame. Mills ran his leg of the relay against Army’s football captain and All-American tackle Bud Sprague, who had begun his collegiate career at Texas and played on the Longhorn football teams of 1923 and 1924 before receiving an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy, where he played football for another four years.

Aside from getting the opportunity to compete at one of the most prestigious track meets in the country, the jaunt to Des Moines also took Henry Mills further from home than he had ever been. The Daily Texan’s “Sport Talk” column the following week included this note.

Big Henry Mills, who made his first trip out of Texas when the Steers went to Des Moines to participate in the special football relay, was back home last night telling some great tales. Mills declared that he saw only one pretty girl on the trip, while the rest of the gang were telling all sorts of stories. All of them were unanimous in saying that Texas had a better track and stadium than the one in which they ran at Drake.

Mills ran against Bud Sprague, former Texas star, and held his own against the noted Army ace. The appearance of the Texas runners brought a salvo of cheers from the stands.6

Mills returned to the Longhorn football team in 1929 and was again a reserve tackle, this time wearing jersey number 29. The 1929 season was an odd one for the Longhorns. They opened the season with five straight wins in which they outscored their opponents by a collective 120-0. That 5-0 start was followed by a pair of scoreless ties against SMU and Baylor. Texas made it to Armistice Day in 1929 without having surrendered a single point, but ended the season with consecutive losses to TCU and Texas A&M. Texas finished with an overall record of 5-2-2 and a 2-2-2 mark in Southwest Conference play.

Mills appears to have played very sparingly that season, if published post-game recaps are any indication. He substituted in at left tackle in the 4th quarter of the Longhorns’ 20-0 win over Centenary on October 5, and a month later he briefly subbed in at left guard during the 2nd quarter of UT’s 15-12 loss to TCU on November 16, which was their first defeat of that year. In the annual Thanksgiving Day matchup with Texas A&M, Mills came off the bench in the 4th quarter in relief of right tackle Billy Hargrove.

His roommate that year was Curtis Beaty, who was a fellow business student and a regular at guard for the Longhorns. Beaty was in the starting lineup for the Thanksgiving weekend game against Texas A&M but suffered a broken leg on the game’s very first play when he was tackled hard after returning the opening kickoff. A month later, the Houston Post related a story that Mills had appeared in Beaty’s hospital room on the day after his injury, carrying Beaty’s bathrobe and slippers and telling him, “I thought you might need ‘em, Curt, to run around the halls in.” In the Post’s account, Beaty told his roommate that he wouldn’t be on his feet — let alone walking — any time soon. In response, “Mills turned all colors, and muttered something under his breath about being so ‘blamed forgetful.’”7

Henry Mills graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in the spring of 1930, and that same year he was awarded a Master of Business Administration (MBA). His graduate thesis was titled, “Marketing Wool in Texas”.8 His younger brother Herbert Maxwell Mills also attended UT in the late 1920s, and later his niece Mae Belle Mills (daughter of his older brother William Oliver “W.O.” Mills) was a UT student in the mid-1940s.

Henry returned home to Pandale soon after completing his college studies and met Josephine Dameron, who had been hired as the new teacher at Pandale’s school in 1930. They married in May of 1932 and were wed for almost 60 years.

Henry Mills Jr. worked for many years as a rancher and stockman in Val Verde County, as his father had before him. He and his wife lived for most of their marriage in Del Rio but also spent significant time at their ranch house in Pandale. Over the years their Pandale home played host to many social gatherings, club meetings, church group events, and family reunions for his wife’s Dameron relatives.

Henry and Josephine Mills had two children, both of whom graduated from Del Rio High School. Their son Henry Mills III also worked as a rancher for many years and died just last year at the age of 89. Their daughter Kay attended the University of Texas after graduating in Del Rio’s class of 1956, and married her junior high sweetheart Bill Cauthorn in 1959. Cauthorn played football at Texas A&M in the late 1950s under head coach Bear Bryant, and in 2007 he was inducted into the Texas A&M Athletic Hall of Fame.

How much Henry kept up with his alma mater and the fortunes of the Longhorn football program is not evident in contemporary articles, though he and his wife reportedly traveled to Fayetteville to attend the legendary “Game of the Century” on December 6, 1969 between the eventual national champion Longhorns and the second-ranked Arkansas Razorbacks.9

In addition to his ranching interests, Henry Mills Jr. also served in public office and had various professional, oversight, and civic roles. He was elected to multiple terms on the Val Verde County Commissioner’s Court, was a supervisor for several years with the Devil’s River Soil Conservation District and was president for two years of the Texas Association of Soil Conservation Districts, had a seat on the Val Verde Memorial Hospital’s board of governors, and was a director of the Texas Sheep & Goat Raisers Association. He and his wife were also Pandale’s last postmasters.

The Pandale community, never very populous to begin with, had a single-digit number of students attending its school by the 1960s. The 1968-1969 edition of the Texas Almanac estimated Pandale’s population at 20, but even that figure may have been generous.10 A sign nailed to a post that stood along a road on the edge of the community was said to have read, “Population varies”.

Josephine Mills was hired to teach at Pandale’s school in 1930, and reportedly still taught there at least as late as 1957. Pandale and the other rural common school districts in Val Verde County (those of Juno, Langtry, Pumpville, and Star Route at the Miers Ranch) had a combined enrollment of 91 students in the fall of 1957.11

An article on Pandale and its school was published by the Texas State Teachers Association in early 1968, and it was portrayed as one of the last remaining examples of the rural “one-room schoolhouse” that had once been common in tiny communities around the state. Pandale’s school had only five students at the time that article was written, those being the children of a laborer who worked at a ranch five miles away from the school. The school’s teacher lived in a trailer home in Pandale during the week, then returned to her home in Del Rio on weekends.12

That article was re-published in several newspapers throughout the state in the early months of 1968, and it prompted Josephine Mills to write a letter to the editor of the San Angelo Standard-Times (one of the first papers to feature the article) to protest that it had not given a full picture of the modern amenities the schoolhouse had available and made the community seem far poorer and more run down than it was.13 She pointed out that the community had prosperous ranches, an “active Sunday School”, bridge club, study group, and school board; and that the school house itself had tile floors, hot and cold water, indoor restrooms, and a working kitchen with a refrigerator and stove.

A year and a half later in the summer of 1969, just days after the completion of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, the residents of Pandale and Comstock voted almost unanimously to consolidate their school districts. Pandale voters were in favor of consolidation by a 15-1 margin, and in Comstock the vote in favor was 34-2. Following the certification of that vote, the Pandale school was closed, and what few students lived in that community were served afterward by Comstock’s school, which was roughly 55 miles away.14 Comstock High School today has an enrollment of just 62 students, according to the University Interscholastic League’s most recent figures. Figures from the 2020 census showed that the area served by the Comstock Independent School District had a population of just 399, a 34% decrease from the 2010 census.

After the closure of Pandale’s school in 1969, its former building served as a community center for several years. A women’s social group called the Pandale Study Club often met at the community center, and group members would discuss topics of interest, share memories of their community’s history, work together to produce and publish cookbooks, and raise money for scholarships and other charitable causes. News reports mentioning the group indicate that it met regularly at the Pandale school building and/or at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Mills Jr. at least as early as the 1950s, and the group was still active at least as recently as the year 2000, by which point most of its original members had died.15 Current Google Maps images indicate that there are few structures left in the old Pandale community, and neither Google nor Newspapers.com was helpful in determining whether or not the former Pandale school building still survives today.

The only business in that area now in operation appears to be the Pandale Crossing River Resort on the Pecos River just south of Pandale, which rents both cabins and kayaks to visitors wanting to explore the area.

Henry Mills Jr.’s mother Alvia May Mills served as Pandale’s postmaster from 1923 until her death in 1936. His wife Josephine Mills was appointed to that position afterwards, and held it for nine years until Henry himself was appointed to fill it in 1945.16 He remained Pandale’s postmaster for 29 years until its post office was closed on New Year’s Eve in 1974, ending a 65-year history of Pandale’s post office handling mail for that very rural ranching community.17

Henry James Young Mills Jr. died in 1992 at the age of 84. His wife Josephine, to whom he was married for 59 years, passed away three years later, just two days shy of her 85th birthday.

As recently as 2009, the Texas Almanac estimated Pandale’s population to be 25. The only Val Verde County resident to win a varsity letter with the Texas Longhorn football program aside from Henry Mills is Scooter Monzingo, a Del Rio High School graduate who was a three-year letterman as a defensive back for the Longhorns in the late 1960s, and who was a senior on UT’s 1969 national championship team.

It has been just over a year now since my first “Texas Longhorn ghost town” post, which focused on a community in Fannin County called Orangeville. I definitely plan on visiting this topic again before 2027 and not taking another year between such posts.

Addendum

After this post’s publication I heard from both of Henry Mills’s grandsons, Guy Cauthorn and Sid Cauthorn.

From Guy I learned that the old Pandale schoolhouse was still standing at least as recently as 2018, the year that the Mills ranch was sold.

Sid told me that their grandfather Henry (who he and Guy called “Pappy”) had a stroke shortly before the end of his life, and their parents were called for help since they lived nearby in Del Rio. Their father Bill Cauthorn, the Texas A&M football letterman, went immediately to his father-in-law’s aid. According to Sid:

Dad held his hand and used a cool water towel to wipe Pappy’s brow. In a little bit, Pappy kind of found his senses, looked up at Dad, and threw up the hook-em, and said, “The eyes of Texas are upon you”. Being an Aggie, Dad loved telling that story. Those were the last words Pappy said.

The terms “large humans” or “big humans” have become ubiquitous in articles discussing the prospect evaluations and recruiting philosophy of Longhorn offensive line coach Kyle Flood, who has held that position at Texas since Steve Sarkisian was hired as head coach in 2021. The Longhorns have definitely targeted bigger players on the lines in recent years, and in one particular recruiting class they signed four players who already weighed at least 350 pounds. But the program had its share of beef on the roster even before the more recent targeting of recruits of Leonard Davis-esque proportions.

Going back 12 years to the 2013 Longhorns, the last UT squad coached by Mack Brown, the program’s online roster for that year shows 18 players with weights at or above 300 pounds. The roster for Mack Brown’s first Longhorn team (1998), which was primarily composed of players he inherited from John Mackovic, had 13 players listed at 300 pounds or more. Players weighing 300+ pounds are by now commonplace on Division I college rosters, and there are likely more of them now at the high school level than ever before. But the University of Texas football program was almost a century old before 300-pounders were more than a novelty at Austin’s Memorial Stadium.

This post will highlight some notable “large humans” to have played for the Texas football team over the years and cover the historic progression from the program’s early decades — where anybody over 200 pounds was considered “big” — to the present era, where the median weight of Longhorn teams is well above 200 pounds.

I decided to cover this topic after a recent online exchange with Billy Dale, a former Longhorn halfback who was a three-year varsity letterman at UT from 1968 to 1970.1 Dale runs the Texas Legacy Support Network (TLSN), a non-profit and “independent organization celebrating Longhorn Sports History and assisting qualifying Horns who need temporary financial assistance.” The TLSN website features many first-person accounts of memorable games and players from UT’s sports history, as well as articles on Longhorn history contributed by a variety of writers. Larry Carlson, a longtime professor in Texas State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is a frequent contributor of articles to TLSN.

Two weeks ago, Dale shared on both the TLSN website and his public Facebook page an article Carlson had written on Robert Guevara, a Longhorn defensive tackle of the early 1970s who was dubbed “the Marfa Giant” due to his size and his west Texas hometown (more on him later in this post). This led to a discussion in the comments section on Guevara and two other players who were also part of the Longhorn program during his time who were reported to weigh either 300 pounds or at least within the vicinity of that figure, and they may have been the three heaviest players the Longhorns had ever had up to that point.

After the founding of UT’s football program in 1893, it took a long while for the linemen to get dramatically bigger on average, and it was really not until the 1940s when 200-pounders were the norm. If anything, the men in UT’s backfields got heavier before the linemen did. One reason for this was likely the diets and physical training methods that were common in those early decades, though a more obvious one is the fact that one-platoon football was the norm until well into the 1940s, and starters were expected to play on both offense and defense. Carrying excess weight was generally not conducive to maintaining the stamina needed to potentially play for all or most of two 30-minute halves of college football. It was not until the era of free substitutions and two-platoon football (that is, players specializing on offense or defense) that college and pro football began to see a lot of athletes playing effectively at 260 pounds or more, never mind 300 pounds.

When digging into the history of heavy players on UT football rosters, a modern-day researcher can only know the weights of players from decades ago from their listings on official rosters, contemporary news accounts that reported players’ weights, and sometimes yearbook pages dedicated to the football team’s players that included such information. It can be hazardous taking weight listings from such sources at face value, and I’ve seen plenty of instances in which news articles from a given month or even a given week listed very different weights for the same athlete.

And there is the obvious fact that the weight of any adult man can fluctuate in a relatively short time even when he isn’t playing college football or going through fall two-a-days during one of the hottest months of the year and losing a few pounds of water weight every day as a result. So a player’s listed weight at the beginning of a football season may bear little resemblance to their actual weight by the end of November.

I should acknowledge that while reading old news articles in preparation for this post I found a February 1986 column from longtime Austin American-Statesman sportswriter and Texas Longhorn football historian Lou Maysel that was partially focused on this very topic and mentioned several of the players named below. This post expands on that theme quite a bit and covers a much longer period of time than was available to Maysel forty years ago.2

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“Baby” Myers (1893-94) — 210 pounds

The University of Texas’s first varsity football team was formed in 1893. Its heaviest player was its center, John Henry Myers, who was reported to weigh 210 pounds and was known by the nickname “Baby”. The regular backfield starters on UT’s first team all weighed 150 pounds or less, and the left tackle on that inaugural team weighed all of 150 pounds. For comparison, the lightest player on UT’s 2025 roster was wide receiver Aaron Butler at 170 pounds.

Baby Myers was the regular center on UT’s first two football teams and was the only 200-pounder on any of the first six UT football teams (1893-98).

Leo “Big” Sam (1899-1900) — 230-240 pounds

Leopold George Sam was a regular at guard on the UT football team for the 1899 and 1900 seasons and was the biggest man to play football at Texas during the program’s first two decades. The 1901 Cactus yearbook listed his size as 6’2” and 231 pounds. Semp Russ, the quarterback of the Texas teams during Sam’s time, said many years later that Leo Sam weighed 240.3 I’m almost certain that I’ve read other accounts that estimated his weight even higher than that, but I wasn’t able to find them when putting this post together. All sources agree that he was very agile for his size and great at opening holes when blocking for the offense, and at times he was employed as a ball-carrier in “guards-back” formations that were used in the era before rules were implemented to require seven men to be lined up on the line of scrimmage before the start of a play.

Leo Sam was easily the heaviest man on UT’s undefeated 1900 team, but not its only player who would have been considered big for that time. The other two guards who played the most on that year’s team were David McDaniel, who was 6’2” and 195 pounds, and Arthur Griggs, who was listed as 6’1” and 218 pounds in the Cactus, though a contemporary news report put Griggs’s weight at 235 pounds. Regardless of which two guards were on the field, the 1900 Texas team had the heaviest guard tandem the program would have for many years.

I previously wrote about McDaniel and Griggs in the posts linked below.

Leo Sam probably would have been a program legend had he played guard for three or four years, but his career was short because he was evidently too good of a student. He graduated from Texas with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1901, only two years after receiving his diploma from Houston High School. He had a brief legal career before tragically dying at age 23 following a brain hemorrhage.

Gordon “Fats” Conley (1916-18) — 270 pounds

Charles Gordon Conley came to the University of Texas after graduating from Quanah High School in rural north Texas, and he played guard for parts of three seasons on the Longhorn football team. He was commonly known by his middle name, as well as the now politically incorrect nickname “Fats”. There have been Longhorns through the years who were given ironic nicknames, such as John Gooch, a tackle from the mid-1920s who stood 6’6” and weighed 215 pounds but was known as “Tiny”. But there was no irony to Conley’s nickname. He was reportedly 6’3” and weighed 240 pounds as a sophomore in 1916, and in subsequent seasons his weight was claimed to be between 255 and 270 pounds.

(It should be noted that another player from this period, a tackle and sometime guard from Houston named Alva Carlton, was also occasionally referred to by the nickname “Fats”. Carlton, who was a four-year letterman on the Longhorn football team from 1913 to 1916, was reported at the beginning of the 1915 season to weigh 205 pounds and was the heaviest man in that year’s preseason camp.)4

The 1916 Longhorn team was the first one in the program’s history in which the players’ uniforms had numbers on the back, though it was not until the early 1940s that the custom was established for linemen to wear numbers between 50 and 79. Conley, all 240+ pounds of him, was the original wearer of jersey #9 in UT’s football history.

In a column on Gordon Conley that was published in the Austin American on October 21, 1917, the writer said of him:

Doubtless it will always be a mystery how a man can grow until he weighs 255 pounds, but Gordon “Fats” Conley has done it, and he uses his weight to wonderful advantage on the Longhorn football team. They say he is rather hard to bowl over, and his side of the line is absolutely impregnable. There have been faster men than “Fats”, but nowhere will there be found one who is more valuable to the team, more loyal to the school and varsity football, or a better all-around man.5

I previously wrote about Conley in a Burnt Orange Nation post in 2022, which covered his Longhorn career and a 1919 incident in which the Austin newspapers erroneously reported that he had died following a bout with appendicitis, though he was actually still alive and would live for 40 more years.

Henry “Demp” Harris (1941-42, 1946) — 270 pounds
Harlan Wetz (1943-46) — 275 pounds

In the two decades that followed Gordon Conley’s last season on the gridiron with the Longhorns the team had relatively few players who could have been called true heavyweights, certainly none who were in Conley or Leo Sam’s weight class. The Longhorn halfbacks, fullbacks, and quarterbacks of the 1920s and 1930s tended to be a lot heavier than the comparative welterweights and lightweights who played in UT backfields in the 1890s and early 1900s, but it took a long while before the average weight of Longhorn linemen was even within 100 pounds of Cole Hutson and Brandon Baker, who were the lightest of the Longhorns’ regular offensive linemen in 2025 at a listed 308 pounds each.

Louis Jordan, a star guard and captain of the 1914 Longhorn football team who was the first UT product to be named an All-American by Walter Camp, was fairly big for his time, standing 6’1” and weighing 205-210 pounds.

Gordy Brown, the Longhorns’ regular left tackle as a 22-year-old junior in 1928, was a two-way terror and seen as the best tackle in the Southwest Conference that year, and he was named to several All-America teams. Brown stood a mere 5’10” tall, and his weight was reported at different times in 1928 as being a very modest 171 to 180 pounds.

Jim Tolbert, the heaviest of the tackles on the 1934 Longhorn team, was 6 feet tall and a mere 200 pounds, and even at that size was still big enough that contemporary articles described him as “big”.

Chal Daniel, a senior guard on UT’s 1941 team who was named to the Associated Press (AP) All-America third team that year, was between 190 and 200 pounds for most of his Longhorn career. This was not an uncommonly low weight for a guard even in that era of college football. The five linemen who made the AP’s All-America first team for 1941 had an average listed weight of 200 pounds.6

Henry Franklin Harris, an Alabama native who came to UT in the early 1940s, was the next “large human” of note to come through the Longhorn football program. He was known by the nickname “Dimp” while attending Wilcox County High School in Camden, Alabama, a nickname that was usually spelled “Demp” while he was a Longhorn. Harris was a reserve tackle for the Longhorn teams of 1941 and 1942. When he registered for the military draft as a 19-year-old in the summer of 1942, his draft card listed his height and weight as 6 feet and 260 pounds. He was projected to be a starter in 1943 but was called into active duty with the Army in the spring of that year. He returned to UT and re-joined the Longhorn football squad after his discharge in 1946 and started at left tackle during that season, during which he was reported to be 270 pounds. After the end of his college career he played in two NFL seasons.

Harlan Wetz was the next giant to play for the Longhorns, and his career overlapped by one season with the 270-pound Demp Harris. Wetz carried roughly the same weight as Harris but was five inches taller. He was a graduate of New Braunfels High School, and when he registered for the military draft as a UT freshman in 1943, his draft card listed his size as 6’5” and 275 pounds. We can surmise that he was fairly athletic for a big man, as he filled in at quarterback for his high school team when they had a starter injured, and while a Longhorn he served as the team’s kickoff specialist late in his career while also playing tackle. He was an honorable mention All-Southwest Conference pick as a senior in 1946. Wetz was the 45th overall pick in the 1947 NFL Draft, and he played for one season with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-America Football Conference (AAFC).

Bud McFadin (1948-50) — 250 pounds
Kenneth Jackson (1948-50) — 252 pounds

Soon after Harris and Wetz completed their collegiate careers, two notable heavyweights from very different parts of Texas arrived on the UT campus. Lewis “Bud” McFadin hailed from the small town of Iraan in far west Texas, while Kenneth Jackson made the short trip to UT after graduating from the local Austin High School. They didn’t necessarily break new ground with their playing weight, but they were arguably the first Longhorns who were truly enormous for their time while also being very effective players.

Bud McFadin was a two-way lineman who won All-America honors at guard as a junior in 1949, then was a consensus All-American guard as a senior in 1950. He was 6’3” with a playing weight typically listed at 245-250 pounds. He was easily the heaviest player to make the AP’s 1950 All-America first team, at a listed 245 pounds.

McFadin was the 11th overall pick in the 1951 NFL Draft, and he went on to play professional football for eleven seasons and made two Pro Bowls. He was inducted into the UT Athletics Hall of Honor in 1973, and into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983.

Kenneth Jackson spent most of his senior season as UT’s starter at right tackle, but also occasionally lined up at right guard. He was listed at 222 pounds as a sophomore in 1948, and reports on his weight during his senior season varied greatly. He was reported to be 225 pounds before the start of the 1950 season, but by October most news articles mentioning him that noted his weight were putting it at 255 pounds or slightly higher. He didn’t garner All-America honors like his teammate Bud McFadin, but he was named to every All-Southwest Conference team for 1950 and was the 22nd overall pick in the 1951 NFL Draft.

The 1950 Longhorns went undefeated in Southwest Conference play and upset then top-ranked SMU along the way, but a 14-13 loss to Oklahoma kept them behind the eventual AP and Coaches’ Poll national champion Sooners, and Texas finished third in the final AP poll.

The Longhorns’ starting offensive linemen against fourth-ranked Tennessee in the 1951 Cotton Bowl — which included McFadin at left guard and Jackson at right tackle — had an average listed weight of 225 pounds, which was about seven pounds heavier on average than the Texas offensive linemen who faced Notre Dame in the 1970 and 1971 Cotton Bowls two decades later.

Jerry Oliver (1962) — 270 pounds

When Jerry Oliver enrolled at UT in 1962, he was likely the biggest freshman the Texas Longhorns had since Harlan Wetz almost twenty years earlier. As a senior two-way tackle at Brazosport High School on the gulf coast, he was an honorable mention Class 4A all-state pick and made the All-District 12-4A second team on both offense and defense. He was reported to be 6’5”, and different sources listed his weight as 266 or 277.

He impressed both rivals and his own coaches with his size and strength as a UT freshman. This was a decade before freshmen were allowed to play on varsity football squads, so Oliver spent that fall on the Longhorn freshmen team. He was voted almost unanimously to the Southwest Conference’s all-freshmen team for 1962 and was named that class’s Most Outstanding Lineman.7 He reportedly wore shoes that were size 14-EEE. Texas Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal said of Oliver, “He has the biggest hands and feet I’ve ever seen. We’re going to X-ray his big toe. I think it has a liver in it.”8 Royal also compared shaking hands with Oliver to “shaking hands with a stalk of bananas.”

Different reports in December of 1962 put Oliver’s weight at 245 or 260 pounds, and it went up in the spring. In early March of 1963 it was reported that he had weighed in at 270 pounds, and that he had lost a mere three pounds in the weeks before the beginning of spring practices while going through Longhorn trainer Frank Medina’s notoriously grueling conditioning program.9

He was believed to be the strongest man to have been in the Longhorn football program in many years, stronger even than the consensus All-American guard and pro football veteran Bud McFadin. Had Oliver stuck it out with the Longhorn varsity he would likely have been a key contributor to their 1963 national championship squad and might have teamed with All-American Scott Appleton to form a very formidable defensive wall. But in the first week of March in 1963 it was reported that Oliver had quit football and intended to enlist in the Army, and he never played football at UT again.10

Robert Guevara (1970-71) — 290+ pounds
Fred Pointer (1971) — 300 pounds
John Boecker (1971-73) — 310 pounds

In the early 1970s the Longhorns had a trio of super-heavyweights who were likely bigger than anyone seen in Austin since Jerry Oliver had come and gone without completing his freshman year. All of them arrived in Austin with high expectations, but none finished their college career at UT.

Robert Guevara, the oldest of the three, was a jumbo athlete from the remote west Texas town of Marfa, which is about 170 miles southwest of Odessa and a drive of more than 400 miles west of Austin. He was appropriately nicknamed “the Marfa Giant” due to his hometown and his 6’6” 275-pound frame. Some articles put his height as high as 6’8”. He had good foot speed in spite of his gargantuan size, and as a senior at Marfa High he played linebacker on defense and was occasionally used as a single-wing fullback on offense. He was named the San Angelo Standard-Times’s 1969 All-West Texas Class 2A Defensive Player of the Year for his play at linebacker, and was also named to its Super All-West Texas first team.11

At least 14 college coaches made the long trip out to Marfa to visit him in late 1969 and early 1970, and Texas Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal traveled there to watch Guevara and the Marfa basketball team in an important district match in February 1970. Guevara waited until the conclusion of basketball season to choose his college destination. He signed with Texas in late February, receiving one of the final scholarships out of the 50 the Longhorns awarded to members of the 1970 recruiting class.

Guevara weighed 285 pounds when he reported for fall practices as a freshman in August of 1970, and he was placed with the defensive linemen. A mere two days later he was hospitalized after suffering from heat exhaustion during an afternoon practice, the Austin humidity being far different from the west Texas mountain air he was more used to. The following week, he amazed practice observers by running a forty-yard dash in five seconds flat. Longhorn freshmen team coach Bill Ellington described Guevara’s potential as “unlimited”.

He had a fine season with the 1970 Longhorn Yearling (freshmen) squad, and in December he was one of nine Longhorns named to the Southwest Conference All-Freshmen team. Ellington proclaimed that the 1970 crop of Longhorn freshmen was “even deeper and more balanced” than the vaunted “Worster bunch” that had signed with Texas in 1967 and finished its run with three straight conference titles and two claimed national championships.12 Guevara was listed as 6’6” and 282 pounds on the news release announcing the 1970 All-Freshmen team, and the only other player to make the team who was within even 50 pounds of that weight was TCU’s Charlie Davis, a second-team guard listed at 6’3” and 265 pounds. Davis’s much younger half-brother Leonard Davis (who will make an appearance later in this post) would suit up for the Longhorns nearly three decades later.

Despite Guevara’s freshman year laurels and unprecedented combination of size and speed, Darrell Royal was less than sanguine about his chances of making a big impact for the Longhorn varsity team in 1971 with the weight he carried. Guevara reportedly weighed 292 in March of 1971, and when Austin American sports editor Lou Maysel asked Royal what he saw in Guevara one month later, the Longhorn mentor responded, “I see he’s got to get down to about 260 or 255. He just can’t play at 290. He doesn’t have the agility and he won’t have the stamina and the quickness. He might play some at his present size but he will never reach his potential.”13 Three months later when Royal called to check on him, Guevara claimed he was 275 pounds, so that was his listed weight in the Longhorn football media guide for 1971.

He was a backup defensive tackle for most of the 1971 season, though he started at right defensive tackle in UT’s 39-10 win over Rice on October 23 in place of an injured starter. He recorded a fumble recovery in that game, and a week later he made an assisted tackle on a goal line stand that prevented an SMU touchdown in a game the Longhorns went on to win 22-18. The Longhorns finished 8-3 overall that season and claimed their fourth straight conference championship.

While Guevara was in his first year on the Longhorn varsity, two equally bulky newcomers were playing on UT’s 1971 freshmen team. John Boecker, a 6’6” 280-pound tackle, signed with Texas in 1971 after receiving all-state honors at Seguin, and Fred Pointer signed that same year as a highly-touted 6’3” 275-pound guard from San Antonio Jay. Both were starters on the 1971 Longhorn freshmen team, Boecker at right guard and Pointer at left guard, and Pointer reportedly ran a forty-yard dash in 5.1 seconds in practice. In the published lineup for a November game against TCU’s freshmen, Boecker was listed at 310 pounds and Pointer at 282. Boecker made that year’s SWC All-Freshmen team.

The spring of 1972 found the Texas Longhorns in the unfamiliar position of having three players weighing at least in the vicinity of 290 pounds. Royal wanted all of them to get their weight into the 255-265 range, and he made it publicly known that if Guevara, Boecker, and Pointer did not drop enough pounds over the summer then they would not have a spot on the Longhorn team when fall practices began, no matter how many forty-yard dashes they could run in 5.1 or faster. He blamed excess weight and poor conditioning for several injuries and pulled muscles suffered by his charges in the previous months.

Guevara was apparently unable to get below 280 pounds. Royal said he was welcome to rejoin the team if he got his weight to the desired range, but the “Marfa Giant” elected to leave UT and never played football again. He continued his college studies at Sul Ross State College (now Sul Ross State University) in Alpine, Texas, a short distance from his hometown.

Pointer weighed 300 pounds when he reported to Texas in the fall of 1972, which Royal called “big enough to burn diesel.”14 He left UT and transferred to Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State) in San Marcos. He would play guard on its football team for three seasons and was named an NAIA All-American as a junior in 1974.

Boecker managed to drop his weight from 310 to under 270 between November of 1971 and August of 1972, and he was allowed to remain with the team. He won his only letter at Texas in the 1973 season, during which he was a backup at offensive guard and defensive tackle. He became academically ineligible the following year and transferred to Adams State College (now Adams State University) in Colorado. He played his final year of eligibility with Adams State in 1975 and made the All-Rocky Mountain Conference first team, and was also an honorable mention NAIA All-American.

The first 300-pounders to see the field at Texas

Ken Hackemack (1986-89) — 305 pounds
Charles Seafous (1986-90) — 308 pounds
Sam Adams (1988-1992) — 320 pounds

There was a gradual upward progression in the average weights of Longhorn linemen in the two decades between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. The five offensive line starters for Texas in the 1971 Cotton Bowl averaged 218 pounds, with sophomore right tackle Jerry Sisemore being the heaviest at a listed 241 pounds. Notre Dame’s four starting defensive linemen in that game were ten pounds heavier on average.

Twenty later when Texas faced Miami in the 1991 Cotton Bowl, the Longhorns’ offensive line starters averaged roughly 275 pounds, with the lightest one being center Todd Smith at about 260 pounds.

John Boecker may have played on UT’s 1971 freshmen team at 310 pounds, but was down in the 275-285 pound range during the lone season that he contributed to the Longhorn varsity.

Gilbert Esteves, an offensive tackle from Brownsville who came to UT as a junior college transfer in 1983, weighed in at 305 pounds when he arrived for fall practices that year and was ultimately redshirted. Esteves was listed at a slimmed-down 286 pounds a year later as 1984 fall practices began and was still the heaviest player on the two-deep roster at that time, but he left the team “for personal reasons” in late August and never played in a game with Texas.15

As for when Texas had its first 300-pound man suit up and appear in a game, that is not entirely clear. Gene Chilton, who received All-America honors as UT’s starting center in 1984 and 1985, was typically listed at 295 pounds in his last two seasons in burnt orange, though a news article from December of 1985 stated that he had gotten up to 315 pounds during one summer in his college career.16 Assuming that Chilton’s weight listing was accurate and that he never actually played at or above 300 pounds, then it was most likely in the 1989 season in which a 300-pounder first played in a game with the Longhorns.

Charles Seafous was a late-blooming offensive tackle prospect who didn’t even play football for his high school until his senior year at Houston’s Furr High School. He was 6’6” and had weighed 330 at one point during high school, but was listed as 308 pounds when he signed with Texas as a member of the 1986 recruiting class, and he may have been the first Longhorn high school recruit who carried over 300 pounds with him to Austin. He reportedly weighed 299 during fall camp in 1986 and was tied with redshirt freshman Brian Nielsen as the heaviest member the squad at the time. Seafous redshirted in his first year with the program and didn’t see his first action with the team until 1987. By that point his weight was variously listed between 262 and 281 pounds, and it was still listed in that range in the following two seasons as he made occasional starts at left tackle.

Brian Nielsen was a backup guard in 1986, but he was typically listed at 292 pounds that year after weighing 299 during training camp. At least one roster published during the 1987 season listed his weight as 305 pounds, but others put it closer to 287. He spent much of that season as the Longhorns’ starting right tackle, but he was declared academically ineligible in 1988 and didn’t play for Texas again. He signed with Texas A&I (now Texas A&M-Kingsville) two years later and played guard on the Javelinas football team for two years, receiving All-Lone Star Conference honors twice and Little All-America first team honors as a senior in 1991.

Sam Adams was another huge offensive line prospect from that decade, and he signed with Texas in the recruiting class of 1988 from Baytown Sterling. Adams (not to be confused with the defensive tackle of the same name who signed with Texas A&M three years later and went on to play 14 seasons in the NFL from 1994 to 2007) was listed at 6’7” and 306 pounds on Sterling High School’s roster going into his senior year, and when he joined the Longhorns for fall practice as a freshman in 1988 he claimed to be 320 pounds. He redshirted as a true freshman and saw his first action with the Longhorns as a redshirt freshman in 1989 when he filled in at left guard for an injured starter. He was listed at 308 pounds early in that season.

So there were several players who weighed 300 or more pounds as they first arrived at UT or before they became regular contributors, but my guess is that the first 300-pounder to actually enter a game for Texas was defensive tackle Ken Hackemack, a 6’9” behemoth from Bellville who was reported to be 305 pounds in August of 1989 after playing at 280 the season before. Hackemack was a starting defensive tackle in UT’s 1989 season-opener vs. Colorado. Sam Adams saw his first playing time later in that year and may have been the first Longhorn on the offensive side of the ball to play at 300+ pounds.

UT’s first 300-pound All-Americans

Texas had its first 300-pound All-American honoree at some point in the 1990s. Exactly when isn’t clear, but there are three obvious candidates.

Blake Brockermeyer, UT’s left tackle as a junior in 1994, was generally listed at 6’5” and roughly 300 pounds. When he was named to that season’s All-Southwest Conference team, the press release announcing the voting results for that honor listed Brockermeyer at 298 pounds. He was named to the AP’s All-America second team and also won All-America honors from the Sporting News and Football Writers Association of America (FWAA). If he didn’t play that season at 300 pounds, he was very close to it.

If UT’s first 300-pound All-American wasn’t Blake Brockermeyer, then it was Ben Adams and/or Jay Humphrey, decorated Longhorn offensive linemen of the 1998 season. Both were commonly listed at 300 pounds or more, and as seniors in 1998 Humphrey (who played right tackle that season) was named to the AP’s All-America second team, while Adams (who played right guard) made the AP’s All-America third team.

Casey Hampton, the immovable nose guard from Galveston Ball, was the first defensive All-American from UT to weigh above 300 pounds. Hampton made the AP’s All-America first team as a junior in 1999 after being credited with a team-leading 101 total tackles, then was a consensus All-American as a senior in 2000. He was listed as 6’1” and 305 pounds in the press release announcing the AP’s 1999 All-Americans, and he weighed in at 314 pounds at the 2001 NFL Combine.

The first all 300-pound offensive line — 1998

Men tipping the scales at 300 pounds became more common on Longhorn rosters as the 1990s progressed. Three years after defensive tackle Ken Hackemack played his senior season at 305 or so pounds, true freshman defensive tackle Stonie Clark got playing time for the 1992 Longhorn team while listed at 6’1” and 300 pounds. Clark and senior offensive lineman Alan Luther (6’4” 293 pounds) were the only two members of the 1992 team with a listed weight that topped 290.

As previously stated, the offensive line starters for Texas in the 1991 Cotton Bowl Classic averaged about 275 pounds. Six seasons later when Texas faced defending national champion Nebraska in the first Big 12 Championship Game in 1996, their starting O-line had an average listed weight of 293 pounds. The only 300-pounder in that group was left tackle Octavious Bishop (who is now Dr. Octavious Bishop, having received his Ph.D. in psychology), while the other four weighed between 283 and 297 pounds.

Two years later in 1998 the Longhorns fielded their first starting offensive line made up entirely of players listed at 300 or more pounds. Left tackle Octavious Bishop (330 pounds), left guard Roger Roesler (300), center Russell Gaskamp (305), right guard Ben Adams (300), and right tackle Jay Humphrey (300) helped pave the way for senior running back Ricky Williams to rush for 2,124 yards and 27 touchdowns and break the NCAA record for career rushing yards during his 1998 Heisman Trophy-winning season.

Eleven players on the Longhorns’ two-deep roster going into the 1998 Thanksgiving game vs. Texas A&M were listed at 300 or more pounds, topped by a certain sophomore offensive tackle who was listed at 350 pounds.

Leonard Davis (1997-2000) — 365 pounds

Over 25 years since the end of his Longhorn career, Leonard Davis remains one of the most massive athletes ever seen on the 40 Acres. Standing 6’6” and over 300 pounds while still in high school, he was a football and basketball star at tiny Class 1A Wortham High School in central Texas. He committed to Texas A&M early in his senior year, but changed his mind shortly before National Signing Day and signed with Texas as a highly-ranked member of the 1997 recruiting class. As a high school senior he was commonly reported to weigh anywhere from 320 to 350 pounds.

He reportedly weighed 355 pounds as a freshman in 1997, and was the first Longhorn to top the 350-pound mark. If any a 355-pound man could be called “svelte”, it was a young Leonard Davis.

Davis began his college career as a defensive tackle, and was credited with 11 total tackles, one tackle for loss, and one fumble recovery as a true freshman in 1997. He was moved to the offensive side of the ball after that season and was the team’s backup left tackle as a sophomore in 1998, then took over the starting left tackle spot as a junior in 1999 following the graduation of three-year starter Octavious Bishop. Davis was a consensus All-American as a senior in 2000, and weighed in at 370 pounds at the 2021 NFL Combine. He was selected with the second overall pick in that year’s draft and went on to play eleven seasons in the NFL and was selected to three Pro Bowls.

Longhorn “large humans” of the last 25 years

In the quarter-century since Leonard Davis was picked second overall pick of the 2001 NFL Draft there have been a few other UT products who entered the pro football ranks with an official weight closer to that of Davis than the 300-pound Blake Brockermeyer.

Offensive tackle Mike Williams weighed 370 at the NFL Combine before being selected fourth overall in the 2002 NFL Draft.

Offensive guard Derrick Dockery, a third round pick in 2003, was 6’6” and 347 pounds at that year’s combine.

2023 Outland Trophy winner T’Vondre Sweat weighed 366 pounds at the combine before being picked early in the second round of the 2024 NFL Draft.

Several other Longhorns who either did not go pro in football or finished their college careers with other programs likewise found themselves in the 330+ pound range at one time or another.

A pair of recent Longhorns drafted by NFL teams were relatively slimmed down after reaching very high playing weights while in college.

Offensive tackle Cameron Williams, taken in last year’s sixth round, weighed in at 317 pounds at the 2025 NFL Combine after reportedly weighing 360 pounds when Texas signed him in the 2022 recruiting class.

Defensive tackle Keondre Coburn, a man who was nicknamed “Snacks”, had a listed weight on the Longhorn roster high as 348 pounds, and inspired some Longhorn fans to start referring to a “Coburn” as a unit of weight, had trimmed down to 332 by the time he weighed in at the 2023 NFL Combine.

In the five full recruiting cycles that have taken place during the head coaching tenure of Steve Sarkisian (2022-26), the Texas Longhorns have signed no less than ten high school recruits who were listed at 335 pounds or more on UT’s signing day press releases. The 2023 class alone included four players weighing 350 pounds or more (three of whom have since left the program), which prompted a tweet in which I jokingly compared that group to the Celestials seen in the 2021 movie Eternals.

Texas is likely to continue recruiting “large humans” to man its offensive and defensive lines for the foreseeable future, players who are not simply big by college football standards but ones who Gregg Easterbrook would label as belonging to the Ticonderoga class (in reference to a class of warships used by the U.S. Navy). Whether the weight of those ginormous recruits will prove to be more of an asset than a hindrance to them reaching their athletic ceiling is likely to be something fans will wonder about every year.

I hope you enjoyed this stroll through the high points of this “weight”-y subject. My goal was mainly to cover the notable Longhorns who set new standards when it came to player weight over the years, and to show just how long it took to get from 210-pound “Baby” Myers being considered “big” to 308-pound Cole Hutson being relatively undersized at offensive guard. With 133 seasons of Texas Longhorn football history now in the books I’m almost certain to have missed a “large human” of historical consequence somewhere along the line. Please comment on the post or send me a message if you’d like to point out others you think I should have mentioned.

Author’s note: the original version this post erroneously stated that Brian Nielsen signed with Southwest Texas State (rather than Texas A&I) in 1990, two years after leaving the Texas program. This was due to the February 15, 1990 issue of the San Antonio Express-News, which reported on that week’s National Signing Day results for various colleges in the state, erroneously labeling a group of Texas A&I football recruits as “SWT signings”. A friend of Nielsen’s pointed out the error.

But in the current era of college football, early January sees the opening of the transfer portal window, where current college athletes seeking more playing time or financial compensation for their talents will either negotiate for more of one or the other, or enter their name in the transfer portal in hopes of getting interest from other programs and improving their $ituation and/or prospects for playing time in the upcoming season.

Until very recently, college athletes who transferred from one program to another within the same NCAA division had to sit out a year before being eligible to play at their new school, unless they already had a degree from their previous school and were enrolling at their new one as a grad student (i.e. a “graduate transfer”). Prior to the current era of free and open transfers, an athlete could only transfer and play immediately if they moved to a school at a lower division, i.e. the FBS or FCS, or anywhere in Division I to Division II or Division III.

I don’t want to spend this post going on a long discourse about the headache-inducing transfer portal era and all the craziness it has unleashed, but with the flood of stories in sports media about all the shenanigans involving the portal during its current window (which ends today, thankfully), I thought this would be a good time to write about some of the earliest football players at the University of Texas who would be called “transfers” using today’s definition.

Football was still very new to colleges in the south and southwest by the time Texas formed its first varsity football team in 1893. UT was the first college in the state to organize a varsity football team, and it was some years before common rules or guidelines were established regarding the eligibility of students who transferred from one school to another. While there were a number of very early UT football players who had previously played the sport at another college, most of them entered UT as graduate students or law students and not still as undergrads, so they were more akin to today’s “graduate transfers” and wouldn’t have been considered transfers in their own era.

This will post will not provide an exhaustive list of transfer students or grad students who played football after arriving at UT, as it is not entirely clear how many of them played football at another college before attending Texas. No less than six members of the inaugural UT varsity football team had previously attended other colleges or universities, but perhaps as few as three had verifiable football experience at their former school.

The men briefly profiled below played for the Texas football program during its first two decades of existence (1893-1913), more than a century before the advent of the transfer portal. This group includes five players who served as a UT football team captain (plus one more who was elected to that role but left school before the next season), and five men who have been inducted into the University of Texas Athletics Hall of Honor.

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Early “transfer” players for the University of Texas football program

The following men all played football at the University of Texas after attending another college and playing or attempting to play football there. Though the title of the post included “Texas Longhorn football history”, most of these men actually played in the era before UT’s athletic squads were commonly known as the Longhorns (which was not until a few years into the 1900s), so they get that label retroactively.

Paul McLane (1893)

Paul McLane and his younger brother Ray McLane entered the University of Texas as engineering students in the fall of 1893, and all accounts credit them as two of the primary organizers of the first UT football team. Paul had attended Columbia College (now Columbia University) in New York during the 1892-93 academic year and had played on its freshmen football team, and when he arrived in Austin and enrolled at Texas at age 19 in September 1893 he was one of the very few students on campus who had prior experience playing organized football.

The McLane brothers were part of a larger group of students that got together to play football early that fall, and they soon formed a team. Paul is recorded as being the one who taught the game to those who had not played it before, and he was UT’s official captain when it played its very first game against the Dallas Athletic Club on Thanksgiving Day in 1893.

James Morrison (1893)

Morrison also enrolled at UT in the fall of 1893 and is regularly cited as a co-founder of UT football along with the McLane brothers. He came to UT as a graduate student after having received his bachelor’s degree from Hampden-Sydney College in his native Virginia. Hampden-Sydney did not have its first varsity football team until after Morrison’s graduation, but he is noted as having played for a football club team that was organized at that college during his undergrad days, and he was its captain for a time. He also served as team captain for two of the four games that Texas played in its inaugural season that started at the end of November of 1893 and stretched into February of 1894. He later attended the University of Virginia as a medical student and was captain of UVA’s 1897 football team.

Bibb Graves (1893)

Graves was an Alabama native who enrolled at UT as a law student in 1893, a few months after graduating from the University of Alabama at age 20. He had been a substitute player on Alabama’s first varsity football team in the fall of 1892, and he was likewise a substitute on UT’s first team in 1893. He has never been a recognized letterman with the UT football program and it is unclear how much he actually played, though one contemporary account stated that he substituted in during UT’s very first game after another player exited due to injury.

Graves went on to complete his legal studies at Yale, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in 1896, and several years later was elected to two terms as governor of Alabama.

Timothy P. Brown, who authors the Football Archaeology Substack, wrote a post on Graves in October of last year.

Football Archaeology

Bibb Graves, Founding Member of Alabama and Texas Football

Football is a game in which individuals and teams have achieved many feats, some of which are more challenging or rare than others. Among all the feats accomplished in football history, Bibb Graves stands with the giants of obscure featdom for having been a member of the first football team at two storied college programs…

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7 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Football Archaeology

John O’Keefe (1894-95)

John Arthur Patrick O’Keefe was born to Irish immigrant parents and grew up in the north Texas community of Honey Grove. After attending a Catholic boarding school in southeast Kansas he began his college career at St. Mary’s College in St. Marys, Kansas, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1894. He enrolled at UT as a law student that same year and joined the nascent Texas varsity football team, which was in just its second season of play. Whether or not he had played football while at St. Mary’s College is not clear, but he was “spoken of as the ‘hot stuff’ when it comes to hiding the oval” before the 1894 season’s opening game, which suggests he had at least some prior experience with the sport.1

O’Keefe was a starting halfback for UT’s first two games in the fall of 1894 and even scored the first touchdown in the first game Texas ever played against its now ancient rival Texas A&M, but he was only recognized as a football letterman for the 1895 season. He also played baseball while in Austin and was both the team captain and manager of UT’s first varsity baseball team in 1895. I previously wrote about John O’Keefe in a post in April 2025.

James “Snaky” Jones (1895-96)

James Slaughter Jones grew up in a small community east of Austin between Bastrop and Smithville and received his first college education at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. He played end on VMI’s football team and graduated in its class of 1895. He enrolled at UT later that year as a law student and played end on the Texas football team for two seasons, serving as a co-captain in 1896. He was often referred to in contemporary articles by the nickname “Snaky”. He also played baseball (he was a team captain in that sport as well) and was a member of the track & field team, and he is credited as one of the first two three-sport lettermen in UT’s athletic history. Jones was inducted into the UT Athletics Hall of Honor in 1983.

Joseph Maytubby (1896)

Maytubby was a native of present-day Oklahoma and was descended from Chickasaw ancestry on his father’s side. He attended Trinity College (now Duke University) in Durham, North Carolina and was a star halfback on its football team. He was elected captain of Trinity’s 1895 football team, but the college’s president disbanded its football program that fall before any games could be played, and it did not field a team again until 1920. It was reported in October of 1895 that the University of North Carolina “offered [Maytubby] large money inducement” to transfer and play football for its team, and that he received similarly “flattering offers from the leading teams of the North”.2 Had he been a student-athlete 130 years later he could have truly cashed in as a potential transfer! But Maytubby declined all monetary and scholastic offers from other schools and graduated from Trinity College in its 1896 class, and he is recognized today as Duke University’s first Native American graduate.

Maytubby enrolled at the University of Texas as a law student and played fullback and halfback on its 1896 football team and was hailed as one of the best players the program had during that time. I wrote a piece on Maytubby’s life and athletic career at Burnt Orange Nation in 2021.

Alexander “A.G.” Blacklock (1897)

By 1897 football was fairly well established on most southern college campuses, and when students came to UT as undergraduate transfers or as law students and joined the football team, it was more common for those newcomers to bring some football experience with them than it would have been a handful of years earlier. The 1897 UT squad had a handful of newcomers who had played football at other colleges.

Alexander Galpin Blacklock was born in England in 1873 and moved with his family to Tennessee when he was about seven years old. He attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee (the college is commonly referred to simply as “Sewanee”) and was a multi-sport athlete there, twice serving as captain of its football team. By the time he left Sewanee in 1897, Blacklock had received both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree. He enrolled at UT as a law student in the fall of 1897 and played both football and baseball during his time in Austin. He was UT’s regular quarterback during the 1897 football season, and he graduated in the following year with a Bachelor of Laws degree.

Sam Hogsett (1897-98)

Sam Hogsett was a Fort Worth native and the son of Jonathan Young Hogsett, who is credited with drafting the original city charter of Fort Worth when it was incorporated in 1873. Sam Hogsett played quarterback on the Texas football teams of 1897 and 1898 while he was a law student there. Before he was a UT student he attended Bethel College in Kentucky and the University of Virginia. He may have played football while at Bethel, as contemporary articles indicate that Bethel’s football teams of 1894 and 1895 had a player named Hogsett.

Cloyd Read (1897)

Cloyd Henry Read, a Tennessee native, came to the University of Texas as a law student after graduating from the University of Tennessee with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1896. He likely played on one of Tennessee’s earliest football teams, as that program’s all-time lettermen list names a “C.H. Reed” as an 1892 letter-winner, and Read’s last name was sometimes misspelled as “Reid” or “Reed” in contemporary articles. Read played end on Texas’s 1897 football team (the 1898 Cactus yearbook misspelled his last name as “Reid” in its section dedicated to the 1897 football team) and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1898.

Birch Wooldridge (1897)

Birch Wooldridge was one of the earliest Texas football players who was a true undergraduate transfer, and also among the very earliest to have played football in high school before his college days. Wooldridge attended Galveston’s Ball High School, which was one of the first — if not the first — public high schools in Texas to field a football team. Wooldridge played on Ball’s 1893 football team before graduating in 1894. He attended Vanderbilt as an undergrad medical student and won a letter playing halfback on Vandy’s 1896 football team. He transferred to Texas (which he had evidently attended even before going to Vandy) the following year and was the regular starter at left halfback on UT’s 1897 football team, often receiving praise for his play in contemporary articles.

I wrote about Wooldridge in an October post on three men who played football at both Vanderbilt and Texas.

Donnell Cameron (1898)

Cameron, a Tennessee native, played on the 1898 Texas football team after attending and playing football for two other colleges. He began his college career at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, and as a 17-year-old freshman he was the regular starter at center on Cumberland’s 1895 football team, which was the second football team in that school’s history. He later transferred to Austin College in Sherman, Texas and was the fullback and team captain of its 1896 football team, the first varsity football squad in that college’s history.

Austin College only played one football game in 1896, a loss to Texas A&M, and Cameron ended up returning to Cumberland and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1898. Later that year he enrolled at Texas as a senior law student, and in the fall of 1898 he was a backup guard on the UT football team.

As noted in a post I wrote about Donnell Cameron last year, UT’s football records have erroneously identified him as Donald Cameron for over a century.

Semp Russ (1898-1900)

Semp Russ grew up mostly in San Antonio and began his college career at Tulane in New Orleans. An injury prevented him from playing football during his lone year as an undergrad at Tulane, but after transferring to Texas in 1898 he joined the football team and established himself as a quality player at the end position, then became the team’s quarterback and was team’s starter at that position for two full seasons. For many years afterward, Russ was commonly viewed as the best quarterback in program history, and certainly the best of the pre-forward pass era (all seasons prior to 1906). Russ also became the first former University of Texas student to participate in the Olympic games when he competed in tennis at the 1904 Summer Games in St. Louis. He was inducted into the UT Athletics Hall of Honor in 1969.

I previously wrote about Semp Russ in a 2021 Burnt Orange Nation post on “UT’s forgotten Olympians”.

Ed Overshiner (1898-99)

Overshiner, a native of Valley View in north Texas, was an undergraduate at Texas A&M during the mid-1890s and played on its football team. After graduating from A&M with an engineering degree in 1898, he enrolled at UT as a law student. He was already 24 years old and had no intention of continuing his football career, but some members of the Texas football team convinced him to come out for the team’s early practices in the fall of 1898. He not only made the varsity squad but ended up being its starting center for two seasons before graduating with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1900.

Claud McClellan (1899)

Claud McClellan was born in east Texas and moved west with his family to Coleman while in his teens. He began his college career at Add-Ran Male and Female College in Waco, which later became Texas Christian University and moved to Fort Worth. While at Add-Ran he played on one of its earliest football teams and is a recognized TCU letterman for the 1897 season. His obituary would claim that he was a team captain. He later attended UT as a law student and was a guard on its 1899 football team.

Arthur Griggs (1900)

Griggs was an Ohio native who enrolled at the University of Texas in October of 1900 after previously attending Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. He had likely played football while at Otterbein, as contemporary news stories on its football team state that it had a player named Griggs who was a starter at left guard in 1898 and at center in 1899. Griggs immediately joined the UT football team after enrolling, though it had already played the first two of the six games on its schedule for 1900. Griggs, a big man for his era at 6’1” whose weight was listed by different sources as 218 or 235, played guard in three of UT’s remaining four games and was a starter in one.

I previously wrote about Griggs in my first “Forgotten Texas Longhorn letterman” post in February of last year.

Jim McCall (1900)

James Lycurgus Livingstone McCall was a Weatherford, Texas native who was an undergrad at Austin College in Sherman and played on the first three varsity football teams organized at that college, though its teams played in only five total games between 1896 and 1898. He later attended UT as a law student and was the center on the 1900 Texas team, which went undefeated and outscored its six opponents by a combined score of 113-13. McCall only played one season on the gridiron at Texas, but left such an impression that for more than a decade after that year he was viewed by many as the best center the school had ever had. Even 25 years later when longtime engineering dean and Longhorn football fan T.U. Taylor picked his all-time Texas football squad in 1925, he named McCall as one of the two best centers in the program’s history.3

Walter Hyde (1901)

Hyde, a native of Taylor, Texas, began his college career at Texas A&M and was a letterman on its football team in 1900. The following year, he was enrolled at Texas and played both end and fullback on UT’s 1901 football team. He was held in such regard that the returning members of the team elected him captain for the 1902 season, but in the summer before that season he took a job with a surveying corps in Mexico and did not return to UT.

Harris James (1901)

James, a San Marcos native, attended Texas A&M and was a teammate of Walter Hyde’s on A&M’s 1900 football team, and both played for A&M against Texas that season. He transferred to the University of Texas in 1901 as Hyde did and played on its football team that fall. He played tackle for Texas and was just 18 years old despite being in his second year of college. He did not return to the team after that year, and died four years later when he was only a few weeks shy of his 22nd birthday.

J.R. Swenson (1902)

John Robert Swenson was born in Sweden in 1870, and moved with his family to Iowa when he was about 11 years old. He was an undergraduate at the University of Denver in Colorado and played on its football team before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1896. His family moved to Texas during that decade, and later in the early 1900s he attended UT as a graduate student. While in Austin he played guard on the 1902 UT football team and was its biggest player at 6’1” and 200 pounds. He was 32 years old at the time and was the oldest letterman in UT’s football history until long-snapper and Army veteran Nate Boyer surpassed him more than a century later.

I previously wrote about Swenson in this space in a September 2025 post on the “old men” of Texas Longhorns football.

Marrs McLean (1903)

Marrs McLean, like Donnell Cameron and Jim McCall before him, played football while a student-athlete at Austin College before attending the University of Texas. McLean played end on Austin College’s 1901 football team, and later enrolled at UT as a law student and was part of its football team. He played end during the 1903 season, left the university the following year, and eventually got into the oil business and had a lot of success in it. He donated extensively to Baylor University and had a seat on its Board of Trustees, and he is the namesake of the Marrs McLean Science Building on Baylor’s campus.

Don Robinson (1903-05)

Willian Doniphan Robinson was a well-traveled 23-year old by the time he enrolled at the University of Texas in 1903. The Indiana native received at least some of his preparatory education at Drury College in Missouri, which had its own preparatory department as many colleges did at that time. Robinson attended the Academy at Drury College through the 1899-1900 school year. Between his time at Drury and his entrance into UT in 1903, he supposedly attended the Agricultural College of the State of Montana (now Montana State University), Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado), and Stanford. He played football while at the Agricultural College of Montana in 1900 and 1901, attended Stanford briefly afterward, then came to Texas and developed into a star ball-carrier for the Texas Longhorn football team.

In October of 1903 during his first year on the Texas football team, the UT student newspaper the Texan said Robinson “is built like a Mogul engine, looks like an Irish prize fighter and can carry a ball through a brick wall." Possibly due to that article, Robinson became known by the nickname “Mogul”, a reference to a line of powerful steam locomotives. He was a three-year football letterman at Texas and was captain of the 1905 Longhorn team as a senior, and he was the last non-Texan to serve as a Longhorn football team captain until the late 1930s. In 1925, UT’s engineering dean T.U. Taylor named Don Robinson as the first team fullback on his own “all-time team” of UT greats. Robinson was inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor in 1971.

Neill Masterson (1904)

Neill Masterson was a Houston native who attended Texas A&M and won a letter as a member of its 1902 football team. He attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia during the 1903-04 school year, then returned to his home state to attend the University of Texas and played quarterback on its 1904 team.

Verne Hendrickson (1904-06)

Hendrickson, a native of Redlands, California, was the earliest Golden State product that I know of who played for the Texas Longhorn football program. He attended Pomona College in Claremont, California and was a star halfback and sprinter there before transferring to the University of Texas, where he was a three-year letterman in both football and track & field, and at one point was one of the country’s fastest men in the 440-yard dash.

Magnus Mainland (1905-06)

Mainland was a native of Scotland’s Orkney Islands and moved with his family to Wisconsin when he was in his late teens. He received his preparatory education at the Wheaton College Academy near Chicago, then attended Wheaton College as a college freshman in the 1904-05 academic year before transferring to the University of Texas to study engineering, a field of study not offered at Wheaton. He played guard for two years on the UT football team, and in 1906 he helped organize UT’s first varsity basketball team, on which he was both a player and its head coach. Mainland was another Longhorn I profiled in the aforementioned “Old Men” of Texas Longhorns football post.

Winston McMahon (1906)

James Winston McMahon was a native of Alabama who attended the University of Alabama as an undergrad and reportedly played on its football and baseball teams, though he is not a recognized letterman in either sport at that university. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Alabama in 1903, when he was just 19 years old, and moved to Texas the following year and enrolled at the University of Texas as a law student.

By this point some eligibility rules had been established in intercollegiate athletics regarding students who attempted to participate in varsity sports after switching schools, and McMahon was reportedly not allowed to play on UT’s varsity teams in the1904-05 academic year because he had previously done so at Alabama.4 He joined the Longhorn football team in 1905 and won his only letter with the program in 1906. He became a significant historical footnote in the story of UT football during the 1906 season when he threw the first legal forward pass in program history, the forward pass having been legalized just that year.

Arnold Kirkpatrick (1909-11)

Kirkpatrick was a native of Brownwood, Texas who began his college career at Daniel Baker College in his hometown. He played both football and baseball at Daniel Baker before graduating with a bachelor’s degree. He went on to attend UT as a law student and was a three-year letterman on the Longhorn football team, playing quarterback, halfback, and fullback at different times and establishing himself as one of the best players in the program’s early history. He was a great all-around player and was noted as one of the best punters the team had ever had up to that point, and he also served as captain of the 1910 Longhorn football team. Multiple longtime observers of Longhorn football who picked “all-time” teams of Texas greats between 1912 and 1925 named Kirkpatrick as either their second team quarterback or second team fullback.

He was inducted into the UT Athletics Hall of Honor in 1958 as a member of the Hall’s second-ever induction class.

Happy Massingill (1909-10)

Martin Luther “Happy” Massingill was a native of Midlothian, Texas who began his college career at Baylor and participated in multiple sports while in Waco. He was a two-year basketball letterman at Baylor and likely played on the Baylor team that Texas faced in its first-ever varsity basketball game in the spring of 1906. He graduated from Baylor in 1907 and spent two years as a teacher at the Allen Academy in Bryan before enrolling at the University of Texas as a law student in 1909. He was a three-sport letterman at Texas, winning two letters in both football and basketball and one in baseball. Had golf been a varsity sport at UT during his time he would almost certainly have become UT’s only four-sport letterman, as he was a highly-ranked amateur golfer during his post-college years and was the namesake of the Massingill Trophy, which was awarded to the UT golfer with the lowest score in the annual intra-squad tournament starting in 1944.

He played halfback on the Longhorn football teams of 1909 and 1910. His prior athletic career at Baylor came under scrutiny in the days leading up to the 1910 Texas-Texas A&M rivalry game when an A&M student who had been a contemporary of Massingill’s at Baylor submitted a sworn affidavit stating that Massingill had competed in athletics under the name "Bailey" while at Baylor, and A&M officials attempted to have Massingill and another Longhorn disqualified as professionals for having supposedly earned a salary for coaching at the Allen Academy. The head of the Allen Academy denied that the UT athletes in question had been paid a salary for coaching at the school, and Massingill specifically denied the charge of having played baseball under an assumed name, claiming that he had simply asked that the newspapers not mention his name in reporting on a Baylor-Trinity baseball game due to his parents not approving of his participation in athletics. He was ultimately allowed to participate in the A&M game, but the Longhorns still lost 14-8. He graduated from Texas with a Bachelor of Laws degree the following year.

Thomas Downs (1911)

Thomas Hampton Downs was one of three graduates of San Augustine High School in east Texas in its class of 1907, and he received his first college education at Southwestern University. Southwestern had its first official varsity football team in 1908, and that school’s football records list Downs as a 1908 letterman. He was reportedly elected captain of Southwestern’s 1910 football team, but he instead enrolled at Texas that year as a law student. He played tackle on UT’s 1911 team, went on to a brief career as a lawyer, and died in 1919 at age 27 from a severe case of influenza.

Bill Murray (1911-13)

William Owen “Bill” Murray Jr. was a native of Floresville, Texas who began his college career at the University of Denver in Colorado and was a member of its football team as a freshman in 1909. He transferred to the University of Texas in 1910, and after sitting out a year of varsity competition he went on to win three letters playing center and guard on the Longhorn football team. The Southwest Conference had not yet been formed, and at that time the college football coaches in the state would publicly name their own “all-state team” picks. Murray was named to a composite all-state team after the 1912 season, and in 1913 he was the coaches’ composite pick for best center in the state.5

Nelson Puett Sr. (1911-12)

Nelson Puett was a graduate of Temple High School who starred in football at Baylor before doing the same at Texas. Of all the “transfers” Texas received in the first two decades of its program’s history, Puett would have ranked among the highest in terms of the football reputation he brought with him to Austin.

Puett played quarterback at Baylor on its 1907 and 1908 teams, and in the latter year he was named to “all-state” teams by sportswriters who covered college football in Texas.6 He enrolled at UT in 1910, and after becoming eligible for varsity athletics a year later he played quarterback for the Longhorns for two seasons. In October of 1911, the Houston Post said Puett was “probably one of the two best quarters the Longhorns have ever had”, and said, “No player in State football today can touch his remarkable work in running with the ball through a broken field.” 7

His son Nelson Puett Jr. also attended UT and was a three-year football letterman with the Longhorns from 1938 to 1940. Nelson Puett Sr. was inducted into the UT Athletics Hall of Honor in 1974.

Milton Daniel (1913)

Milton Enoch Daniel grew up in Waco and attended TCU (which was then located in Waco) as a prep school student before enrolling as a college student, and he was a TCU undergrad when that university relocated from Waco to Fort Worth in 1910. He was a football and baseball star at TCU, winning three letters in the former sport and serving as TCU’s football captain in 1911. He came to UT as a law student in 1912, and after sitting out of varsity sports for a year he joined the Longhorn football team in 1913 and was part of a dominating team that won its first seven games before falling to Notre Dame 29-7 on Thanksgiving Day in the first ever matchup between those programs. Daniel was named to both all-state and All-Southwestern teams for his play at fullback in 1913, his only season on the gridiron in Austin.

Daniel was later a law professor, head football coach, and a longtime trustee at his alma mater TCU, and he is the partial namesake of the Daniel-Meyer Athletics Complex.

It’s entirely possible that I’ve overlooked a significant “transfer” that UT football benefitted from in this early time period. If any Longhorn history buffs know of one, please reach out or mention them in the comments. One of these days I may write a post on the all-time most impactful transfer players in Longhorn football.

High schools in the state had been playing football for well over two decades by that point, and there had been seasons prior to 1920 in which a school was informally recognized as the “state champion”. Houston High School’s 1912 team did not play in an official championship game, but unofficially claimed to be that year’s state champion. Austin High School’s 1914 team beat Fort Worth’s North Side High School in game played in Fort Worth in early December of that year that was unofficially seen as the state championship. But the 1920 football season is the first one for which the University Interscholastic League (UIL) officially recognizes a state champion. Two champions, in fact, as Cleburne and Heights would play to a tie.

If one were reading the story of a team’s run to a state championship in today’s era, they would expect that narrative to include an account of how the team fared during the regular season, and then of how it successfully moved through the postseason from the bi-district and area rounds, the regional semifinals and finals, and finally of its triumph in the state semifinals to advance to the championship game, which was played at a location long predetermined. The brackets for the playoffs would have been established as soon as the regular season ended, so any negotiations between the participating teams would have only concerned where each game should be held, not who to play or whether or not the next round need even be played.

But the story of the 1920 Texas high school football playoffs was unlike that of any UIL football playoff tournament that would follow in the next 105 years. Contemporary accounts say that it was anything but an organized bracket, and even Cleburne’s last two regular season games (against previously unbeaten teams from Comanche and Dallas’s Bryan Street High School) were scheduled late in the season with an eye toward eliminating any other contender who could potentially claim the northeast Texas championship.

And the 1920 state championship game itself was only played after weeks of negotiations over who were the true champions of north and south Texas, and after several potential locations for the game were rejected by both parties before they came to an agreement to hold it in Austin. More on that can be read a bit lower in this post.

During the 2022 high school football season I wrote a weekly post for Burnt Orange Nation covering the exploits and upcoming games involving the recruits who were at that time committed to sign with the University of Texas. Along with commenting on how those future Longhorns were performing, I also incorporated some UT football history into that fall’s posts, regularly featuring an “Historic Longhorn Notable of the Week”.

That season was a good one for several Longhorn commits, and by the time the time the last week of the 2022 campaign arrived there were three UIL state championship games that involved players who were committed to Texas at the time. Included in the post I wrote in December 2022 previewing the upcoming state championship games was an extended portion on the historical background of the first official state championship football game, which had been played almost 102 years earlier.

This portion was actually part of a larger section I wrote about the career of Blue Smith, the star halfback of Cleburne’s 1920 state finalist team and a future Texas Longhorn, as I’d decided he was an excellent candidate for that championship week post’s “Historic Longhorn Notable of the Week”. Smith was one of the biggest high school football stars in the state in 1920, and Cleburne’s 1921 yearbook credited him with scoring 16 of the 36 touchdowns the team scored in its undefeated 1920 season while also rushing for over 1,300 yards.1

In hindsight I wish I had separated the part about Blue Smith and the 1920 Cleburne-Heights state championship and published it as its own post. Burnt Orange Nation has always been much more focused on current Longhorn athletics and much less on history lessons, and so during the fall of 2022 I shoehorned in several Longhorn history lessons into posts that were ostensibly about future Longhorns who were still competing on the prep gridiron.

Below the divider line is the portion of that 2022 Burnt Orange Nation post that told the story of now forgotten 1919-20 high school football star Clarence “Blue” Smith and his team’s participation in the first official high school football state championship game.

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The following was previously published at Burnt Orange Nation on December 16, 2022 as part of a post titled “Five Texas Longhorn commits will play for state championships this weekend”, which can be viewed here. No edits have been made to the original text aside from a few footnotes and a pair of pictures being added, and one paragraph that was broken into two.

Clarence Wagner Smith was born in Missouri in 1901 and spent his early years in that state before his family moved to Cleburne, Texas (a town about 25 miles south of Fort Worth) when he was in his early teens. At Cleburne High School he played on the football team and developed into one of the most acclaimed players in the state. He acquired the nickname “Blue” at some point during his youth, and he was frequently referred to by that name throughout his athletic career.

He stood six feet tall and weighed about 165 pounds, which was a good size for a high school halfback at the time. The men in Cleburne’s starting backfield in 1920 had an average weight of 168 pounds, which was a slightly higher figure than the Texas Longhorn backfield for that same year. Cleburne’s 1920 yearbook extolled the prodigious qualities that Smith showed as an 18-year-old junior in the 1919 season, particularly his ability to catch passes and his elusiveness in the open field with the ball in his hands. “Blue will return next year and if he improves (were such a thing possible), all we fear is that he will get the big-head and leave us to play with Harvard or Yale or some other place where the opponents will be a little more in his class”, read a paragraph on Smith in the 1920 edition of The Santa Fe Trail, Cleburne High’s yearbook.

The 1920 Cleburne team was arguably the most dominant “eleven” in the state, marching through the nine games on its schedule with no losses while outscoring its foes 217-15. While Clarence Smith was the star halfback, the team also had a highly-regarded lineman named Doss Richerson, a junior who was described as a “giant” at 210 pounds. In addition to his football stardom Richerson was also a track & field state champion in the discus and shot put, and later a three-year football letterman at the University of Missouri.

Football had caught on at the high schools of Texas’s largest cities by the late 1890s, and games between high schools became more common as the sport spread to smaller towns throughout the state in the first two decades of the 1900s. In the early years of interscholastic football competition there were some top teams who were informally recognized as “state champion”, but it was not until 1920 that the first state championship was officially recognized by the organization now known as the University Interscholastic League, the governing body for athletic and academic competitions between the state’s public schools. According to a report by the League published in December of 1920, there were 239 high schools in the state playing football in that fall.2

The UIL’s football championship archive includes a purported playoff bracket for the 1920 season that led up to the state championship game, but a reading of contemporary articles about the games played that December more than suggests that those games were not part of a well-organized tournament bracket with clearly-defined rounds.

Those 1920 “playoff” games could be best described as an ad hoc series of contests that decided the champions of various sections of the state, with the two finalists only playing each other after some weeks of negotiation, and nearly a month after the Interscholastic League had advised against teams scheduling any further games with the calendar being so late in the year and most schools having by then flipped their athletic calendar to basketball.

After the first two weekends of December in 1920, Cleburne and Clarksville were the only teams in the “northeast” section of the state to remain undefeated. Clarksville essentially waived its claim to the Northeast championship in favor of Cleburne when its officials refused to allow the team to travel out of town for any more games, resulting in Clarksville forfeiting a game late in the year between the two. The lack of an organized structure of districts and schedules made the situation murky. Waxahachie also claimed a share of the Northeast championship, as it had suffered a single one-point loss in a game where its star player was out with an injury, and its team was seen has having played a tougher schedule than Cleburne. The Interscholastic League gave some oxygen to Waxahachie’s claim, but Cleburne dismissed it outright, owing to the fact that Waxahachie’s loss had come against Dallas’s Bryan Street High School (formerly Dallas High and later renamed Crozier Tech), and Cleburne had later posted a shutout win against that same Bryan Street team.

Abilene was also unbeaten and was the undisputed champion of Northwest Texas. Abilene and Cleburne agreed on a game to decide the champion of North Texas, and Cleburne paid Abilene $1,500 (roughly equivalent to $22,000 in 2022 dollars) to convince their team to travel to Cleburne for the game. The teams played on Friday, December 17, and in the game’s opening minute Blue Smith received a pass and ran 60 yards for a touchdown. He scored another touchdown a few minutes later to give Cleburne a 14-0 lead. Abilene fought back and tied the score in the same quarter, but Cleburne regained the lead in the 3rd quarter and never lost it. The final score was 28-20, but Cleburne reportedly piled up over 600 yards (a figure that may have included yardage gained on punt returns), more than double what Abilene had.

The Fort Worth Record’s account of the game reported that Cleburne “used every form of offense known to football. Dazzling aerial flights, trick plays, fakes, triple pass end around dashes, straight rushes, tackle over tackle, cross bucks — all followed each other with a bewildering mixing up of plays and precision that made it almost impossible for the spectator to believe that he was watching a high school machine.”3

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s report of the game praised Blue Smith as “the most brilliant high school back seen in Texas in several seasons”, and his gridiron exploits drew the attention of college coaches. Among the 4,000 to 5,000 spectators reportedly present at the Abilene-Cleburne game was Berry Whitaker, the head football coach at the University of Texas, whose team had just gone 9-0 and posted what would be its last undefeated and untied season until the Longhorns won their first national championship in 1963. Whitaker was joined in the stands at Cleburne by his coaching counterparts from SMU and TCU, among other schools. There was some thought that Smith might return to his home state of Missouri to attend college, but the Record asserted that “Texas University exes, of which [Cleburne] is full, have a different idea about the matter and will endeavor to keep this star for the Longhorns.”4

Shortly after the final whistle sounded on Cleburne’s win over Abilene, Cleburne’s coach had initial talks with officials from Houston’s Heights High School about scheduling a game between their teams for the state championship. Heights was undefeated and had beaten Bryan High School to claim the championship of Southeast Texas. No decision was made on the time or location of the state championship for some time, as both schools desired to host the game. Confident that it would attract a crowd of several thousand, a number of cities offered to host a Cleburne-Heights game on Christmas or New Year’s Day weekend, but the schools objected to a number of the candidates presented. Cleburne didn’t want to play in Dallas or in Houston, Heights didn’t want to play in Fort Worth, and neither warmed to the idea of meeting for a game in Waco. Also delaying a firm date and place being set for the first official state final in football were the unresolved issues of whether Waxahachie had a valid claim to the Northeast Texas title and could schedule its own game with Heights, and whether Heights should first have to play the undefeated team from Corpus Christi High School before being able to claim the South Texas championship. This situation would move the Interscholastic League toward a much more organized structure for deciding state championship contenders in later seasons.

Heights ended up playing and beating Corpus Christi 7-0 in a game played in Houston at Rice’s field on Christmas Day to become the undisputed South Texas champion, and negotiations with Cleburne resumed. Having acceded to Cleburne’s demand that it play Corpus Christi, Heights in turn demanded that Cleburne play and beat Waxahachie so that the North Texas championship would not be in dispute. But Cleburne refused and said it would play only Heights to decide the state’s champion. For a time it appeared there might be no further games played, as the timetable for the 1920 football season had already eclipsed, and New Year’s Day 1921 came and went without an agreement in place for a championship game. Finally, the Interscholastic League stepped in and announced on January 2 that it would recognize Cleburne as the North Texas champion, and the following day it was announced that Cleburne and Heights would belatedly play for the 1920 state championship on January 8, 1921 at Clark Field in Austin, which was the home field for the Texas Longhorns until Memorial Stadium was built in 1924.5

Anticipation was high for the game, with some sports reporters speculating that it might have the highest attendance of any high school game ever played in the state. But rain had started to fall by the time the game kicked off, and only about 3,000 fans attended. Newspaper accounts all agreed that rain fell throughout the course of the game, and “muddy” and “sloppy” were commonly-used descriptions for the playing surface at Clark Field. The Austin American said that due to the playing condition “very little good football could be shown by the two teams”. The Houston Post described the field as “a sea of mud that made end runs impossible, kicking precarious and forward passing a matter of accident”.

Offense was hard to come by for Cleburne, and Blue Smith was more or less held in check on offensive plays, but he was able to show his noted elusiveness on several long punt returns that brought the ball from deep in his team’s territory to near midfield. In the first quarter alone he had punt returns of 30, 35, and 40 yards, and early in the 4th quarter he returned a long punt 60 yards, but the play was nullified by an offside penalty on his team.

Cleburne got as close as the Heights 20-yard line on a 3rd quarter drive before turning the ball over on downs, and didn’t seriously threaten on any other possession. Heights got the ball in Cleburne territory multiple times but was never able to put points on the scoreboard. On one 4th quarter drive Heights advanced to within a yard of the goal line, but Cleburne’s defense held them on downs. Three times in the second half Heights attempted field goals, but all were unsuccessful.

Thus did Texas’s first official high school football state championship end in a 0-0 tie. There was no mechanism yet in place that provided for an overtime period, or for tie games being decided based on the number penetrations inside the 20-yard line, which was the deciding factor of many playoff games in the years to come. It was a deeply unsatisfying ending to the season after the years-long wait for an official championship game, and the weeks of negotiations that had preceded its scheduling. Cleburne’s coach immediately approached Heights about staging a re-match for the following week to decide the champion once and for all. University of Texas officials offered the use of Clark Field again should the teams agree to another game, and Cleburne offered to guarantee Heights a payment of $2,500 (equivalent to over $41,000 in 2022 dollars) if they agreed to a game the following week in Austin, Waco, or Fort Worth. But Heights refused all offers for a re-match. The Houston schools had final exams scheduled for the following week, and the coaches and academic officials at Heights believed staging another football game during that week would be unnecessarily disruptive to the entire student body, and they were content to let the scoreless championship game be the last word on the 1920 season. So the two teams would go down in the record books as co-champions for that year.

Cleburne would have a similar result in its only other appearance in a state championship. In 1959 the Cleburne Yellowjackets reached the Class 3A state final and faced Breckenridge, which had won that classification’s state title four times in the previous eight seasons. The game ended in a 20-20 tie, and the two schools were named co-champions. Heights — which was known as John H. Reagan High School from 1926 until 2016, when it reverted back to its original Heights name — played for the City Conference state championship in 1950, but lost to Dallas Sunset. Its football teams have never advanced beyond the second round of the playoffs since then.

Clarence “Blue” Smith enrolled at the University of Texas in September of 1921. He was old for his grade and had turned 20 shortly before graduating high school, and he went to UT with the reputation of being “one of the most sensational high school football stars seen in several years”, as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram put it. He did not live up to that billing during his time in Austin.

He was voted the captain of the UT freshmen team in 1921, and was expected to be a regular at halfback going into the 1922 season, but he withdrew from the varsity squad at some point that year. One report said he withdrew from the team “after a few hot words with the Longhorn grid authorities higher up”, but UT’s athletic director L. Theo Bellmont disputed that report and said there was no bad blood between Smith and the athletic council, and that Smith had voluntarily left the team after he noticed “that old wriggle he used to have in evading tacklers, seemed to be gone”. Bellmont said that he hoped to see Smith return to the team if he desired to do so.

Smith returned to the varsity squad in the fall of 1923. He played in his first varsity game in the season-opening 31-0 win over Austin College. A week later he scored his first college touchdown in UT’s lopsided 51-0 win over Phillips University. He returned a punt for a touchdown in a 44-0 win over Southwestern on October 27. But he spent that entire season as a reserve at halfback, and missed at least two games with a sore hip. He was not recognized as a letterman for the 1923 season. Sports writers who watched him play in 1923 wrote that he was still a dangerous open field runner, but was below average in the other aspects of his game, particularly on the defensive side. Still, he was said to have improved late in the season, and he was expected to finally be a regular in 1924 and perhaps fulfill the promise that greeted his arrival in Austin three years earlier.

But that did not appear likely in the weeks leading up to that season. Smith had a bout with the mumps during the summer that left him 15 pounds under his normal playing weight. Then on September 5, 1924, it was reported that Smith would not be returning to school, and that he had told head coach E.J. Stewart that he would be unable to pay his way through school that semester or to play with the football team because he had not found a job in Austin. But that issue was apparently resolved, as three days later he reported to the team for its preseason training camp.

He had moments of brilliance on the field in 1924, and his defensive play was reported to be noticeably better that in prior years, but he was rarely a starter and most often entered games as a substitute. He also played through a series of knee injuries and a shoulder injury suffered during the season, which likely limited his effectiveness. He finally won his first and only letter with the Longhorns for that 1924 season.

Blue Smith was a popular player with Texas Longhorn fans during his time in Austin, but was only a consistent contributor for one season, in which he was far from 100% physically. Whether the physical gifts he had while in high school were diminished by injuries in college, or if his advantages back then were owed to his being a physically developed 19-year-old playing high school ball in an era when high school seniors were often as young as 16 or 17, the simple fact was that his play in college did not routinely match the hype that he had attained during his high school years, and his Longhorn career was not one for the history books. Indeed, Smith was barely mentioned in Lou Maysel’s 1970 history of the program, Here Come the Texas Longhorns. But the coaches and sports writers who watched him play at Cleburne High had long memories. In 1968, the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame was formed and its inaugural class was comprised of five star players from the 1920s. One of those five was Blue Smith.

After graduating from Texas in 1925 he began what would be a long career as a teacher and coach. He was hired as the football coach at Honey Grove High School in the summer of 1925, and he was later the head coach at Galveston Ball for four seasons from 1928 to 1931. He lived in Galveston for the last 44 years of his life while teaching and coaching at schools there and in Houston. He died in 1973, at the age of 71, and his obituary said he had recently retired from Houston’s public schools.

The list of Texas Longhorn football players who were part of state championship teams in high school is quite long, and the name at the top of it is Clarence “Blue” Smith. For that reason alone he’ll always be a significant figure in Texas high school football history, and a notable one in Texas Longhorn history.

The 2025 University Interscholastic League (UIL) high school football state championship games were played last week at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. Twelve total state championships were played, with trophies awarded for two divisions in each classification from Class 1A (the schools in which play six-man football) to Class 6A.

The Class 6A level has some inherent instabilities and inequalities in the way its playoff structure is organized compared with the lower classifications. These have no doubt been discussed for as long as the UIL has had split division playoff brackets, so this post will not tread any new ground on that topic. But what I want to present here is an idea for a re-organizing the Class 6A playoffs in a way that should greatly lessen some of those instabilities.

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In 1989, Texas had one high school football state championship for the tiny schools playing Six-Man football, and one each for the 11-man football schools from Classes 1A through 5A. Class 5A, then the state’s highest classification and home to its largest high schools, would often feature playoffs matchups between schools with a lopsided difference in enrollment.

Plano High School, located in a suburb north of Dallas, won state titles in Classes 2A, 3A, and 4A as its enrollment grew between 1965 and 1977. Class 4A was renamed Class 5A in 1980, and Plano won back-to-back state championships at that level in 1986 and 1987. By the end of the 1980s Plano had over 5,000 students and was by far the state’s largest high school, and a football powerhouse in a classification in which some schools had less than one-fourth as many students. The upper cutoff for Class 4A was around 1,460 students at the time, but 13 schools (most of them in Houston) opted to compete in 5A despite having Class 4A numbers.

The 1990 summer issue of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine had info boxes listing the “Davids and Goliaths” of each high school classification and their respective enrollments. The screenshot below shows the largest and smallest Class 5A football schools at that time.1

Starting in 1990, the UIL split Class 5A’s playoffs into Division I and Division II brackets, with Division I intended as the “big school” bracket. Each district in Class 5A would have three playoff qualifiers, and whichever one had the highest enrollment would compete in the Division I bracket, while the other two would compete for the 5A Division II state title. By the end of the 1990s, the UIL had split division playoff brackets for every level from Class 5A through 2A, and in 2006 the split division championships came to Class 1A and Six-Man. 2025 was the 20th season in which the UIL awarded a total of 12 football state championships.

In 2014, Class 5A was renamed Class 6A, and all of the lower classes also moved up one number, with Six-Man becoming the new Class 1A. Through the 2017 season, each classification was split into two divisions for the playoffs after the conclusion of the regular season, with the two playoff qualifiers in each district with the highest enrollment going to Division I and the two smaller postseason qualifiers going to Division II. Starting in 2018, Classes 1A through 5A were split into Divisions I and II before the season, with enrollment cutoffs established for each level. For example, in the most recent UIL realignment Class 5A Division II was comprised of schools with enrollments between 1,350 and 1,902 students, while 5A Division I schools had between 1,903 and 2,274 pupils. Class 6A alone continues to separate their divisions only at the beginning of the playoffs.

The reason for that is primarily logistical. In Class 5A, the competing schools all fall within an enrollment range of 1,350 to 2,274, so even without that level being organized into separate divisions at the outset of a season there would rarely be playoff games where one school has a ridiculous enrollment advantage. In Class 6A, on the other hand, there are nearly 250 schools that almost all have enrollments above 2,275, with some being in the low to mid-2,000s, 45 or so schools having 3,500+ students, and about a dozen having in excess of 4,000 students.

Setting a preseason cutoff dividing 6A into Divisions I and II would be dicey, because there are few schools of 6A size in the west Texas and south Texas regions, and creating preseason divisions would result in districts that are either unworkably small in terms of their number of schools, or so large geographically that some district opponents would be hundreds of miles away and make for long drives for their teams in all sports. El Paso, for instance, currently has only seven schools in Class 6A, and as of 2024 only three of them had enrollments above 2,600. If a 6A Division II cutoff was set at around 2,800 students, would the four smaller El Paso schools have a small district all to themselves? Would the three larger ones have to join a district with the Midland and Odessa schools, which are over 300 miles away? Similar issues would pertain in the Rio Grande Valley region if its 6A schools were to be split into districts for Divisions I and II.

Some districts have much larger schools than others, and since a playoff team’s divisional placement is based on how large its enrollment is compared with the other playoff teams in its district this can lead to some absurd postseason matchups.

District 12-6A in central Texas doesn’t have a single school with as many as 2,800 students, and its bi-district playoff opponents come from District 11-6A, which has three schools with more than 3,100. Temple, with less than 2,500 students, is on the small side for 6A but is one of the larger schools in District 12, which resulted in the Wildcats being placed in the Division I bracket in this year’s playoffs.

Temple was, in fact, the smallest school out of the 64 teams in the 6A Division I field, and based on its 2024 enrollment figure it was smaller than nearly two-thirds of the schools in the Division II bracket. Their first round opponent from District 11 was Duncanville, which is one of the ten largest schools in the state and has over 4,200 students according to the most recently reported figures. This year’s Division II bracket, meanwhile, included 11 schools with enrollments above 3,000 students.

District 6 currently has three of the four largest high schools in the state: Allen, Plano East, and Plano West. In any season where all three qualify for the playoffs this would result in the state’s fourth-largest high school being slotted in 6A Division II, ostensibly the “small school” bracket!

Previously in the 2022 and 2023 football seasons, District 6 was comprised of the three Plano ISD high schools, the four largest schools from Lewisville ISD, and Coppell. This eight-team district had seven of the thirty largest high schools in the entire state at the time. One of that district’s Division II representatives in the 2023 playoffs was Coppell, which had over 4,200 students but was merely the third-largest of the District 6-6A playoff teams that year. This is clearly not what the UIL intended with split division playoffs and has been an obvious design flaw since 1990.

To my mind, there is a better way of separating 6A playoff teams into divisions, that being putting teams in Division I or II not based on how a school’s enrollment compares with the other schools in their district but with the other playoff qualifiers in that region.

For several years I wrote a weekly column at Burnt Orange Nation during the high school football season that detailed how the recruits committed to the Texas Longhorns were performing on the field. Since those years always featured several commits from states other than Texas I spent some time each year familiarizing myself with the playoff formats and structures in states like Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, among others.

Some states set up their playoffs very similarly to how Texas does, with the first round — the “bi-district” round in Texas — featuring games between teams from neighboring districts, such as District 1 vs. District 2, District 7 vs. District 8, etc. Other states produce a seeded bracket, with the seedings based on a power ranking formula. Louisiana’s playoffs are a seeded tournament bracket, with the top seed facing the bottom in the first round and the other spots being filled out in the design typical for seeded tournaments, regardless of whether those first round opponents are two miles or 250 miles apart. Arizona similarly sets its playoff brackets up as seeded tournaments based on a statewide ranking formula.

Florida employs a ranking formula but differs slightly from Arizona and Louisiana. Its playoff brackets are split into four regions as those in Texas are, but the eight teams in each of Florida’s four regions are seeded 1-8, so there is a ranking element to it and teams aren’t set up to play an opponent from the next district over in the first round.

Having a statewide, region-less seeded playoff tournament like those held in Arizona and Louisiana would be a non-starter in Texas for obvious geographical reasons. An idea that I believe is worth exploring for future editions of the Texas Class 6A playoffs is similar to Florida’s setup, with the added element of the two divisions being split based on the 16 largest and 16 smallest playoff qualifiers from each region.

In my initial preparations to write out this thought experiment I created a spreadsheet listing each playoff team from Class 6A shortly after the end of the regular season. In columns next to each school’s name I labeled them by the playoff division they would compete in along with their region and noted their enrollment figures listed on the UIL’s 2024-26 “rank-order” page. Since Texas doesn’t use any kind of official power ranking formula I included in another column of my spreadsheet each school’s MaxPreps rating as of the end of the regular season. I used MaxPreps’s ratings as a sort of placeholder to fill out this experiment, as the UIL would surely formulate its own power ranking method were it to ever put this idea into practice.

After sorting the 32 playoff qualifiers from each region in order by enrollment, I separated the 16 larger schools from the 16 smaller ones, putting the larger ones in a theoretical Division I and the smaller ones in Division II. I then sorted the teams in each region within those divisions from the highest to lowest MaxPreps rating and created alternative brackets with the teams seeded 1-16 in each region.

Below is a screenshot of how the Region 1 teams appeared in my spreadsheet after taking those steps. The “division” column indicates which one each team competed in during the recently concluded playoffs.

After completing that exercise on all four regions and creating seeded Division I and II brackets based on the results, I found that 30 of the 128 playoff teams (a full 23% of the Class 6A field) would have landed in a different division than the one in which they competed in the actual 2025 playoffs.

Region 1 schools Prosper and Hebron, which both had over 3,400 students in 2024, would properly have been in the Division I playoffs instead of Division II, where they were this season. Smaller Region 1 teams like Mansfield Lake Ridge, Richardson, and Haltom — all with enrollment figures below 2,800 — would end up in Division II rather than being placed in Division I (as they were in this year’s playoffs) simply because they were larger schools in districts that had relatively small schools.

The 2025 6A playoffs saw three schools from Region 2 with over 3,000 students end up in the Division II bracket, while four other schools from that same region that all had less than 2,800 students were placed in Division I.

Region 3, which covers most of the greater Houston area, probably has the highest median enrollment by school out of all the four regions. The 2025 6A Division II playoff bracket included three schools from Region 3 (Houston C.E. King, Humble Summer Creek, and Katy) with enrollment numbers above 3,500, while Division I in that same region — again, the division that was originally intended to be the “big school bracket” — had three playoff teams (Fort Bend Ridge Point, Houston Strake Jesuit, and Pearland Dawson) with less than 2,900 students.2

My method of division sorting would fix that issue, though it would also result in some divisions having three or more teams from a particular district, rather than each division having two teams from each district. The four Katy ISD playoff teams, for example, would all be in Division I in this alternate playoff scenario. Another significant change in an alternate universe where the 6A playoffs were organized in this way in 2025 would be Houston C.E. King competing in the Division I playoffs where a school of its size logically should be. King would have been the 13th largest school in the Division I playoffs, but in the actual 2025 playoffs C.E. King lost to DeSoto in last week’s 6A Division II state championship.

Below is the 6A Division I football playoff bracket that would have resulted from following this alternate method of division sorting by enrollment and power rating within each region. As noted in the image, the schools whose names appear in red are the ones that were in the Division II bracket in the actual 2025 playoffs.

Would this method of playoff organization have changed the outcome of the 2025 playoffs?

Galena Park North Shore defeated Duncanville in last Saturday’s 6A Division I state championship, and the end result in this alternate scenario might not have been any different, but in this bracket North Shore would have had to pass through a very tough stretch just to make it to the Region 3 final, with C.E. King and Summer Creek (the two teams that played for the Region 3 championship in the Division II playoffs) being potential second and third round opponents. Dickinson, who North Shore beat in the regional finals, would have been their potential opponent in the same round in this bracket.

Duncanville and Waxahachie, who played in the Region 2 final of Division I, are the top two seeds in that region in this alternate scenario, and the alternate version of Region 4 would potentially have Lake Travis meeting district arch-rival Austin Westlake in that region’s championship, which didn’t happen this year because Westlake was in Division II.

Using the method described above would have resulted in this alternative bracket for the 2025 Class 6A Division II playoffs.

Fifteen schools that competed in this year’s 6A Division I playoffs would have ended up in Division II instead using this method. North Forney in Region 2 would have been one of the chief beneficiaries.

The North Forney Falcons were the champion of District 10, and with an enrollment of only 2,579 that school is the fifth-largest of the seven schools in its district. But because three of that district’s four largest schools missed the playoffs, the Falcons ended up being one of its Division I representatives. They lost in the second round to eventual Region 2 finalist Waxahachie, but would likely have lasted a bit longer than two rounds in this alternative playoff arrangement, in which they would enter the Division II playoffs as Region 2’s #2 seed and would be set up for a potential third round matchup with cross-town rival Forney High.

The DeSoto Eagles, who would have been the top seed in this bracket’s Region 2, soared through the 2025 Division II playoffs and won the state championship while outscoring their six postseason opponents by an average margin of 28.5 points. DeSoto, it should be noted, had well over 3,000 students as recently as the UIL’s February 2018 realignment, but by 2024 its enrollment had fallen to 2,127, which was 147 students below the upper cutoff for 5A Division I. DeSoto elected to opt-up and remain in Class 6A for the 2024-26 competition years despite its drastically reduced enrollment.

In this alternative bracket, DeSoto might have met Willis and its superstar wide receiver (and University of Texas signee) Jermaine Bishop in the second round of the playoffs rather than the fourth. When those teams played on December 6, Bishop accounted for five total touchdowns and 236 offensive yards, and Willis got the score as close as 40-34 early in the 4th quarter before DeSoto pulled away to win 60-41.

Region 1’s alternative bracket has Southlake Carroll and Denton Guyer as the top two seeds, and those two teams indeed met in the actual Region 1 final of this year’s Division II playoffs, with Carroll blasting Guyer 51-19.

The alternate version of Region 3 would look very different than the real 2025 playoffs. All four of the teams that reached the Region 3 semifinals in Division II this year (C.E. King, Humble Summer Creek, Katy, and Katy Jordan) would have instead been in the Division I bracket. Those four teams all beat their second round opponents by 20 points or more, so it’s anyone’s guess which team would have emerged from Region 3 in this alternate reality bracket. The top seed would be Fort Bend Ridge Point, which went undefeated in the regular season and saw its season end with a 31-7 loss in the second round to eventual Division I state champion North Shore. Perhaps the Ridge Point Panthers would have met DeSoto in the Division II state championship at the end of this bracket instead of C.E. King.

Geography would be a factor that might prevent such an idea from ever gaining much traction. Texas is obviously a very large state, and Regions 1 and 4 in Class 6A are particularly spread out. The schools in Region 1 stretch as far west as El Paso and as far east as the northeast Dallas suburbs. The longest driving distance between any two schools in that region is probably the one separating El Paso Franklin and Princeton, which are 680 miles apart! See the below Google Maps image.

Region 4 stretches from the northern Austin suburbs to the Rio Grande Valley in far south Texas. Vista Ridge High School in Cedar Park is 370 miles from Homer Hanna High School in Brownsville, to cite an extreme example of driving distance in that region.

Region 3, by comparison, is far more compact and entirely in the Houston area. Every school in that region is either within Harris County or a county that borders it. The longest driving distance I’ve found between any two schools in Region 3 is the 83 miles separating Katy Paetow (which is west of Houston) and Brazoswood near the gulf coast.

Region 2 is a medium between the compactness of Region 3 and the much larger dimensions of Region 4. It stretches from the suburbs of south Dallas and northeast Dallas down into central Texas and finally into the west Houston suburbs. The distances between schools there only get really long for a team that advances past the second round of the playoffs, but they don’t get more extreme than Wylie East (north of Dallas) being roughly 270 miles from Cypress Lakes (west of Houston).

My proposed alternative method of organizing the 6A playoffs would necessarily make it more likely that an early round matchup features two schools much further from each other than normal bi-district opponents, and they would have to get creative when finding a neutral site.

The El Paso schools will always have a long drive for their playoff games no matter the opponent. Those distances are long enough in the bi-district round, in which they play teams from the nearest west Texas district, and get longer if they advance to successive rounds. The four El Paso schools that qualified for the 2025 playoffs out of District 1-6A were matched up with opponents in the bi-district round that are an average distance of 328 miles away. Franklin, the only one of those four to reach the second round, got to face Byron Nelson High School in the Denton County suburb of Trophy Club, which is over 600 miles away. Eastwood and Byron Nelson met in the area round at a stadium in Lubbock that is 330 miles from both schools.

My alternative bracket for Division I would have featured a bi-district game between El Paso Franklin and Lewisville, and Division II would have had one pitting El Paso Pebble Hills and Richardson. Both of those games would have involved teams that are nearly 650 miles apart. Perhaps those schools could have worked together to organize a playoff double-header at a neutral site in west Texas like Big Spring, which would still require a drive of 290 miles or more by each participant. But such is the potential travel cost of being in Region 1. (The European mind cannot comprehend the vastness of Texas’s Class 6A Region 1! Paris and Berlin are as far apart as El Paso Franklin and Lewisville.)

My alternative brackets would also illustrate the potential travel extremes for Region 4. In Division I there would have been a first round game between Round Rock and Los Fresnos, which are 360 miles apart. And in Division II, Cedar Park Vista Ridge and Edinburg would have to find a neutral site for a first round game somewhere in the 350 miles separating their campuses.

At the very least this method of organizing the 6A playoffs would shake things up and create some postseason matchups between schools that rarely, if ever, play each other. With the present playoff structure a lot of teams will go into the last week or two of the regular season already knowing who their first round foe in the playoffs will be, or at least have it narrowed down to two or three schools. Setting up playoff brackets in the way described in this post would add some mystery to the potential first round matchups, as the actual playoff qualifiers and final power rankings wouldn’t be set in stone until the conclusion of the regular season, and perhaps the brackets and seedings could be announced in a much-anticipated Saturday evening program by the UIL, much like NCAA basketball tournament brackets are announced to great fanfare every March.

One factor I haven’t fully delved into is that the alternative brackets would also mean the best teams in each region are more likely to meet up in the regional final round, aka the state quarterfinals. There’s nothing that can be done if the two best teams in a classification happen to come from the same region, which can make the state championship game feel anticlimactic in some seasons. But this would prevent a situation in which two teams ranked near the top of 6A meet in the very early rounds of the playoffs because their districts happen to be close together. This doesn’t happen often but certainly can. In the early 2010s Allen and DeSoto were among the most loaded teams in the state. Eventual state champion Allen beat DeSoto in the state semifinal round of the playoffs in 2012 and 2013 when they were in different regions. The 2014 realignment put them in the same region, and in the 2014 and 2015 seasons they met in the second round of the 6A Division I playoffs.

For any Texas high school football aficionados who made it through this post’s first 4,000 words, does this strike you as a good idea? A terrible one? One at least worth studying or positing to the UIL officials who ultimately decide such things?

I’d love to hear any reactions or counter ideas you may have in the comments.

The University of Texas fielded its first varsity football team in 1893 and played its very first game on Thanksgiving Day of that year against a team from the Dallas Athletic Club. UT played A&M for the first time a year later in October of 1894. The two schools did not play each other again until 1898, and did not play on Thanksgiving for the first time until 1900.

There has not been a single season in UT’s football history in which its team did not have a game either on Thanksgiving Day or the two days following that holiday. A&M has been the most frequent opponent by far, with 99 all-time Thanksgiving matchups between 1900 and 2024. Texas has had 14 other Thanksgiving opponents in its history and has played those teams a combined 33 times.

I won’t go into a long-form history of the Longhorn football team’s Thanksgiving Day adventures in this post, but will run through some fun facts and a few notable games that they have played on that weekend.

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American football being played on Thanksgiving Day is a tradition that goes back to Princeton and Yale playing each other on that day in 1876. The two teams met on Thanksgiving several more times in the following years, and by the time the University of Texas had its first team in 1893 Thanksgiving had become an established date for college football games in the areas of the country where the sport was most popular. I wrote an extensive post on UT’s first football game two years ago at Burnt Orange Nation.

The Dallas Athletic Club team that Texas met in its very first game on November 30, 1893 had established its own tradition by that time of playing on Thanksgiving Day. Dallas had played a rival football club from Fort Worth on Thanksgiving Day in 1891 in a game that “Flashback: Dallas” blogger Paula Bosse has called “The First Turkey-Day Football Game in Dallas”.

Texas played the Dallas Athletic Club again on two later Thanksgivings, in 1896 and 1898. UT also had Arkansas and LSU, and town teams from San Antonio and Fort Worth as its Thanksgiving opponent during the 1890s before playing Texas A&M on Turkey Day for the first time in 1900.

The Aggies (who were popularly referred to as the “Farmers” in the early years of that rivalry) were UT’s usual Thanksgiving opponent for most of the next 111 years, aside from a stretch of Thanksgivings between 1910 and 1917 in which the Longhorns played A&M only once, and another one between 1978 and 1995 when Baylor served as an intermittent Thanksgiving foe seven times.

After A&M left the Big 12 to join the Southeastern Conference (SEC) in 2012, the two teams did not play each other again until 2024, and Texas filled the Thanksgiving slot on its schedule with a series of less-inspiring Big 12 opponents. Now that UT and A&M are competing in the same conference once again, Thanksgiving weekend should see the rekindling of their rivalry for the foreseeable future.

How did the Aggies spend their Thanksgiving for their first 12 years in the SEC?

“Who cares?”, most Longhorns would probably say. But for the completists out there…

A&M played fellow Big 12 expatriate Missouri for Thanksgiving in 2012 and 2013, then had annual Thanksgiving weekend plans with LSU from 2014 to 2023.

Below I will list all 15 opponents Texas has faced on a football field during Thanksgiving weekend, along with their record against each and the last time they played during that holiday.

Texas A&M: 67-29-3 (last Thanksgiving meeting: 2024)
Baylor: 5-3 (2022)
Texas Tech: 3-2 (2023)
Arkansas: 3-0 (1917)
Dallas Athletic Club: 3-0 (1898)
TCU: 0-3 (2016)
Notre Dame: 0-2 (1915)
Oklahoma: 0-2 (1913)
Kansas State: 1-0 (2021)
Kansas: 1-0 (2018)
Wabash: 1-0 (1914)
LSU: 1-0 (1899)
Fort Worth: 1-0 (1897)
San Antonio: 1-0 (1895)
Iowa State: 0-1 (2020)

Texas goes into the Thanksgiving Day 2025 weekend with an all-time Turkey Day weekend record of 87-42-3

Texas won its first nine games played on Thanksgiving and 15 of the first 16 such games, with its first loss coming by an 11-0 score in 1902 against Texas A&M, a game that gave A&M its first-ever win against UT.

Nine games remained UT’s record for a Thanksgiving winning streak until Darrell Royal was hired as the Longhorns’ head coach in 1957 and won his first ten Thanksgiving Day matchups with A&M. Since then the longest win streak by either team in the Thanksgiving rivalry has been seven, with Texas beating the Aggies seven straight Turkey Days from 1968 to 1974, and A&M beating the Longhorns on that weekend seven straight times between 1985 and 1993 (with two games against Baylor in 1989-90 sandwiched within that streak).

Texas has won its last four Thanksgiving weekend games, which is the program’s longest Thanksgiving winning streak since the Longhorns prevailed over the Aggies six straight times from 2000 to 2005.

UT’s first Thanksgiving losing streak began in 1909, when the Longhorns lost 5-0 to A&M, then lost to Oklahoma in the following two years by scores of 3-0 and 6-3.

Texas’s longest Thanksgiving losing streak is six games, which stretched from 1984 to 1989 and included four straight defeats at the hands of A&M but began and ended with losses to Baylor.

When Texas and Texas A&M met at Austin’s Clark Field in 1918, less than three weeks after the armistice that ended World War I, both teams were undefeated but had played very unorthodox schedules that included multiple teams from military installations. Texas halfback Joe H. Ellis scored a touchdown on UT’s second possession to give the Longhorns a 7-0 lead, and that ended up being the game’s final score.1

The next time the teams played on Thanksgiving Day in Austin (1920), the Longhorns sported a record of 8-0 and had outscored their opponents 275-10, while the Aggies had a 17-game unbeaten streak and had not allowed any points since Joe Ellis’s touchdown two years earlier. A&M led 3-0 before Texas fullback Francis Domingues scored a late touchdown to put Texas ahead 7-3 and ultimately won the game.

Those 1918 and 1920 games remain the only two instances in which Texas and Texas A&M both had unbeaten records going into their Thanksgiving matchup.

Texas (8-3) is ranked 16th in this week’s Associated Press poll, while the unbeaten Aggies (11-0) are ranked 3rd. The number of times they have met on Thanksgiving weekend with both being ranked by the AP is probably much lower than you would think.

The AP poll was introduced during the 1936 college football season, and within the AP poll era the Texas-Texas A&M Thanksgiving game has been a matchup between ranked teams only nine times. The first was in 1941, when Texas was ranked 10th (and was three weeks removed from having held the #1 ranking for the first time) and A&M was 2nd. The Aggies came into that game with an 8-0 record and were seeking revenge against the visiting Longhorns, who had beat them 7-0 on Thanksgiving in 1940 to dash their hopes of winning a second consecutive national title. Revenge they did not get, as Texas won 23-0 to give A&M their first home loss in three years.

The prior years in which UT and A&M have met during Thanksgiving week as ranked opponents are:

1941 — #10 Texas beats #2 Texas A&M, 23-0
1943 — #12 Texas beats #16 Texas A&M, 27-13
1974 — #17 Texas beats #8 Texas A&M, 32-3
1975 — #2 Texas A&M beats #5 Texas, 20-10
1977 — #1 Texas beats #12 Texas A&M, 57-28
1985 — #15 Texas A&M beats #18 Texas, 42-10
1999 — #24 Texas A&M beats #7 Texas, 20-16
2000 — #12 Texas beats #22 Texas A&M, 43-17
2024 — #3 Texas beats #20 Texas A&M, 17-7

Those wins by Texas over A&M on Thanksgiving in 1940 and 1941 were the first consecutive wins by either team on that holiday since the Longhorns enjoyed their turkey as winners in 1923 and 1924. From 1925 until 1940, the home team did not lose a single time in that series, though the teams tied in 1933 at College Station.

Current Longhorn head coach Steve Sarkisian is a perfect 4-0 in Thanksgiving games while at UT. During his previous head coaching stops at Washington and USC he was 5-1 in games played during that week.

Tom Herman’s Longhorn teams went 2-2 during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Charlie Strong? 0-3 between 2014 and 2016.

Mack Brown went 11-5 on Thanksgiving while at UT from 1998 to 2013.

David McWilliams’s Longhorn teams went 1-4 on Thanksgiving week from 1987 to 1991, the lone win coming against Baylor at Waco on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1990, which happens to be the first Longhorn game this writer ever attended.

Longtime Texas coach Darrell Royal was 17-3 on Thanksgiving from 1957 to 1976.

Dana X. Bible, the only man to serve as head coach at both Texas and Texas A&M, was 4-5-1 vs. the Longhorns on Thanksgiving Day as Texas A&M’s coach from 1919 to 1928, and was 8-2 vs. the Aggies on Thanksgivings while coaching at Texas from 1937 to 1946. A&M played Rice instead of Texas on Thanksgiving in 1917, Bible’s first season in College Station, and he was away from the team in 1918 while serving in the Army during World War I.

By my count, this week will be the 15th time that a Texas A&M team has woken up on Thanksgiving morning without a loss and had Texas as their next opponent. A&M was previously undefeated going into a Thanksgiving game vs. Texas in: 1902, 1906, 1907, 1909, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1927, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1956, 1975, and 1992.

A&M went 8-6 the first 14 times that occurred, so Texas has a pretty good history of spoiling Aggie dreams of undefeated seasons.

The most famous example will probably always be the 1940 season. Texas A&M won the 1939 national championship with an undefeated record, and won its first eight games of the 1940 season while allowing just 27 total points. Second-ranked A&M was a heavy favorite to beat 6-2 Texas on Thanksgiving Day 1940 and garner an invitation to the Rose Bowl, and the Aggies were sure to contend for the #1 spot in the AP poll. But Texas scored a touchdown in the first minute of the game to take a 7-0 lead and played great defense over the final 59 minutes to preserve that lead en route to a 7-0 win. Nine of UT’s eleven starters played for the entire game in what still ranks as one of the greatest upset wins in Longhorn history.

Though it’s not a relevant data point for this season, Texas has brought an undefeated record into a Thanksgiving matchup with Texas A&M on 12 occasions, most recently in 2009. UT’s record in those games: 12-0.

In many other years Texas had only one loss going into that game, most often one suffered at the hands of Oklahoma, a team Texas A&M very rarely played prior to the formation of the Big 12 in 1996. Before their time as annual Big 12 Conference opponents, Texas A&M and Oklahoma played each other in football only ten times.

The polar opposite of the dozen times an undefeated Longhorn team has faced the Aggies on Thanksgiving is the 1938 season, in which Texas had one of the most miserable campaigns in program history and was 0-8 going into Thanksgiving. The Longhorns scored only 45 total points in those eight games, and did not convert on a single extra-point try.

Texas A&M’s season wasn’t one to remember either, as the Aggies were 4-3-1 going into Thanksgiving Day 1938, but they had a chance to saddle their arch-rival Texas with its first winless season ever. The odds were not in UT’s favor by any means, and making victory seem even less likely was the fact that the Longhorn varsity was reportedly beaten in a scrimmage by their own freshmen team in the week leading up to the A&M game, albeit a freshmen team that had several future program greats.

The Longhorns and Aggies were scoreless at halftime, with Texas squandering a number of drives that went deep into A&M territory by fumbling or turning the ball over on downs. A&M’s offense wasn’t doing any better, as they had 20 pass attempts that resulted in only five completions and six interceptions.

Texas finally got on the score board on their first possession of the 4th quarter, as halfback Nelson Puett Jr. dove into the end zone for a three-yard touchdown. Fullback Wallace Lawson converted on UT’s only successful point-after try all season to make the score 7-0.

Texas played fine defense the rest of the quarter, and after a late Aggie punt Texas took over at its own five-yard line. But a fumble by halfback Bobby Moers (who was later a two-time All-American for the Longhorn basketball team) was recovered by A&M in the end zone for a touchdown with only about thirty seconds left. Texas’s lead was saved when center Roy Baines blocked A&M’s extra point attempt, and the Longhorns would win 7-6.2

Only three Longhorn Thanksgiving games have ever ended in a tie, all of which were games against A&M.

In 1921, Texas and A&M played to a scoreless tie on Thanksgiving. A&M finished with a 3-0-2 record to claim the Southwest Conference championship. Texas, which only played two conference games for some reason, went 6-1-1, losing 20-0 to an unbeaten Vanderbilt team and outscoring its other seven opponents 268-7.

Texas and Texas A&M were both in the middle of the SWC pack when they played on Thanksgiving in 1933. Texas had an overall record of 4-5-1 and had lost three straight games going into that week, while A&M was 6-3. Texas A&M held a 10-7 lead late, but Texas got deep into A&M territory late in the game, and a reserve guard named Harry Mayne was brought in to try a field goal from A&M’s 17-yard line. The ball barely cleared the crossbar and tied the game at 10-10. Mayne only appeared in five quarters during the entire 1933 season, but on the recommendation of head coach Clyde Littlefield he was awarded a varsity letter for that year due to his toe salvaging a tie with the Aggies.

Thanksgiving Day of 1948 found the Longhorns and Aggies at opposite ends of the SWC standings, with Texas sporting a 4-1 conference record and trailing only 5-0 SMU, while A&M was 0-9 and on the verge of its first winless season. Texas led 14-7 late in the 4th quarter and was poised to send the Aggies home with an ignominious 0-10 record, but a tipped pass was caught by an Aggie receiver who ran all the way to the end zone for a 72-yard touchdown, and the point-after tied the score at 14-14. The game ended with the same score, and for the first time A&M left Memorial Stadium in Austin with a result other than a loss. It was not until Thanksgiving Day of 1956 that the Aggies won for the first time in that stadium, which opened during the 1924 season.

Tight end Amari Niblack appeared in nine games with the Texas Longhorns during the 2024 season and recorded one of his five receptions on the year against Texas A&M. Niblack, who had begun his career at Alabama before transferring to Texas, entered the transfer portal after the 2024 season and is now at Texas A&M. If he sees the field on Friday he will become the first player in a very long time to experience the Texas-Texas A&M Thanksgiving week rivalry from both sides.

A year ago I wrote a post at Burnt Orange Nation detailing the careers of 14 Texas football players who were also undergrads at Texas A&M. Only a small portion of that group played for and against both teams on Thanksgiving Day.

Walter Hyde, an end, and Harris James, a guard, both started for Texas A&M against Texas in 1900, the first Thanksgiving Day game in that rivalry. A year later, both were attending UT and were members of its football team when Texas won over A&M on Thanksgiving Day 1901 by a score of 34-0.

Kyle Elam came to Texas A&M after graduating from Beaumont High School in 1917. He started at quarterback for the Aggies for two seasons, and he played against Texas in the 1918 Thanksgiving game. He transferred to Texas in 1919, and after sitting out of athletics for a year he was the Longhorns’ starting quarterback in Thanksgiving Day games against the Aggies in 1920 and 1921.

Donald Deere was a football and track star from Breckenridge, Texas who began his college career at Texas A&M. As a freshman in 1943 he entered the Thanksgiving game against Texas as a substitute.3 The following year, he was transferred from Texas A&M to Texas due to his participation in the Navy’s V-12 officer training program. He did not start in the 1944 Thanksgiving game against A&M but saw action against his former team as a substitute.

Henry Hook graduated from Houston’s Reagan High School after earning all-state honors as a senior in 1942. He enrolled at Texas A&M in the spring of 1943 and participated in spring practices with the Aggie football team. He was enlisted in the Navy, and since A&M was not a host campus for that branch’s V-12 officer training program, Hook had to transfer to a campus that was, and he chose Rice. He started on the line for Rice’s 1943 team as a freshman, then was transferred to Texas in 1944 and joined the Longhorn football team. He was UT’s starter at right guard in the 1944 Thanksgiving Day game against A&M, which Texas won 6-0. After a year of serving in the Navy, Hook returned to Texas A&M in 1946 and was a member of the Aggie football team for two years. He reportedly played as a substitute tackle during the 1947 Thanksgiving game against Texas.

So Amari Niblack could be the first player in 78 years to participate in Thanksgiving Day games for both the Aggies and Longhorns.

I hope everyone reading this has a very happy and memorable Thanksgiving Day this week!

During a game in December 2020, a defensive lineman from Edinburg High School in south Texas ran onto the field from the sideline and violently knocked the referee to the ground. The attack occurred mere seconds after the assailant was ejected from the contest after being flagged for both a personal foul and unsportsmanlike conduct following a late hit to the opposing quarterback.

In September of 2015, two players from John Jay High School in San Antonio attacked a back judge during a play. It turned out that the instigator of this attack was one of Jay High School’s assistant coaches, who later pleaded guilty to assault charges stemming from the incident.

Video of both attacks went viral and received national attention at the time, and the actions of those players will live on for as long as online video exists.

Far less likely to show up in a Google search are two incidents of player-on-official violence that took place one week apart after Southwest Conference games played in November of 1934, ninety-one years ago this month. This post will mostly concern the first of those two incidents, as the assailant in that case was a Texas Longhorn lineman.

On November 17, 1934, Texas and TCU played a hard-fought and turnover-marred contest in Fort Worth, from which Texas emerged victorious by a score of 20-19. No sooner had the game ended than a backup Longhorn tackle named Jim Tolbert ran on to the field and took a swing at the game’s umpire Jack Mahan, who reportedly had made several egregious calls benefitting TCU during the course of the game.

Tolbert and Mahan are both notable figures in the state’s football history, though their names probably won’t mean anything in 2025 to most readers under the age of 70. The Tolbert-Mahan incident was written about in numerous contemporary news articles, but has seldom, if ever, been mentioned in Longhorn football history books.

What follows in this post is a look at that long-forgotten incident and the lives of the two men at the center of it, both before and after the event. Read on and you’ll learn about one of Texas A&M’s early football greats, the coaching career of a man who led some of the earliest integrated high school teams in Austin, the end of Austin High School’s time as a central Texas football power and University of Texas talent pipeline, and of urban legends of one man’s life that somehow became facts by the time his obituary was written.

(In the footnotes you’ll also find some corrections that Wikipedia editors out there can take note of.)

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The Referee — Jack Mahan

Jack Francis Mahan was born on July 22, 1898 and grew up in Gainesville, Texas, a small town about 60 miles north of Fort Worth. His father, a Baylor alum, was a longtime employee of the Waples Painter lumber company and served as either its vice president or president for the last 36 years of his life. Mahan starred in football and track & field while attending Gainesville High School, and after graduating he enrolled at Texas A&M and was a multi-sport star there as well.

Mahan earned varsity letters in football at A&M in 1917, 1919, and 1920. He and several other Aggie football players (along with their head coach Dana X. Bible) missed the 1918 season due to serving in the military during World War I. But those Aggie teams that were sandwiched around the 1918 “war season” were among the most dominant ones in the program’s history. In Mahan’s three seasons with the team, Texas A&M went 24-1-1 and was scored against precisely once!

The 1919 Aggie eleven finished with a record of 10-0 while outscoring its opponents 275-0. This team was retroactively rated as the top team of 1919 by the Billingsley Report and has appeared since 1996 in the NCAA record book as one of that season’s four recognized national champions,1 though Texas A&M did not officially claim a national championship for 1919 until 2012 when it joined the Southeastern Conference (SEC).

Jack Mahan was the star fullback of that 1919 Aggie team and earned All-Southwest Conference honors for his play that season. As a senior in 1920 he served as team captain, and the Aggies went 6-0-1 in their first seven games of that campaign (the tie came by a 0-0 score against LSU). After going most of two seasons with neither a loss nor even a single point allowed to their opposition, the Aggies allowed their first touchdown in two years to the Texas Longhorns on Thanksgiving Day, and Texas would emerge a 7-3 winner in that epic battle of unbeaten teams. A 7-0 win by Texas at the end of the 1918 season had represented A&M’s most recent loss going into that game. The 1918 and 1920 games between Texas and Texas A&M are still the only two times in that rivalry where neither school had a loss going into their Thanksgiving Day matchup.

The fullbacks of Mahan’s era were not the burly run blockers of the more modern Daryl Johnston or Lorenzo Neal mold. In the single-wing offenses of Mahan’s time, they were typically players with multiple skills who received the snap from the center and were effective both as runners and passers. Since everyone played on both offense and defense while on the field and the substitution rules then in place meant there were no “special teams” units that took the field only on 4th downs or extra point attempts following a touchdown, fullbacks often served as their team’s punter and/or placekicker.

Jack Mahan stood only about 5’7” but was a well-built 170 pounds and had a reputation as a tough player who could plunge through opposing lines with the ball and run with power, and he was known as a hard tackler as a defensive back. He also returned kicks and served as A&M’s kicker. He was seen as one of the most effective “triple threat” backs of his era, a label given to a player who could make an impact on the game as a runner, a passer, and as a punter.

So highly-regarded was Mahan that well into the 1930s he was regularly named to mythical all-time teams of Aggie greats. Before the emergence of All-American John Kimbrough in the late 1930s, Mahan would have easily been the consensus choice for best fullback in school history.2 When writing about Kimbrough’s performance against Tulane in the 1940 Sugar Bowl, United Press sports editor George Kirksey (a University of Texas alum, no less) hailed him as, “truly the successor to Bronko Nagurski, Ernie Nevers, and Jack Mahan”, placing Mahan’s name in the same sentence with two fullbacks who would later be charter members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.3

Along with being one of A&M’s all-around football greats in the early decades of the 20th century, Mahan was also a track star and part of a long line of accomplished Aggie throwers. He broke the Southwest Conference record in the javelin throw in 1920, and that same year he was a member of the U.S. Olympic Team. At the 1920 Summer Games in Antwerp, Belgium, Mahan threw the javelin 53.52 meters (about 175 feet, 6.5 inches), but finished 12th in the qualifying round and did not advance to the finals. The winning throw by Finland’s Jonni Myyra topped Mahan’s best throw by 40 feet and set a new Olympic record in that event.

As a senior at the 1921 Southwest Conference track & field meet, Mahan competed in all three throwing events. He broke his own conference record in the javelin but finished second in that event behind an Aggie teammate, and also took third in the discus and fourth in the shot put. A&M’s team was the runaway winner at the conference meet, finishing 22 points ahead of second place Rice.4

A decade later in the fall of 1931, it was reported by a number of newspapers that Mahan, who was then 33 years old, had begun training with the javelin again in hopes of making the 1932 Olympic team, but I was unable to find any subsequent updates filed on that effort, and he was not an Olympian ever again.5

Mahan moved to southern Oklahoma after graduating from Texas A&M in 1921, and he managed a large farm there for the next 26 years. He also became a familiar face to a new generation of football players and fans as a game official, and from at least the early 1930s through 1941 he regularly officiated both college and high school games.

When working high school games, he primarily stayed between southern Oklahoma and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was part of the officiating crew for at least a handful of games involving Corsicana High School in the mid-1930s, which apparently provoked no objection despite Mahan being a college teammate of Corsicana’s head coach, Johnny Pierce.

His officiating work in north Texas gave him an up-close view of some historically notable football games. He was an official for at least three games involving the team from the Fort Worth Masonic Home, whose incredible story was famously told by Jim Dent in his 2008 book Twelve Mighty Orphans, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2021. Mahan was the head linesman for the Masonic Home’s 13-0 win over Highland Park in the quarterfinals of the 1934 Texas high school playoffs. He later served as the umpire for the 1937 Texas high school state championship game in Dallas, which Longview won 19-12 over Wichita Falls.

Film from that 1937 state championship game can be found on YouTube, and in this video you can see Jack Mahan in action as an official. You’ll also see future Texas Longhorn guard Chal Daniel, who was the left guard and co-captain of the 1937 Longview team, and would go on to earn All-America honors as a senior at Texas in 1941.

As an official for college games, Mahan primarily worked with the Big Six Conference and the Southwest Conference, and he appears to have been a particular favorite of TCU. According to contemporary news accounts, he served as either the umpire or referee of no less than nine TCU football games between 1934 and 1939, and these included not only home games played in Fort Worth but also TCU road games played against such geographically far-flung opponents as Ohio State (1937), Temple (1938), and UCLA (1939).

In 1934, Flem R. Hall of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described Jack Mahan and Richard Fischer as, “two of the finest men in the football officiating business, men whose honesty and courage have never been questioned, men who are generally rated as capable administrators of the rules that govern the game.” Sportswriter Frank Tolbert (no relation to Jim), then of the Wichita Falls Times, wrote in September 1936 about a meeting of football officials from Oklahoma and northwest Texas that took place in Wichita Falls, and described Mahan (who was one of the officials present) as being “generally regarded as first string official in his conference”, referring to the Big Six Conference.6 The Waco-based sportswriter Jinx Tucker, on the other hand, considered Mahan to be one of the worst college officials in the region, and said in 1936 that Mahan was “undoubtedly the worst” official he had observed in a game that season.7

So whether or not Mahan was a good or reliable football official depended greatly on who you asked, but for a solid decade he had no trouble getting work in that seasonal profession. A September 1934 article in the Star-Telegram reported that he was set to officiate 28 games that fall, including three games for the Big Six Conference (later the Big Eight), six for the Southwest Conference, and several others for the high school and small college ranks.8

When Mahan registered for the military draft in early 1942 he was 43 years old, and his draft card listed his size at 5’7” and 230 pounds, a substantially higher weight than what he reportedly had as a decorated collegiate athlete. How much weight he was carrying at the time of the Texas-TCU game in November 1934 is impossible to say, but based on the blunt descriptions of his physique given by contemporary reporters we can surmise that he didn’t much resemble the man who’d been an Olympic athlete and an All-SWC fullback 14 years earlier. The Austin Statesman’s Ray E. Lee, who was not a fan of Mahan as an official, described him as “fat”. The Star-Telegram’s Amos Melton, who had a much higher opinion of Mahan’s officiating abilities, referred to him at different times as, “the barn-wide powerhouse”9, and “the wide and very good football official”.10

Whatever one’s opinion was of Jack Mahan the official in 1934, he was at that time a living Texas A&M legend as a former athlete.

The Player — Jim Tolbert

James Wade Tolbert was born on May 12, 1915 and grew up in Farmersville, a small town about 35 miles northeast of Dallas. Farmersville’s population at the time of the 1930 census was 1,878, and it was not until the 2000 census that it rose above 3,000 for the first time.

Jim Tolbert’s father worked at different times as a poultry wholesaler, a hardware store owner, and a farmer, while his mother was one of the first female undertakers in Texas and worked for the Fielder Baker Funeral Home. Jim and his brother Frank, who was older by nearly three years, would get into fights in public that would attract crowds when word spread, and sometimes their father would be summoned to break up the fisticuffs. Frank and Jim (who was known locally by the nickname “Brub”) both played on Farmersville High School’s 1928 football team that went 12-0 and won its regional championship while allowing just 33 total points over that season. Both attended the University of Texas and went out for the football team, but Frank’s Longhorn football career ended almost as soon as it began. According to Jim’s son, James Tolbert Jr., Frank was kicked off of UT’s freshmen football team after hitting one of the coaches.

Jim Tolbert enrolled at the University of Texas in 1931 at the age of 16 after graduating from Farmersville High. A myth would emerge decades later that he was an almost immediate starter for the Longhorn football team and UT’s “youngest football player ever”, but that was not accurate. (More on that later.) Freshmen were not eligible to play on collegiate varsity teams at that time, and though it is unclear if Tolbert played on UT’s freshmen team in 1931 or 1932, he certainly played his first season as a member of the Longhorn varsity football team in 1933, at age 18. He wasn’t exactly a giant for his time, but at 6 feet and 195-205 pounds he was still big enough to be called “big”, and he was the heaviest of the Longhorns’ tackle candidates going into the 1933 season. Contemporary reports did not name Tolbert as a starter in any of the Longhorns’ eleven games played in 1933, but he regularly substituted in at both right and left tackle and earned his first varsity letter that year.

As was common among University of Texas student-athletes (and probably those from other Southwest Conference schools) in that time period, Tolbert did menial labor during the summer months between semesters. In the summer of 1934 the Austin Statesman contacted returning members of the Longhorn football team to inquire about how they spent their summer, and Tolbert’s reply was published in the paper’s August 28, 1934 edition.

Somewhere in your letter you asked for “interesting” information; then you addressed the letter to Farmersville. About the only interesting thing that could happen would be absence from said village. My weight ranges from 200 to 205, I think I am in better condition than I have been in quite a while before the season started. And as to how I have occupied myself during vacation, if you want to call it a vacation: For the first month I worked at a hay press. Since then (and the drouth) I’ve been pulling slipscrapers and Fresnoes.11

Tolbert was one of just three tackles on the 1934 team who were returning lettermen. He was the starter at left tackle in the first two games of that season and started in another game or two later that year, but for most of the season he was a substitute player once again. Defensive statistics tabulated by the Daily Texan during the 1934 season credited Tolbert with 21 total tackles.

In the game against TCU, he came off the bench in relief of starting left tackle Clint Small. Tolbert, at 200 pounds, was the heaviest player listed on a UT roster that was published in the week leading up to the TCU game.

In a theoretical tale of the tape Jim Tolbert may not have outweighed Jack Mahan on that day, but at 19 years old and in midseason playing shape he was almost certainly more physically fit than the former Aggie great, and was five inches taller.

The 1934 Texas-TCU game

The 1933 Texas Longhorns had compiled a record of 4-5-2. Head coach Clyde Littlefield (who had been a three-sport star at Texas while a student) resigned his football post after that season, but would remain at UT as its track & field coach until 1961. Taking Littlefield’s place as head football coach in 1934 was Jack Chevigny, an Indiana native who had played football under the legendary Knute Rockne while a student-athlete at Notre Dame. After his college career, Chevigny became an assistant coach under Rockne, and during his two seasons on Rockne’s staff Notre Dame won 19 consecutive games and is a recognized national champion for the 1929 and 1930 seasons.

Rockne died in a plane crash in March of 1931, and Chevigny was seen as a potential successor. But it was the team’s line coach Hunk Anderson who instead became the interim head coach. Technically, Anderson was made the “senior coach” and Chevigny the “junior coach” for the 1931 season, but the interim tag was removed and Anderson would lead the Notre Dame football team from 1931 to 1933. After assisting Anderson in 1931, Chevigny left Notre Dame to serve as head coach of the NFL’s Chicago Cardinals, and in his lone year with that franchise his team finished with a record of 2-6-2 in the 1932 season.

Chevigny left Chicago in 1933 to take over as the football coach at St. Edward’s University, a Catholic university in Austin, Texas that was founded in 1877 by the Rev. Edward Sorin, a French-born priest who had founded the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana 35 years earlier. The St. Edward’s Tigers went 7-2 in the 1933 season, winning the Texas Conference and giving Chevigny his first winning season as a head coach at any level. He made the geographically short move to the University of Texas in 1934 when he was hired to replace Clyde Littlefield.

Chevigny, at 28 years of age when the 1934 season began, was by far the youngest of the seven head coaches in the Southwest Conference, the other six ranging in age from 34 to 49. The 1934 campaign began promisingly for Texas, with a 12-6 road win over Texas Tech (then a member of the Border Conference) on September 22.

Two weeks later came a much-anticipated road game against Notre Dame, pitting Jack Chevigny against his alma mater. Hunk Anderson, who Notre Dame had chosen over Chevigny to replace the deceased Knute Rockne in 1931, was gone after three seasons and an overall record of 16-9-2. He was replaced as head coach of the Fighting Irish in 1934 by Elmer Layden, who had been an All-American fullback under Rockne in the early 1920s and was a member of its famed “Four Horsemen” backfield. Though Texas and Notre Dame had both posted losing records in 1933, their game in 1934 received a good amount of national attention, with prominent radio stations in New York City broadcasting it after the conclusion of game 4 of that year’s World Series, which took place the same day.

Notre Dame fumbled on the opening kickoff to give Texas the ball at the 18-yard line. Four plays later, star left halfback Bohn Hilliard scored on an eight-yard touchdown run after cutting behind a Tolbert block at left tackle, and Hilliard’s subsequent extra point kick gave Texas an early 7-0 lead that it never gave up. The Longhorns’ monumental 7-6 upset win over Notre Dame represented the first time a team from the state of Texas had beaten that traditional power, and it also gave Chevigny a measure of revenge against his alma mater after he’d been passed over for its head coaching position three years earlier.

Jim Tolbert started at left tackle in the Notre Dame game and played for over half of the game. Later accounts of the game would say Tolbert played for the entire contest on both offense and defense despite suffering a sprained ankle, and game summaries published the next day in newspapers throughout the state said that eight of UT’s eleven starters (including Tolbert) had played the entire game and only three substitutes had seen the field. The Sunday American-Statesman’s play-by-play recap, however, said that Tolbert was relieved at left tackle by Clint Small during the third quarter. Further confusing the matter is the fact that the American-Statesman did not list Small as a substitute in its box score of the game, despite its detailed recap mentioning him coming into the game for Tolbert in the second half.12

The win over Notre Dame was followed by a 19-0 shutout victory over Oklahoma in Dallas. But in the Longhorns’ first true home game they lost 9-6 to Centenary, a non-conference opponent that would finish 10-2 that year while also recording wins over Texas A&M, TCU, Baylor, and Ole Miss. To begin conference play, Texas lost 20-9 to Rice and tied SMU 7-7. The Longhorns got back on track with a decisive 25-6 win over Baylor on November 10 that put their conference record at 1-1-1 with three games left, starting with a November 17 date with TCU.

The 1934 TCU Horned Frogs were also playing their first season under a new head coach. Dutch Meyer, a TCU alum who’d been a three-sport letterman as a student-athlete before serving as an assistant football coach and the head baseball coach for several years, was promoted to the head football coach position in 1934. He would remain in that post for 19 seasons, during which time he led TCU to its first three bowl wins and a pair of claimed national championships in 1935 and 1938.

TCU, a Southwest Conference power at the time, went into the 1934 season having won at least nine games in five consecutive seasons, and the Horned Frogs had shut out Texas in their last two meetings. Going into their 1934 matchup, TCU had a 2-1 conference record with three games remaining against Texas, Rice, and SMU. So for both Texas and TCU it was a must-win game for them to still have a chance at winning the conference.

Jack Mahan served as the umpire on the four-man officiating crew for the Texas-TCU game on November 17, 1934. It was the second time just that month that he had worked a TCU contest; he had been the head linesman for the Horned Frogs’ 34-12 home win over Baylor two weeks earlier.

In the 1st quarter, the Texas defense twice recovered fumbles deep in TCU territory, but those possessions ended with a turnover on downs and a lost fumble. The Longhorns finally opened the scoring on their next possession with a 65-yard touchdown run by halfback Hugh Wolfe, who would become UT’s first-ever NFL Draft pick in 1938. TCU scored a pair of touchdowns in the 2nd quarter but missed on the point after try both times, and the Horned Frogs led 12-7. On the final play of the first half, a pass from TCU’s Sammy Baugh (a charter inductee into Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963) was intercepted at UT’s 3-yard line by Bill Pitzer, which ended another TCU scoring threat.

After receiving the second half kickoff, Texas went on a 13-play drive that ended with another Hugh Wolfe touchdown run, and the extra point try was successful to put Texas back on top 14-12. TCU fumbled on the ensuing kickoff return and Texas took over at the TCU 25-yard line, but the Longhorns were unable to capitalize and turned the ball over on downs at the same spot.

In a sloppy series of plays, Texas halfback Bohn Hilliard intercepted a Sammy Baugh pass at UT’s 38-yard line, but one of Hilliard’s own passes was intercepted by TCU near midfield. Shortly afterward, a TCU pass was caught then fumbled back to Texas. Texas was again unable to get points on that possession and ended up punting. The final play of the 3rd quarter resulted in another Texas interception of a Baugh pass, this one giving the Longhorns the ball at the TCU 48-yard line. That interception was grabbed by Longhorn co-captain Charlie Coates, who would make the All-Southwest Conference team at center and was the leading tackler among UT’s linemen that season. Coates also handled kickoff duties for the Longhorns.

Texas ended up punting to give TCU the ball at its own 5-yard line, and two plays later a pass from TCU halfback Jimmy Lawrence was intercepted by UT’s Jimmy Hadlock at the TCU 25-yard line. Two plays later, a 16-yard touchdown run by Hilliard gave UT a 20-12 lead, but the extra point try was blocked. Baugh was intercepted once again on TCU’s next drive, but Hilliard gave the ball right back on UT’s ensuing possession when he was intercepted at the TCU 20-yard line.

Two successive TCU passes fell incomplete but were ruled complete due to Texas being penalized for interference, which advanced the ball just beyond midfield. After getting a first down at the Texas 21-yard line, a Sammy Baugh pass deflected off Hilliard and into the hands of a TCU receiver in the end zone, and TCU pulled to within 20-19 after making the extra point. (The rule allowing two-point conversion attempts after touchdowns was not approved for college football until 1958.) Texas got as close as the TCU 30-yard line on its final drive before punting. Two TCU passes from deep in its end of the field fell incomplete on the game’s final two plays, and Texas won the hard-fought and turnover-laden contest by a 20-19 score. The two teams had combined to fumble the ball nine times and toss seven interceptions.13

The Punch

Jim Tolbert played tackle for a good chunk of the 4th quarter (he was reportedly on the field for only 10 of the game’s 60 minutes) but was substituted out and was on the Texas sidelines at the end of the game. No sooner had the game ended than Tolbert ran onto the field towards an unsuspecting Jack Mahan and attacked him. UT’s student newspaper, the Daily Texan, would later say Tolbert “forcefully shoved” Mahan, but most accounts described it as a punch or a “swing”.

According to Flem R. Hall of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Tolbert “rushed from his position the instant the final gun sounded to take a swing at Jack Mahan, former Texas A&M star who umpired the game... He struck the surprised and unprepared Mahan once. The blow appeared to land on the neck or face. Other officials and players quickly separated the men and no real damage was inflicted.”

“Never before in a major college football game have we seen a player offer to do physical violence to any of the men in charge of administering the rules”, wrote Hall.14

An Associated Press (AP) story on the Texas-TCU game (which did not mention Tolbert by name) reported, “As soon as the game was over, a Texas player rushed on the field and took a hay-maker at Umpire Jack Mahan”, and that afterward “Coach Jack Chevigny grabbed the peeved player and shoved him off the field and then shook hands with Mahan.”15

That AP article and other news stories that reported the Jim Tolbert-Jack Mahan incident speculated that the cause of Tolbert’s outburst was he and his teammates having taken great exception to the two interference penalties against Texas that had helped extend TCU’s final scoring drive, both of which were called by Mahan. Ray E. Lee of the Austin Statesman was critical of those two calls and a number of others made during the game, and in a column he provided a list of grievances with the officiating that were likely shared by members of the Longhorn squad and coaching staff.16

Also there are 6000 witnesses that Old-Timer Mahan of A&M has lost his class as an official. He was slated as umpire in the game Saturday, but [referee] Harry Viner had to carry his load. Price of Austin College was field judge, but he contributed little judgment. It was left to Viner and Fouts, the head linesman, and I must say that Viner turned a neat one-man performance.

But Mahan is fat and 40 [he was actually 36], indifferent and careless. He ruled two pass interference penalties against Texas in the final period. The first was doubtful enough but might have been called if the umpire saw it that way. The second was terrible — neither man in the tangle was within three yards of the ball and the play was wide open for the ball.

Mahan ruled a pass completed when T.C.U.’s Roach dropped the ball and fell on it at the sideline in front of the Texas bench. Mahan was 25 yards away, flatfooted and indifferent to the play.

Mahan let the T.C.U. secondary get away with two slugging bees I saw, and goodness knows how many more.

Mahan let a T.C.U. blocker hold [Buster] Baebel on a pass defense play—and get away with it. He let a linesman tackle [Longhorn end Jack] Gray when Texas was passing and Gray was an eligible receiver; let him be tackled before the ball was thrown.

And most obvious of all, he and Price gave Texas a kicked ball on a spot where it hit a T.C.U. end, but refused to call a 15-yard penalty for interference before the ball hit the ground. Both contended the ball hadn’t hit a man, but moved it any way to the point where it struck, rather than downing it where [Texas quarterback Jimmy] Hadlock reclaimed the ball after the bounce.

Most often the losers complain of the officiating, and it sounds a bit sour. I am happy to put in an oar here, since Texas won, for nomination as the worst officiating I have ever seen, Harry Viner excepted.

He swept over the field as fast as he could, called the shots quickly and fairly, and even nailed two pile-ups that really were Mahan’s call — one against [Longhorn fullback Bill] Pitzer and one against [TCU halfback Scott] McCall.

I hope Texas uses Viner more often, but refuses to consent to disturbing Mahan’s Saturday afternoons henceforth.

The Aftermath

Jim Tolbert’s attack on Jack Mahan was mentioned in several newspapers across the state in the week that followed Texas’s win over TCU, and was roundly condemned even by writers who held no admiration for Mahan as an official. Tolbert’s punch could not be quickly forgotten because only one week later TCU had its own incident of player-on-official violence.

TCU traveled to Houston on November 24 and knocked off previously unbeaten Rice by a score of 7-2, and shortly after that game’s conclusion TCU’s star halfback Jimmy Lawrence (who had scored the only touchdown by either team) ran toward umpire Richard Fischer and punched him, knocking him to the ground. Lawrence was apparently similarly displeased with some calls that had been made against his team, despite their leaving Houston with a win. That game represented Rice’s only defeat in the 1934 season, and the Owls would win the Southwest Conference with a 5-1 record in league play.

With two such incidents in as many weeks, SWC officials met to discuss the sudden pattern of players at member schools attacking officials. Newspaper columnists from around the state offered advice on what the punishment for Tolbert and Lawrence should be.

A Waco News-Tribune writer who evidently had neither witnessed the Texas-TCU game nor had timely knowledge of the physical condition of Mahan or Tolbert wrote:

This business of gridsters taking cracks at officials after games seems to be getting common. One of the Texas boys rushed out on the field to take a crack at Jack Mahan after the T.C.U.-Texas game. Our only regret is that someone stopped the player. Had he been allowed to hit Mahan there would have been no such trouble in the future. They would have had to gather up the Longhorn with a mop or something. Down in Houston Saturday after the game Jimmy Lawrence went out to the field and knocked down the field judge. It was an uncalled for act, and Lawrence should be kicked off of the Texas Christian team for the remainder of his grid career. But Jimmy is a great football player and the powers that be at the great Christian university of Fort Worth will forget about the matter.17

Houston Chronicle sportswriter Dick Freeman wrote a column that advocated banning any player who attacked an official.

There is only one solution.

Take their uniforms away from them and bar them from the gridiron.

They may be just boys, but now is a good time to teach them a lesson that should last them for a lifetime, and not only them, but all the rest of the players in the conference.

The coaches choose the officials. If they are not safe from the players, there is something sour about football.18

An Austin American writer similarly opined, “Players guilty of such indiscretion should be summarily dismissed from the football squads. They have no place in college athletics.” The writer ended that portion of the column with this statement.

It is our belief that the average college official is sincere and honest in his decisions. He may err now and then, but that is only natural. Of course if he proves to be incompetent, he should be dismissed. But as long as he is authorized to work the games, he should be guaranteed protection from physical violence by roughneck football players.

Now the question is: What is the Southwest conference authorities going to do about it? [Bad grammar in the original.]19

The conference ultimately left the punishment of Jim Tolbert and Jimmy Lawrence up to their respective schools. Lawrence “voluntarily” sat out TCU’s final conference game, which the Horned Frogs lost 19-0 to SMU.20 He was not kicked off the TCU team or banned from the gridiron, but instead returned for the 1935 season as TCU’s co-captain. He was one of the stars of a 1935 TCU team that went 12-1, beat LSU in the Sugar Bowl, and was named national champion by the Williamson Report. The first-ever NFL Draft was held in February 1936, and Jimmy Lawrence was its fifth overall pick, and the first player drafted from a Southwest Conference school.

Jim Tolbert, on the other hand, was not made to sit out UT’s final games of the 1934 season but suited up and played in UT’s wins against Arkansas and Texas A&M. The UT Athletic Council chose not to suspend Tolbert, using the novel reasoning that to do so would punish the whole team for his actions rather than just him, and instead his punishment for punching Mahan was to have his varsity letter for the 1934 season withheld. The council attempted to take this action quietly, but reporters did not fail to notice that Tolbert’s name was missing from the group of varsity letter-winners announced at the end of a season in which he had participated in every game.

A December 6, 1934 editorial in the Daily Texan, criticized the Athletic Council’s “apparently selfish attitude” in attempting to discipline Tolbert while still allowing the football team “the benefit of his services in the Aggie game.” The Texan staff believed that Tolbert was deserving of his varsity letter but should have been made to sit out the Texas A&M game, and that the Athletic Council had “placed winning ahead of sportsmanship.”21

On December 12, 1934, the entire Longhorn football program, from the varsity to the freshmen, gathered for a team banquet where the main course was duck that the coaching staff had bagged during a hunt on UT regent Lutcher Stark’s property in Louisiana. After some remarks by head coach Jack Chevigny, Charlie Coates, one of the team’s two captains in 1934, surprised Tolbert by announcing that the members of the team had pitched in to buy him a silver football mounted on a stand, which was then awarded to him. This was gifted to Tolbert out of the team’s desire to not see their teammate’s work on the field to go completely unrewarded after he’d been denied his letter for that season.22

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Jack Mahan in later years

Jack Mahan remained active as a football official through at least the 1941 season. Texas ultimately did not take Ray E. Lee’s advice on not “disturbing Mahan’s Saturday afternoons”, as he would work at least four Longhorn football games between 1939 and 1941.

He worked as a teacher with a veterans’ vocational agriculture program from 1947 until 1952, but his health declined as he reached his 50s and forced him into an early retirement. The Star-Telegram not-so-gently described him as “a semi-invalid” at the end of his life.

In early September of 1955, Mahan was accompanied by his wife and their young granddaughter on a visit to friends who owned a farm a few miles southeast of Gainesville, and on their farm was a body of water that different news accounts described as either a lake or “stock tank”. He went out to fish one morning during that visit, and when his wife went out to the lake to check on him he was nowhere to be seen and his hat was floating on the surface of the water. Mahan’s body was later found under about seven feet of water, some fifteen feet from the bank where he had last been seen. According to a Star-Telegram article reporting on his death, “the hook of an artificial lure was found caught in Mahan’s shoelaces, leading to speculation that he fell down the steep dam into the water while trying to disentangle the line.”23 He was 57 years old.

Texas A&M’s Athletic Hall of Fame was dedicated in 1964, and Jack Mahan was posthumously inducted as a member of its second class in 1965.

Jim Tolbert in later years

Jim Tolbert returned to the Texas Longhorn football team as a 20-year-old senior in 1935. At the end of the team’s spring practices in 1935 he was captain of one of the two squads for their spring game, which was referred to at that time as the “Round-Up game”. Unlike the previous summer, in which Tolbert had done menial farm labor, he spent the summer of 1935 hitting the books in summer school, while at least eleven of his teammates spent the summer working jobs related to construction or oil drilling.24

The Longhorns had finished with a record of 7-2-1 in 1934, their first season under Jack Chevigny. They followed that up by getting off to a 3-1 start in 1935, with wins over Oklahoma and the Centenary team that had dealt them one of their only two losses the year before. But the wheels came off after that. Texas convincingly lost five of its last six games, with those five defeats coming by an average margin of 17 points. Jim Tolbert was the starter at right tackle in five of the team’s ten games in the 1935 season, and substituted in for either Howard Terry or Nick Frankovic in the other five.

That 4-6 season was the beginning of the end of the brief Jack Chevigny era. No Longhorn team before 1935 had ever lost six games in a season, and only one (Clyde Littlefield’s last team in 1933, which finished 4-5-2) had lost as many as five games. Chevigny resigned as head coach after leading the Longhorns to a 2-6-1 record in 1936. He had received a law degree while coaching at Notre Dame, and after leaving UT he went full-time into the legal profession, never to coach college or pro football again. Chevigny served in the Marines during World War II and was killed in action at the Battle of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, at the age of 38.

Jim Tolbert graduated from the University of Texas in 1936 with a Bachelor of Science in Physical Education, and later that year he was hired as a physical education teacher and coach for two junior high schools in Austin, beginning what would be a four-decade career of teaching and coaching in that city. He spent several years as a coach at Austin’s University Junior High, and also took graduate courses at UT during summer sessions in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

His teaching and grad school work was interrupted by his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He spent part of that service in Asia, and he and his brother-in-law Park Fielder were shipped there in the same convoy and returned to the states after the war on the same boat.25

Tolbert returned to Austin after his discharge from the Army, and in 1947 he was awarded a Master of Education degree. His graduate thesis was titled, “Athletic Ability and Motor Learning in Throwing”. In addition to teaching and coaching he also contributed some scholarly work to his field. He was a co-writer on a pair of articles that were published in the early 1950s in the Research Quarterly of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation.26

Austin High School’s football team was strong for most of Tolbert’s years as a full-time junior high coach. Austin High was Austin’s only public high school for white students until 1953, and its football teams finished with a winning record in fourteen consecutive seasons from 1938 to 1951, winning seven district championships and reaching the state championship game three times during that span. Austin won its only state championship in 1942, and lost in the state final to Wichita Falls in both 1949 and 1950.

But the Austin Maroon football program fell off in the early 1950s, and the team compiled a 5-14-1 record between the 1952 and 1953 seasons. In July of 1954, Austin High’s head coach Johnny Kitchens, who had led the Maroons to back-to-back state championship appearances just four years earlier, resigned and took a job with a Fort Worth construction company. Jim Tolbert, who had tutored many of Austin’s football players during their junior high years but had never been a full-time coach at the high school level, was hired as the new head football coach at Austin High School on July 12, 1954.27

Things did not turn around immediately in Tolbert’s first year at the helm, as Austin finished 0-9-1 in 1954 and was outscored by an average margin of 19 points. But steady improvement followed the Maroons’ first winless season in over four decades, as they won two games in 1955 and five games in 1956. Their breakthrough came in 1957 with a roster that was among the most talented ones the school has ever fielded.

The 1957 Austin Maroons boasted a backfield with three players who won all-state honors that year: quarterback Mike Cotten, halfback Bobby Nunis, and fullback Don Jester. Six seniors on that team received football scholarships from Southwest Conference schools, and at least five members of the junior class would also sign with colleges a year later. The team went 10-0 in the regular season and outscored opponents by an average margin of 24 points. The Maroons defeated Corpus Christi Ray and San Antonio Jefferson in the first two rounds of the Class 4A playoffs to reach the state semifinals, where they would play Port Arthur Jefferson. On the other side of the bracket were Highland Park and Abilene, the latter of whom had won three consecutive state titles and owned a state record 49-game winning streak going into the semifinal round.

The semifinal between Austin and Port Arthur Jefferson was played on December 14 at Port Arthur’s Yellowjacket Stadium, and the field was a mess of puddles and mud after several hours of steady morning rain. The jerseys of both teams’ starters were caked in mud before the end of the 1st quarter, and the field conditions worsened as the game went along. This was a familiar setting for the Port Arthur team, which had already played a handful of games in similar conditions that year.28

The Austin Maroons were far less prepared for the wet and muddy state of the field. It effectively negated their talent advantage in the backfield when they attempted to run, and several passes slipped through their receivers’ hands when their offense went to the air while trailing in the second half. Port Arthur took a 14-6 lead in the 4th quarter, and twice in that quarter Austin High advanced deep into Port Arthur territory before turning the ball over on downs. The Maroons scored their only touchdown on an 82-yard Bobby Nunis kickoff return late in the 2nd quarter, and for the game they gained well under 100 yards of total offense. Port Arthur Jefferson won the game 14-6 and advanced to the Class 4A state championship game, where the Yellowjackets lost 21-9 to a Highland Park team that had dethroned three-time defending state champion Abilene in the other state semifinal.

The game film from the 1957 Austin-Port Arthur Jefferson state semifinal game has been uploaded to YouTube and can be watched below.

Jim Raup, who played quarterback at Austin High in the early 1960s and later played baseball for the Texas Longhorns, tells me that the heartbreaking semifinal loss to Port Arthur Jefferson in 1957 convinced Jim Tolbert to have his teams practice outdoors from then on even in the most inclement of weather. Raup was a sophomore in October of 1960 when the Maroons practiced outdoors in the rain multiple times leading up to an important district matchup with unbeaten Bryan, and when that game ended up being a very wet affair the Austin boys were seemingly ready for it and went home with a win. The headline of the Austin American’s story of that game: “Maroons Wade to 28-6 Victory”.29

Raup was a junior in his first season with the Maroon varsity in September of 1961 when Hurricane Carla struck the Texas coast and ultimately caused 34 deaths and an estimated $300 million in damage (roughly $3.2 billion when adjusted for inflation). Raup and his teammates on the Maroon football team saw just how stubborn Coach Tolbert’s stance on rain-or-shine practices had become when he had the team go through practice outdoors even as the remnants of Hurricane Carla were dumping over 3.5 inches of rain on Austin during a two-day span and while Austin’s schools were closed due to the weather. Raup says the team practiced on Austin’s baseball field, with him filling the role of scout team quarterback to mimic their upcoming opponent’s plays. Remembering a huge puddle on the field that could almost be called a lake, and the scout team line’s inability to block Austin’s first team defense, he says, “It is a wonder I did not drown under the pass rush when I dropped back to throw the opponent’s pass play.”

James Tolbert Jr. says his father received offers over the years from college coaches wanting him to join their staff, but he felt more at home coaching in a high school setting and turned down all offers to coach at the collegiate level.

The Maroons had some good years during the latter half of Tolbert’s tenure and did not have a single losing season during the 1960s. But that 1957 season would be the pinnacle of Jim Tolbert’s coaching career.

More context on Jim Tolbert’s coaching career

Austin High School football teams of the current era can often play an entire regular season without venturing outside of Travis County more than once or twice. The longest road trip that the 2025 Maroon team had was about 50 miles, the distance between its campus and that of Canyon High School in New Braunfels. But the situation was very different at the beginning of Jim Tolbert’s tenure.

When Tolbert took over Austin’s football program in 1954, it was one of just 53 high schools competing at the Class 4A level, then the state’s highest classification. (247 schools compete in today’s highest classification, 6A.) And far from playing all their district games against opponents from within the city of Austin or in nearby suburbs, Austin High’s district opponents in 1954 were: Highland Park in north Dallas, Tyler in east Texas, Waco (about 105 miles to the north in central Texas), and Wichita Falls (in northwest Texas just south of the Red River). The average distance from Austin High to those campuses using today’s roads is roughly 210 miles!

By the early 1960s Class 4A had grown to the point where Austin’s district opponents were much closer in general, but they still had a pair of district foes — Bryan and Waco — that were over 100 miles away. It was not until 1968 that enough new schools had been opened to allow the Maroons to be zoned into a district entirely consisting of Austin opponents.

Jim Tolbert’s tenure as head coach coincided with the earliest moves toward integrating Austin’s public schools. McCallum High School and Travis High School opened in 1953, which both relieved the very crowded Austin High campus and ended its long period as the city’s sole public high school for its white students. As with most large cities in Texas, Austin’s public schools were racially segregated well into the 1950s.

In 1955, a year after the United States Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, the Austin school board voted to allow black students to enroll in what had previously been all-white high school campuses. Twelve black students did so in the 1955-56 school year, with seven of them attending Austin High.30

George Lambert Bristol, a 1958 graduate of Austin High who was a backup guard and linebacker on the 1957 Maroon football team, wrote in his 2012 book On Politics and Parks:

As integration loomed after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Coach Tolbert simply said to us, “No trouble!” And there wasn’t. In our senior year, as we were headed to the state playoffs, so was the “colored” high school in Austin—Anderson High. We sent a good luck telegram to them and some of us went to their game. Austin was full of folks who said, “No trouble.”31

The Austin Maroon varsity football team had an integrated roster at least as early as 1959, when senior Garland Earls played halfback and fullback on the team after having been a member of Austin’s B team the prior year.32 This was a time when integrated football rosters were still a rarity among the big high schools in the state.33 By the end of the 1960s, roughly 15% of Austin High School’s students were black.34

Tolbert’s teams didn’t make frequent postseason appearances in an era when only district champions advanced to the playoffs, but from 1957 to 1969 they had only one season in which they failed to win at least seven games. Though the Maroons only won four district championships during Tolbert’s tenure (1957, 1961-62, and 1969) they spent much of that time as the preeminent high school program among Austin schools. That began to change in the latter half of the 1960s.

John H. Reagan High School opened in northeast Austin in 1965, and the new school not only took over a significant chunk of Austin High’s attendance zone and talent pool but also hired away Tolbert’s two longtime assistants for its first football coaching staff. Travis Raven, who had spent several years as Austin’s backfield coach and head baseball coach, was hired as Reagan’s first head football coach.35 In making the move to Reagan High, Raven brought along with him Glen Swenson, who had been Austin’s line coach as well as its track & field coach. Raven and Swenson were both Austin High alums who had been members of the Texas Longhorn football team during the mid-1940s, and Tolbert had coached Raven when the latter was a high schooler playing for Austin’s B team in the late 1930s. In short order, Raven and Swenson turned the Austin Reagan Raiders into a football powerhouse, and a frequent thorn in the side of their alma mater.

In the first matchup between Austin High and Reagan in 1966, the Raiders took a 12-0 lead into the 4th quarter, but a late comeback gave the Maroons a 14-12 win. A year later, both teams were undefeated when they faced off in October in a potential battle for their district’s supremacy. Reagan led Austin 18-7 going into the 4th quarter. The Maroons scored a touchdown to cut the deficit to 18-14 with 1:47 left in the game, but they were not able to add to their total. Austin had one last possession in the game’s final minute but was unable to get across midfield.

The American-Statesman’s story on the game said that Austin got the ball back on their own 19-yard line with 1:24 left on the clock after a Reagan punt, but this was probably a typo, as Austin only ran three offensive plays in the time that remained. The story made no mention of an onside kick after Austin’s last touchdown.36 William “Tudey” Teten, a 1971 graduate of Austin High who was a ninth grader at the time of the 1967 Austin-Reagan game, wrote years later that Austin’s kickoff after getting the score to 18-14 was a “pooch” kick into Reagan territory, and after two Reagan players on the kickoff return unit ran into each other the football rolled in the direction of the Reagan sideline with a pair of Austin players in mad pursuit. But before either could reach the ball it was intentionally nudged out of bounds by Raven with his foot. The officials, who did not see Raven’s skullduggery, gave possession to Reagan.37 Tolbert was so incredulous when one of his players told him what he’d seen Raven do that he didn’t believe it until he watched the game film.

The Reagan Raiders went on to win the rest of their games and claim not only their first district championship but also the Class 4A state title in their school’s third year of existence. Since second-place teams in each district did not qualify for the playoffs until 1982, there was no opportunity for the 8-1 Maroons to get a playoff re-match with the Raiders. Reagan repeated as Class 4A state champion in 1968, going 15-0 and outscoring opponents 394-51 for the season. Reagan held Austin to just 45 total yards in a 10-0 victory over the Maroons in November of that year. Reagan’s 1967 and 1968 teams were both named mythical high school national champions by the National Sports News Service.

Jim Tolbert’s last matchup against Reagan and his former protegé Travis Raven came a year later in the 1969 season. In a game played before 21,000 fans at Memorial Stadium in Austin, the Maroons dominated the two-time defending champions by a 27-7 score. That win by Austin denied Reagan a shot at a third consecutive state championship and snapped the Raiders’ 35-game winning streak, which was then tied for the third-longest streak in Texas history. Enough bad blood had developed between the two former colleagues by that time that Tolbert refused to shake Raven’s hand after the game. Two weeks later he wrote a letter to Reagan High’s principal apologizing for his actions.38

Austin went on to wrap up their district’s championship a week after the win over Reagan, allowing them to advance to the playoffs for the first time in seven years. But the Maroons fell 22-21 in the first round to Seguin, a team that would reach the state quarterfinals before losing 27-23 to eventual Class 4A runner-up San Antonio Lee. Tolbert stepped away from coaching in the spring following the 1969 season.

Austin Reagan rebounded in 1970 to win its third state title in four seasons, and Travis Raven resigned as Reagan’s head coach a few months later after being named athletic director for Austin’s public schools. Three years later in 1974, he resigned in disgrace from that position after being convicted on a misdemeanor charge of engaging in prostitution with a 16-year-old girl.39

Reagan remained a state contender for several years after Raven departed as its head coach. The Raiders lost by five points to eventual state champion San Antonio Lee in the 1971 playoffs, and two years later they reached the 1973 state championship before losing 21-14 to a John Tyler High School team led by future Heisman Trophy winner and Pro Football Hall of Famer Earl Campbell.

Austin’s Reagan High School, which was renamed Northeast Early College High School in 2019, is now far from its own football glory days and has not had a winning season since 2003, but between 1967 and 2002 its teams won 19 district championships, and its ascendance effectively ended Austin High’s status as a central Texas football power. The Austin Maroons have not won a district championship since 1978, and they have not won a single playoff game since the 1957 season that ended in the state semifinals.

Austin High School has — unsurprisingly, given its proximity to the University of Texas — produced more UT football lettermen than any other high school by far. It was an important talent pipeline for the Longhorns for many years, and in the first seven decades of UT football (1893 to 1962) it supplied the program with eleven team captains and eight players who were later inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor. But its days as a notable football talent pipeline were numbered by the end of Jim Tolbert’s time as head coach, which was at least partly due to Austin having eight high schools in 1969, compared with the three it had in 1954.

Austin’s 1957 state semifinalist team included future Texas Longhorns Bobby Nunis, Mike Cotten, and Johnny Treadwell. Nunis was an offensive and defensive back on the Longhorn varsity for three seasons (1960-62) and one of the team’s primary punters. Cotten was the Longhorns’ starting quarterback for two seasons, and as a senior in 1961 he was named an honorable mention All-American and led a 10-1 team that was one of UT’s best-ever squads to not win a national title. Treadwell played both guard and linebacker for Texas and was a consensus All-American as a senior in 1962.

Most of the ex-Austin Maroons who have played for the Texas Longhorns since the end of Johnny Treadwell’s career have been walk-ons or one-year lettermen. Charles Wright, a reserve quarterback with the Longhorns from 2021 to 2023, is the only Austin High graduate in the last 60 years to win three letters with the Texas football program.

The lone NFL player who Tolbert coached in his 16 years at Austin High was Alvin Matthews, who won All-America honors at Texas A&I (now Texas A&M-Kingsville) after graduating from Austin High in 1966. Matthews (who was known as Al Matthews during his pro football career) was picked in the 2nd round of the 1970 NFL Draft by the Green Bay Packers and played as a defensive back in the NFL for eight seasons. Matthews, who died on March 8 of this year, holds the distinction of being UT football’s first African-American assistant coach. His pro football career prevented him from coaching the Longhorns during the fall, but starting in 1972 Matthews served as an offensive assistant to the Longhorns during spring practices, and he also assisted during practices for bowl games in years when his team’s NFL season ended early enough.

Tolbert coached another future professional athlete in Don Baylor. Baylor started at end for the Maroon varsity football team for two seasons and made the all-district team as a senior in 1966. He was also a speedy and power-hitting outfielder on the Maroon baseball team and received honorable mention all-district honors in basketball. Baylor had several scholarship offers for football (including one from the hometown Texas Longhorns), but chose to turn pro in baseball after the Baltimore Orioles picked him in the second round of the 1967 Major League Baseball amateur draft. He went on to play in the major leagues for parts of 19 seasons (1970-88) and was the 1979 American League Most Valuable Player. After his playing career ended, he was a coach at the Major League level for 23 seasons, nine of them as a manager.40

Had he accepted the football offer from Texas, Don Baylor would have become the Longhorn football program’s first black player on scholarship, and would actually have been following in the pathbreaking footsteps of another Austin High alum, James Means, Jr. Means became one of the first black student-athletes at the University of Texas when he joined the Longhorn freshmen track & field team in December of 1963, and in 1966 he became UT’s first black scholarship athlete in any sport.

A year younger than Don Baylor was Danay Covert, a three-sport standout at Austin who played end on the Maroon football team and was also a star in basketball and baseball. Covert was the 66th overall selection in the 1968 Major League Baseball draft and spent seven years in the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) minor league system, but topped out at the AAA level and never reached the majors. His grandson, Chance Covert II, was a true freshman on the Texas Longhorns baseball team last spring, but has since transferred to Utah.

Another notable sports figure who made regular appearances on Austin High School’s sidelines during the Jim Tolbert era was neither a player nor coach, but a cheerleader! One of the seven members of the school’s cheerleading squad during the 1957-58 school year was a senior boy named Merton LaVerne Lundquist Jr., who was then commonly known by his middle name. He shortened that name some years later after getting into sports broadcasting and was known as Verne Lundquist over a six-decade TV and radio career that included 15 years working as one of the radio voices of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and many more years as a commentator for ABC, CBS, and TNT in their coverage of football, basketball, golf, and Olympic figure skating.

Jim Tolbert resigned as Austin’s head football coach in April of 1970. He was a month shy of his 55th birthday at the time, and had led the Maroons to an overall record of 105-55-5 with four district championships in 16 seasons. To this day he remains the longest-tenured head football coach Austin High School has ever had.

By the time Tolbert stepped away from coaching he had either coached or worked with several of the head coaches at Austin’s other high schools. He remained at Austin High as an assistant principal for eight years before retiring for good in 1978, 42 years after he’d originally been hired by the Austin school district as a junior high P.E. teacher.

Tolbert died on July 14, 1998, at the age of 83. He and his wife, the former Mattie “Pat” Fielder, were married for 61 years before his death. He was survived by two children, five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. His widow lived to the age of 98 before her death in 2012.

Coach Tolbert was remembered fondly by several former players who were quoted in news articles written following his passing, including the aforementioned early 1960s Longhorn stars Mike Cotten and Johnny Treadwell.

I got in touch with a handful of former Austin High student-athletes from the Tolbert era while preparing this post, and all of them described him as a great leader of young men and a very good motivator. He was commonly described as “larger than life” and a man with an intimidating presence about him. “Old school” and “tough but fair” were other labels commonly applied to him. A fullback who played for Tolbert in the late 1950s said he was a man players had “a healthy fear of”.

Jim Raup, the future Texas Longhorn pitcher who played on the Maroon varsity football team from 1961-62, says Tolbert was “gruff and intimidating, but with a heart of gold.” That intimidation, Raup said, was less of a physical intimidation than it was Coach Tolbert being someone you didn’t want to disappoint. “If you thought he disapproved of you, you’d try twice as hard to prove him wrong”, Raup told me in a conversation last summer.

One particular example of Tolbert as a motivator still stands out to Raup sixty-three years later. Austin High won its district in 1961 but was not expected to contend for a second consecutive district title in 1962, Raup’s senior year. In an early district game in mid-October, the Maroon defense held a good Waco team to 145 total yards and allowed only one completed pass, but their offense turned the ball over six times, had a punt blocked and returned for a touchdown, and allowed a safety in a game they ultimately lost 30-8.

One week later, the Austin offense had a lackluster first half against a team they were expected to beat, putting no points on the board and having an interception returned for a touchdown with just seconds left in the 2nd quarter to go into halftime trailing 6-0. Raup remembers the coaches entering the locker room at halftime and Tolbert tersely telling the first-team offense that if they did not score on the opening possession of the 3rd quarter, all of them would be benched for the rest of the game. Tolbert and his assistants departed from the locker room without another word. The Maroons drove 93 yards on 21 plays after receiving the second half kickoff and scored a touchdown to take a 7-6 lead, and they never trailed again, eventually winning by a score of 21-12. Austin largely rode a strong defense to victories in the rest of its regular season games and claimed a second straight district championship.

Another early 1960s Austin High alum who I talked with knew Jim Tolbert as a Methodist Sunday School teacher during his junior high years before playing football for him in high school. He told me that when Tolbert wore his Sunday School teacher hat he would “regale the class with stories of being a mud marine in Burma in World War II, about playing for the Longhorns in the days before face masks, and about memorable games and players at Austin High. There was a biblical lesson somewhere in all of these tales, but his exuberant personality and authenticity kept a packed room of teenagers spellbound.” As a football coach, he says Tolbert “looked like a tough marine out of central casting, but he was always encouraging to players regardless of where they were on the depth chart”, and he pointedly stated that Tolbert “wouldn’t tolerate racism toward his black players.”

Even Austin High athletes who didn’t play Tolbert’s sport would get encouragement and motivation from him. Bruce Lindsey, a 1963 graduate who didn’t play football but ran on the Maroon track & field team, said that Tolbert once saw him run a good time at a practice meet his junior year, and afterwards Coach Tolbert “never let me forget that race.”

Lindsey says of Tolbert: “He’d stop me or walk with me if we were headed similarly, put a heavy, long arm over my shoulder, and launch into a well-developed sermon about how the old belief that an athlete could put out maximum effort only once or twice a season had been set aside for its opposite, that a good athlete could give max effort many times if he was training properly and thinking righteously. By the end of each sermon I was wired, a Secretariat in the gate waiting to launch.”

Tolbert’s son James Tolbert Jr., who readily admits to being a biased source on the subject of his father, remembers him as an old school “straight shooter”, a consistently honest man who he never saw “tell a lie to me or to anyone else”, and who treated all of his players the same. He could be an intimidating figure but it was not in his nature to start fights, though he was not averse to finishing one when needed.

Among Tolbert’s personal rules was that a man should never hit a woman or swear in front of one, and James says his father had no problem confronting a man if he saw him hitting or slapping a woman in public. He was also respectful and obedient to a fault towards authority figures over him, which, as it turns out, is likely what led to his punch of Jack Mahan. More on that in a bit.

Legends about Tolbert’s relatively unremarkable college career apparently took hold in the decades after his graduation from UT. In both his Austin American-Statesman obituary and a column about his life by longtime Statesman sportswriter Suzanne Halliburton, his accomplishments as a Texas Longhorn were embellished. His obituary said that he was a three-year starter at Texas and “the youngest starter ever on the Texas Longhorn Football Team.”41 Halliburton wrote in her column that Tolbert “started his sophomore year at 16 and lettered [at Texas] from 1933-35.”42

University of Texas catalogues indicate that Tolbert first enrolled at the University of Texas in 1931 when he was 16, but freshmen at that time were barred from participating in varsity athletics, and there is no evidence that Tolbert suited up for the Longhorn varsity football team before 1933, when he was 18. Far from being an immediate starter, Tolbert was not a reported starter for a Longhorn game until the beginning of his junior year, though he was young for his grade and still just 19 years old. And far from being a regular starter for three years, contemporary news reports of Longhorn games indicate that Tolbert was a starter in, at most, nine of the 31 games played during his three years on the varsity.

Had he been a starter as an 18-year-old sophomore in 1933, he still would not have been close to being UT’s “youngest starter ever”. The starting right end in UT’s very first football game in 1893 was 17-year-old Ray McLane. The even younger Joe Spence started at tackle for the Longhorns against Baylor during the 1917 season when he was a week shy of his 17th birthday.

The myth of Jim Tolbert being the youngest starter in the history of UT football may have originated with Curtis Jackson “Shorty” Alderson, who was a longtime coach and instructor at UT and coached the Longhorn freshmen football team during Tolbert’s earliest years as a student. As a 16-year-old freshman in 1931, Tolbert may have been the youngest player Alderson worked with while a football assistant, and James Tolbert says it was Alderson who told him that his father had been the Longhorns’ youngest-ever starter. He heard the same from William “Rooster” Andrews, a longtime friend of Jim Tolbert’s who had been a Longhorn football team manager during the 1940s and owned a sporting goods store in Austin for many years.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”, says a newspaper editor near the end of the 1962 John Ford-directed western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. While Jim Tolbert’s college football career had taken on a bit of a “print the legend” aspect by the end of his life, the event in that career that may have received the most newsprint at the time was all but forgotten.

Jim Tolbert’s punch of umpire Jack Mahan after the 1934 Texas-TCU game took place long before Longhorn games were first broadcast on TV, and the only witnesses were members of the two teams and some portion of the reported 10,000 spectators who attended the game. It made news at the time in Austin and other cities around the state, but was seldom, if ever, mentioned in newsprint again after the 1934 season. As far as I can find, neither the Austin American nor Austin Statesman ever mentioned it during Tolbert’s four-decade career as a teacher and coach in the city, and I have yet to run across any book on the history of Texas Longhorn football that mentions it.

I haven’t done anything resembling an exhaustive survey of surviving Jim Tolbert-era Austin High students to see how widely known the incident was among them, but if the responses from the very small sample size that I have communicated with are any indication it would seem that exceedingly few of them were aware of it. Of the ones who I queried in preparation for this post, almost all of them said they had never heard the story of him punching an official while in college. The aforementioned track athlete Bruce Lindsey was the only one who claimed any memory of hearing such a story, though the version he heard was more akin to an urban legend whose details barely resembled those of the actual event. He remembers a classmate telling him that Tolbert had gotten into serious trouble as a freshman at Texas, and as a result became the first player to be permanently banned from Southwest Conference competition.

The particulars of the incident were similarly distorted in the only book that I have ever found that mentions it with much purported detail. Tudey Teten’s Very Truly, Tudey: An Austin Anthology is a 2006 compilation of semi-autobiographical stories and essays written by the fifth-generation Austin resident and 1971 Austin High School graduate. Teten, who was a junior during Tolbert’s last season as the school’s head football coach, wrote about Tolbert’s playing and coaching career and the highs and lows that the Austin Maroons experienced during his coaching tenure in an essay titled “Football’s Lost Boys”. (Travis Raven would play the metaphorical role of “Captain Hook” in that essay.)

Teten wrote:

It began in 1931, during the Great Depression, when 16-year-old Jim Tolbert walked on the University of Texas campus and became their youngest football player ever. Tolbert was massive for his age, 6’4” and 240 pounds. He dwarfed most of his teammates. Resembling John Wayne in looks and demeanor, he was soft of heart, but hard of head. Early in his playing career as an offensive lineman he had a frustrating game because one official kept blowing calls right and left. After being flagged for holding, an exasperated Tolbert walked up to the referee, reared back and punched him out, leading to his immediate suspension from the team.

Jack Gray Sr., the student representative on the disciplinary committee, successfully lobbied for Tolbert’s re-instatement at the disciplinary hearing. The jury, which included Clint Small, only needed to hear contrition from the boy before making it official. Tolbert was brought in and seated in front of the committee. He was asked, “Son, if you had to do it over again, would you do anything different?”

The young player looked down for a few seconds and then slowly lifted his head. “Yes, I woulda hit the sumbitch harder.”

It would have been the wrong answer for most people, but not for Tolbert. In those few seconds while he stared at the floor, he was faced with telling a lie and extending his football season or telling the truth and being responsible for his actions. Jim Tolbert lost that season’s eligibility but remained a steadfast stickler for personal accountability his entire life.43

At least five aspects of Teten’s account of the punch differ from the actual record of events, as they were reported at the time. As previously stated, Tolbert was 18, not 16, when he first played for the Longhorn varsity. During his time as a player, his height was typically reported to be either 5’11” or six feet, and his weight between 195 and 205 pounds. At no point during his Longhorn career was he anywhere near 240 pounds, let alone 6’4” in height. When he registered for the military draft in October of 1940, his height was listed as 6 feet and 3/4 of an inch, and his weight as 225 pounds. Even at just 200 pounds, Tolbert was the heaviest player on UT’s 1934 roster.

Tolbert’s punch of Jack Mahan (who Teten did not name and may not have known the name of) did not come following a bad holding call, but by all accounts occurred immediately after the Texas-TCU game ended, and this game was played late in Tolbert’s junior year, which could hardly be called “early in his career”.

Especially inaccurate was the notion that Tolbert’s honest answer to the question posed by the “jury” ended up costing him that year’s eligibility. The council could well have suspended him for the following season or kicked him out of the program altogether, but on a rhetorical football eligibility card, Tolbert’s had already been punched for the 1934 season the moment he stepped on the field during the team’s first game. In the aftermath of the punch, he had one remaining season of eligibility regardless of anything he might have said to a UT disciplinary committee, as long as they did not kick him out of the program.

Tudey Teten died in 2021, so we cannot ask him who or what his source was for this account of Tolbert’s Longhorn career and the punching incident, but the fact that he mentioned Jack Gray Sr. and Clint Small in his essay is telling. Jack Gray was the Longhorns’ starter at left end as a senior in 1934 and was also a basketball star, and he would later serve as UT’s head basketball coach for 12 seasons. His son, Jack Gray Jr., shared with me an account his father had told him about Tolbert’s disciplinary hearing that tracked with Teten’s.

The younger Jack Gray graduated from Austin High in 1975, a time when Tolbert was an assistant principal and five years removed from the end of his coaching career. Gray says the late Tudey Teten was a close friend of his, and is 100% certain that Teten’s first awareness of Tolbert’s punch and its aftermath came from the second-hand stories he shared with Teten that he had originally heard from his father.

Teten may have also heard that story from Clint Small or others who knew him. Small was a sophomore tackle on UT’s 1934 team and was later captain of the 1936 Longhorn squad, and after his graduation he practiced law in Austin for over 50 years. Will Wilson Jr., who was a senior on Austin High’s 1967 football team and later a law partner with Clint Small, was another longtime friend of Teten’s. Wilson told me he had heard Small tell the story of Tolbert’s disciplinary hearing, and how Tolbert had said he’d do it all again.

Jack Gray Jr. says his father had heard that the Athletic Council was considering withholding Jim Tolbert’s varsity letter after the Mahan incident, and he hoped to be able to moderate the situation. The meeting Tolbert had with the members of the Athletic Council apparently went smoothly early on, and every indication was that the council would grant Tolbert his letter for the season. Gray says that the question asked by the committee on whether Tolbert would have done the same thing if he “had to do it over again” was one that came up only at the end of the meeting as its attendees had begun standing up to leave the room, and Tolbert’s honest answer to the question sealed his fate as far as whether or not he’d get his letter.

Gray says when his father first shared that story with him he was sworn to secrecy, not wanting it to get out and potentially embarrass Tolbert since he was still an assistant principal at the time.

As stated earlier in this post, I have every reason to believe that very few Austin High students of that time were aware of that event. Even Jim Tolbert’s son says he didn’t learn about his father’s punch of Jack Mahan until he was several years out of high school.

He told me in a phone conversation that he first learned of that event while accompanying his father to attend a Cotton Bowl game that Texas played against Notre Dame in either 1970 or 1971 (he wasn’t certain on the year). During halftime Jim Tolbert was brought onto the field for a brief ceremony, during which a UT Athletics figure announced the restoration of his varsity letter for the 1934 season that had been withheld from him by the Athletic Council many years earlier. James, not knowing this was to take place beforehand, says that after Jim returned to his seat he asked him what that was all about. Jim told him that while he was a Longhorn player he had punched an official after a game and had his letter for that year taken away. More specifically, he said he had punched the official not due to his own frustration with bad calls made during the game, but on the instruction of his head coach, Jack Chevigny!

In Jim’s telling, after the 1934 TCU game Chevigny had grabbed Tolbert, made some sort of indication toward Jack Mahan and ordered Tolbert to “go knock out that son of a bitch”, or some words to that effect. Whether this was due to Mahan’s reported sloppy umpiring of the game or his being a former star athlete at UT’s archrival is unclear, but James thinks it might have been a combination of the two. James says his father punching an official on Chevigny’s orders would have been in character for a man inclined to unquestioningly obey coaches or authority figures above him, but he says Jim made it clear in that brief conversation that it was wrong of him and something he regretted.

Why would such a ceremony be held in Dallas at halftime of the Cotton Bowl rather than a Longhorn home game in Austin, where Jim Tolbert had lived for nearly four decades? Probably because UT was playing Notre Dame, since Tolbert had been the starting left tackle of the first Texas team to beat the Fighting Irish.

James Tolbert says that conversation at the Cotton Bowl — which he believes lasted less than two minutes — was the first and last time that his father talked to him about the incident. Jack Chevigny, on the other hand, was a subject that came up more often.

Twice during the 1960s — in 196244 and again in 196945 — Tolbert recalled to the Austin American’s George Breazeale his memories of the 1934 Texas-Notre Dame game, of how Chevigny’s astute tactics (kicking off to a Notre Dame receiver who he believed was prone to fumbles) had helped set up UT’s early score, and how his defensive game plan worked perfectly to preserve their 7-6 lead en route to the win. As fondly as he may have publicly recalled that game to a local sportswriter, Jim Tolbert held no respect for Chevigny as a man and hated the way he treated others. James Tolbert says if Chevigny’s name ever came up in conversation Jim would use words to describe him that otherwise very seldom passed the lips of the longtime Methodist Sunday school teacher.

It would have been especially rich of Chevigny to pull Tolbert away from Mahan and demonstratively shove him off the field before shaking hands with Mahan if Mahan had just been punched on Chevigny’s orders.

Jeff Walker’s 2012 biography of Chevigny, The Last Chalkline: The Life & Times of Jack Chevigny, made only a passing reference to a Longhorn punching Jack Mahan after the 1934 TCU game and did not mention Jim Tolbert by name in that portion or anywhere else in the book.46

I have not found in either the Austin newspapers or the Daily Texan any reference to a Cotton Bowl ceremony in which Jim Tolbert had his 1934 varsity letter restored. Perhaps the UT Athletic Department restored Tolbert’s 1934 letter as quietly as they had withheld it decades earlier. Regardless of whether or when such a ceremony occurred, it was not reflected in UT’s official records during Tolbert’s lifetime. As recently as 2000 the all-time lettermen list for UT football named James Wade Tolbert as a letterman for the 1933 and 1935 seasons, but not 1934. When the 2001 Longhorn football media guide was published, its all-time lettermen list instead showed Tolbert as a “1933-35” letterman, and he has been listed as such ever since.

In the end, neither Jim Tolbert nor Jimmy Lawrence had their careers impacted by their respective punches of officials in November of 1934. Tolbert had a long and respected career as a high school coach and administrator. Lawrence was the first-ever Southwest Conference athlete to be picked in an NFL Draft, went on to play four seasons in the NFL, and by the time of his death in 1990 the Harlingen native had been inducted into the TCU Athletics Hall of Fame and the Rio Grande Valley Sports Hall of Fame.

One suspects that escaping the ignominy of being disciplined for punching a game official and not allowing it to define who you are as a person was far easier to do in the 1930s or 1940s than it would be today when football games at all levels are regularly filmed and the internet is forever. But hopefully each of the young men involved in the incidents mentioned at the beginning of this post will similarly grow to have long and productive careers such that their youthful lapse in judgment will barely merit a footnote when the story of their life is written.

The University of Texas has had its share of pipeline schools from which it has drawn football talent in the 132-year history of its football program. In all, there are 36 high schools or prep schools which have had ten or more UT football lettermen among their ex-students, and at least 83 other schools can claim five or more Longhorns who once walked their hallways.

Some of those schools are modern-day powerhouses such as Austin Westlake, Brenham, DeSoto, Galena Park North Shore, and Tyler High School, and most UT fans could name multiple Longhorns who came from those schools. But there are also a number of pipeline schools from past eras whose contributions to the Longhorn football program’s success are largely forgotten, either because the school in question no longer exists, has not been a football power in a very long time, or (as is the case of this post’s subject) has not served high school students for many, many years.

This post, the first in a recurring series on “Forgotten Texas Longhorn pipeline schools”, will focus on a notable San Antonio prep school called the San Antonio Academy. This school has not served high school students for nearly a century, but it was one of the most prominent pipeline schools in the first three decades of the UT football program’s existence.

In fact, even today, 105 years after the last San Antonio Academy product to win a varsity letter with the Longhorn football program, no other school in San Antonio can claim more UT football lettermen among its former students.1

The school now known as the San Antonio Academy of Texas was founded in 1886. (A prior institution known as the San Antonio Academy existed at least as early as 1854, though it appears to be unrelated to the one that is the subject of this post.) Its first principal was Dr. W.B. Seeley, who was hired away from the Newark Academy in Newark, New Jersey to open the new school. For several years the school was variously referred to as the San Antonio Academy, the Seeley School, Seeley Academy, or as “Professor Seeley’s academy”. It was common at that time for private schools to be named colloquially — and sometimes even officially — for their founding principal. The Academy’s website states that it was founded as the Seeley School and that its name was changed to the San Antonio Academy in 18942, though an 1886 article in the San Antonio Daily Light reporting on the school’s founding stated that its name was intended from the beginning to be the San Antonio Academy.3

Originally it was designed as a school to prepare young men for college, but after operating as a preparatory school for twenty years it expanded its lower school in 1906 to educate students in grades two through seven.

In 1926, all of the San Antonio Academy’s upper school students (those in grades eight through eleven) were transferred to the nearby West Texas Military Academy, and its upper school was merged with the West Texas Military Academy to form the Texas Military Institute. This school still operates today and has been known as TMI Episcopal since 2017. The San Antonio Academy — if I’m reading its history correctly — has not served students above middle school since 1926. Today the San Antonio Academy educates boys from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The Academy’s student body has mostly been comprised of boys from San Antonio families, but it also ran a boarding program from the late 1880s until 1998 which served boys from various other parts of the state.

Football was played by students of the San Antonio Academy at least as early as 1889. The issue of the Daily Light published on December 13 of that year stated that teams from the San Antonio Academy and St. Mary’s College (another all-male prep school and college which operated in downtown San Antonio at the time) had played a football game the previous day, with the St. Mary’s team emerging the victor.4 No other details were given, so we can’t be sure if this was a game of gridiron football or a similar game played by rugby rules.

The University of Texas fielded its first varsity football team in 1893, and between that year and 1920 there were no fewer than 14 now-recognized UT football lettermen who had attended the San Antonio Academy. By the time Academy graduate Louis Jordan served as captain of the 1914 Texas Longhorn football team, the Academy could have claimed more former students among UT’s lettermen than any school except for Austin High School. Even as late as 1926 when the Academy stopped serving upper school students, only Austin High and Houston High School could claim a connection with more Longhorn football lettermen.

Below are the Longhorn lettermen who are known to have attended the San Antonio Academy before enrolling at UT (years in parentheses are the seasons for which they are recognized football lettermen):5

John Frost Maverick (1894-95)
Clarence Waldman King (1896)
Lewis Maverick (1896)
Walter Richard Schreiner (1896-1900)
Carl Groos (1897-98)
Sempronius “Semp” Russ (1898-1900)
Raymond Keller (1899)
Victor Keller (1901)
George Vance Maverick (1902)
Seth Searcy (1903)
Frost Woodhull (1904, 1910-12)
Leon Goodman (1908)
Louis Jordan (1911-14)
Joe Ferguson Ellis (1920)

Below I will share the stories — some much more brief than others — of these San Antonio Academy students who went on to play football at Texas. This group includes three Longhorn team captains, UT’s first Olympic athlete, the Longhorn football program’s first All-American, a three-sport athlete who signed a contract with a professional baseball team, and four players who were considered all-time Longhorn greats well into the 1920s. It will proceed mostly in chronological order from earliest to latest, with some groupings of brothers or other relatives who attended years apart.

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John Frost Maverick (1894-95)
Lewis Maverick (1896)
George Vance Maverick (1902)

Three members of San Antonio’s prominent Maverick family played football for the University of Texas during the program’s first decade. They were first cousins to one another, and were all grandsons of San Antonio pioneer Samuel Augustus Maverick, who moved from Alabama to Texas in 1835.

Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870) was a major landowner in and around San Antonio and served as that city’s mayor on a pair of occasions. He was a veteran of the Texas Revolution and was present at the Alamo after the Mexican army had begun its siege of that mission in March of 1836, but he was sent away as a delegate to the Convention of 1836 (which drafted and signed the Texas Declaration of Independence) and thus was not among the Texians killed in the final days of that iconic battle.

Samuel Maverick was also indirectly responsible for the name Maverick becoming a descriptive noun. He is said to have acquired around 400 head of cattle in 1845 from someone who owed him a debt, and because Maverick refused to brand the livestock that he owned many from that herd ended up roaming away or being claimed by other ranchers. Thus “maverick” came to be defined as “an unbranded range animal”, and later as “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party”. The term “maverick” has been used frequently in the political realm and as a nickname for athletic teams. Along with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and a number of minor league baseball and hockey teams there are no less than ten colleges and forty-five high schools whose mascot is the Maverick.

Samuel Maverick did not live long enough to witness the opening of the San Antonio Academy, but many of his descendants have attended the Academy during its nearly 140 years of operation. A 2017 issue of Bond of Brothers, the Academy’s official magazine, named members of the Maverick family who had graduated in classes from ten different decades!6

John Frost Maverick was born in 1874 and was the scion of two prominent San Antonio families. His father, Samuel Augustus Maverick Jr., was the eldest son of the aforementioned Samuel Maverick. His mother, the former Sarah Frost, was a sister of Thomas Clayborne Frost, the founder of the San Antonio-based Frost Bank.

At some point an urban legend (or were they rural legends back then?) took hold that Sarah Frost “Sallie” Maverick was the first white woman born in Texas, but she was actually born in 1851, 15 years after Texas gained its independence from Mexico and five years after Texas was admitted to the union as the 28th state.7 And census records consistently named Alabama as her birthplace.

John Maverick was one of the earliest students at the San Antonio Academy, and his father Samuel Maverick Jr. was a member of the school’s original board of trustees when it was founded in 1886. He graduated from the Academy in 1888, the year he turned 14. He first enrolled at the University of Texas in 1893 at age 19, and the University’s catalogue for 1893-94 listed him as a freshman engineering student. In the fall of 1893 he was a member of UT’s first varsity football team, though he was not a starter in any of the four games played in that inaugural season and is not considered a letterman for that year.

He was a regular at the tackle and fullback positions in the following two seasons and is a recognized letterman for the 1894 and 1895 seasons. In his post-college career he was a postal worker in Houston and Galveston.

Lewis Maverick was born in 1877 and was the son of William Harvey Maverick, another son of the pioneer Samuel Augustus Maverick, Sr. Lewis received his early education at schools in Germany and Switzerland before attending the San Antonio Academy, from which he graduated in 1896.8 He enrolled at the University of Texas that same year, and was an academic student for two years and then a law student for another two years. While at UT he played quarterback on the 1896 football team, a full decade before the forward pass was legalized. News reports from UT’s 1897 football season make a few references to a quarterback named Maverick, but it is unclear how much he played that year.

He served in the Army for a number of years after his college days, and was living in California at the time of his death following a heart attack in 1939. His son Lewis Maverick Jr. was married to a niece of Lou Henry Hoover, the wife of President Herbert Hoover.

It is unclear if Lewis Maverick was considered a football letterman at UT during his lifetime. The 1897 Cactus yearbook did not mention him as one of the members of the 1896 football team, though contemporary news accounts state that he started in at least one game that season. A 1916 pamphlet published by the UT Athletic Council did not list him among the school’s known athletic lettermen.

Lewis Maverick was also not identified as a letterman by Austin Statesman sportswriter and Longhorn football historian Lou Maysel in his 1970 book Here Come the Texas Longhorns, which included a list of UT’s all-time lettermen through the 1969 season in its final pages.

But Lewis Maverick has been included in the all-time lettermen lists published in Longhorn football media guides going back over 50 years, and he undoubtedly played for the team in any case. My own speculation is that the first compilations of football “lettermen” were largely based on which names were mentioned in the annual Cactus yearbooks during the 1890s before it became tradition for varsity letters to be awarded at a post-season banquet after the end of a season. This is how William Henry Richardson, the starting right guard in UT’s very first football game in 1893, was not awarded his football letter until several decades afterward because an injury or illness prevented him from being present when the 1893 team photo was taken.

George Vance Maverick was born in 1880 and was the son of George Madison Maverick, the third oldest of Samuel Augustus Maverick’s children who survived childhood. He graduated from the San Antonio Academy in 1899 and began his college career at Princeton that same year. He left Princeton a year later, and attended the University of Texas as a law student from 1902 to 1904. While a UT student he played fullback on the 1902 varsity football team and is a recognized letterman for that year.

In addition to his above-named cousins, George Vance Maverick had two other family connections with the UT football program. His first wife was the former Laura Blocker, a fellow San Antonian whose older brother William Bartlett Blocker was a letterman on the Texas football teams of 1904 and 1905. George V. Maverick was also an uncle to George Maverick Green, who played tackle for the Longhorns in 1919 and 1920 after beginning his college career at Rice.9

Clarence Waldman King (1896)

Clarence King was born in 1876 and was a native of Wharton, Texas. His father was a lawyer, and the King family moved from Wharton to San Antonio when Clarence was still at a young age. He attended the San Antonio Academy, then was a student at the University of Texas from 1895 to 1899. He played fullback on the 1896 UT football team and is a recognized letterman for that year. In his professional life he was an architect in Shreveport, Louisiana for many years.

Walter Richard Schreiner (1896-1900)

Walter Schreiner was born on New Year’s Eve in 1877 to a French father and a German mother, and was a native of Kerrville, Texas. It was in that city that his father Charles Schreiner founded the Schreiner Institute in 1923. The Schreiner Institute operated as a prep school and junior college for many years before becoming a four-year college in 1981, and it became Schreiner University in 2001.

Walter Schreiner graduated from the San Antonio Academy (likely as a boarding student) before enrolling at the University of Texas in 1896.10 He joined the UT football team and developed into a standout at the end position. He served as team captain in 1900, his last season with the team. Rules limiting student-athletes to three or four years of eligibility had not been established yet, and Schreiner became the UT football program’s first five-year letterman, and he was likely the only one the program ever had until the post-COVID era.11

Within his lifetime, Walter Schreiner was considered an all-time UT football great. In 1925, the University’s longtime dean of engineering T.U. Taylor, who had been a big fan of its football team almost from the very beginning, named his all-time Texas football first and second teams. He named Schreiner as the right end on his second team.12 This will not be the last time this post mentions Professor Taylor’s all-time UT football team.

Schreiner was inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor in 1973. His nephew Whitfield Scott Schreiner was a member of the UT Board of Regents from 1942 to 1947.

Carl Groos (1897-98)

Carl Groos was a San Antonio native who was born in 1879 and descended from German immigrants on both sides of his family. He attended the San Antonio Academy and played on its football team. He played right tackle on the “Seeley” football team in 1895, a squad that had at least three other future UT football lettermen in its lineup. Groos was an academic student at UT from 1897 to 1899 and played on the varsity football team. He was a substitute on the 1897 team and the regular fullback on the 1898 squad, and program records credit him as a letterman for both seasons.

Sempronius “Semp” Russ (1898-1900)

Semp Russ was born in Louisiana in 1878 and moved with his family to San Antonio at age 12 after the death of his father. For his preparatory education he attended the San Antonio Academy and another day school in the city, the Magruder’s School for Boys. He first played football while at the Academy, and many years later he recalled playing against the football team from the West Texas Military Academy in San Antonio, which had future Army general Douglas MacArthur playing quarterback.13

He began his college career at Tulane, but transferred to the University of Texas a year or so later. While at UT he was a member of the varsity football team from 1898 to 1900, playing the end position initially but becoming a star at quarterback over his last two seasons. Though the forward pass was not legalized until six years later in 1906 and the quarterback position did not involve passing the football during Russ’s time, it was still a key position in the offensive lineup and was responsible for calling the offensive signals. For many years Russ was considered the best to play that position at UT, and certainly the best from the pre-forward pass era. Engineering dean T.U. Taylor named Semp Russ as the first team quarterback of his personal all-time UT football team in 1925.

Even into the 1930s, Semp Russ’s play at quarterback was remembered by enough UT football “old-timers” that when Austin American sports writer Weldon Hart was asked in the fall of 1935 to compile an all-time UT football team for publication in the game program for that year’s Thanksgiving Day matchup with Texas A&M, Hart named Russ as UT’s second team all-time quarterback after consulting with people who had watched the team as far back as the 1890s.14

Russ was even better at tennis than football. He won several state singles and doubles championships in tennis from his early 20s through his late 30s, and in 1904 he competed in men’s tennis at the Olympic games in St. Louis, Missouri, becoming the first former University of Texas athlete to compete in the Olympics. He was inducted into the Texas Tennis Hall of Fame in 2007. (I wrote more about Russ and his athletic career in a 2021 post at Burnt Orange Nation on “UT’s forgotten Olympians”.)

Russ was a longtime attorney, businessman, and philanthropist in his hometown of San Antonio, staying active well into his 90s. He was inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor in 1969, when he was 91 years old and among the last surviving UT student-athletes from the 19th century. He died in 1978, only five weeks shy of his 100th birthday.

Raymond Keller (1899)
Victor Keller (1901)

Brothers Raymond (1876-1953) and Victor Keller (1883-1949) were both born in their father’s home state of Illinois, and moved with their family to San Antonio in 1885. They both attended the San Antonio Academy before enrolling at the University of Texas. Raymond played halfback on the UT football team and is a recognized letterman for the 1899 season. Victor played center and won a letter with the 1901 team.

Their father was a lawyer, and both Raymond and Victor would follow him into the legal profession. Raymond practiced law until retiring in his early 70s, and Victor held office as the City Attorney for San Antonio during the early 1940s.

Seth Searcy (1903)

Seth Shepard Searcy was born in Brenham, Texas in 1881 and lived for all of his youth in that city. He was named after his mother’s older brother Seth Shepard (1847-1917), a lawyer and Texas native who was one of the earliest members of the University of Texas Board of Regents (he served as a Regent from 1883 to 1890), and later was a judge for 23 years on the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia after being nominated to that court by President Grover Cleveland in 1893.15 Searcy’s father, William Searcy (1855-1941), was also a lawyer, and according to his obituary he was a charter member of the Texas Bar Association and served as its president for the 1912-1913 term.16

Seth Searcy attended the San Antonio Academy as a boarding student before enrolling at the University of Texas, where he was a law student and played quarterback on the football team. He passed the Texas bar exam in the summer of 1903, but returned to UT that fall to complete his legal studies and won his only letter with the varsity football team that year. The Cactus yearbook’s roster for the 1903 football team listed Searcy’s size as 4’11.5” and 140 pounds, which would have made him possibly the smallest man to ever suit up for the UT football team if those numbers were accurate.17 That height figure was either inaccurate or Searcy had a late growth spurt after his 22nd birthday. When he registered for the military draft nearly four decades later at age 60, the height and weight listed on his draft card was 5’6” and 160 pounds.

He graduated from UT with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1904 and went on to a long legal career. His younger sister Katherine Searcy was also a UT alum and worked at the University of Texas library for 45 years before retiring in 1957.18

Frost Woodhull (1904, 1910-12)

Thomas Frost Woodhull was a San Antonio native whose grandfather, Thomas Clayborne Frost, was the founder of today’s Frost Bank.19 Woodhull was a first cousin once removed to the aforementioned letterman John Frost Maverick. Throughout his life he was commonly known by his middle name, Frost.

Woodhull attended the San Antonio Academy and graduated in its class of 1904, the commencement for which was held a week before his 17th birthday. He was initially reported to be bound for Princeton to begin his collegiate education, but he instead enrolled at the University of Texas that fall and joined the UT football team for its early workouts in September.20

Frost Woodhull played the right end position for the 1904 UT football team. According to the 1905 Cactus yearbook, he was among the team’s smallest players, standing just 5’8.5” and weighing in at 135 pounds, and at 17 years of age he was easily the team’s youngest player and a full nine years younger than the team’s oldest player: guard Lucian Parrish. (I wrote about Parrish in a September post on the “old men” of Texas Longhorn football.)

Woodhull played in five of the team’s seven games in the 1904 season and was awarded a varsity letter for that year.

As you might suspect from reading the years that he lettered at Texas, Woodhull’s collegiate career was an unorthodox one. He was reported to be returning to UT in the fall of 1905, but at some point he left the University and traveled east to attend the Phillips Exeter Academy, a prestigious boarding and prep school in New Hampshire that was founded in 1781 and remains in operation today. Woodhull would graduate from Exeter as a member of its class of 1907. He played football during at least his final year there, but was a member of the team’s backup unit of 1906, the “second eleven”, and not the first team. According to the 1907 Pean yearbook he was voted “handsomest” and “best gymnast” in his Exeter class.

Notably, Exeter had admitted black students for many years by the time Woodhull attended, though they did not make up a significant portion of the student body. One of Woodhull’s contemporaries at Exeter was Julian Paris Rodgers, an Alabama native who graduated from Exeter in 1908, went on to graduate from the University of Michigan’s law school in 1915, and was said in his obituary to be “the first Negro to take a written bar examination in Alabama”.21 Whether or not Woodhull and Rodgers were acquainted is unknown, but Woodhull’s attendance at Exeter meant that he had at least one black classmate at a time when most Texas public schools were still five or six decades away from desegregating.

He eventually returned to UT in 1910, by which point he was 23 years old and about five years removed from his last day as a student there. He re-joined the Longhorn football team and played the end position for three seasons from 1910 to 1912. As a senior in 1912 he was voted captain of the Longhorn football team, and in that season the team finished with a 7-1 record. Their only loss came against Oklahoma in what was the first time the two schools played against each other at a neutral site in Dallas rather than at one of their respective home fields.

Frost Woodhull was considered a standout at the end position and one of the best players the school had produced during its football program’s first few decades. When engineering dean T.U. Taylor named his all-time Texas football team in 1925, he put Frost Woodhull as the left end on his second team.

Woodhull graduated from Texas with a Bachelor of Laws degree and was a lawyer in his hometown of San Antonio for several years, and in the 1930s he was elected to two terms as Bexar County Judge. Aside from his familial relationship with 1894-95 letterman John Frost Maverick, Woodhull had a connection with another past UT football figure through his second wife, the former Holland Sharpe. Holland Sharpe Woodhull was a niece of Charles Holland Leavell, who played halfback and fullback on the Texas varsity football team from 1896 to 1898.

Leon Goodman (1908)

Leon Stanley Goodman was born in 1886 in San Antonio and was a lifelong resident of that city. He was a descendant of German immigrants on both sides of his family. His father Lewis Goodman was a native German of Jewish ancestry who moved to California while in his teens, and after marrying and having four children while living in San Francisco he moved his growing family to San Antonio in 1885, only a year or so before Leon’s birth. Lewis Goodman worked as a grocer in San Antonio for the rest of his life, and Leon would eventually follow his father into that profession.

Leon Goodman attended the San Antonio Academy and likely graduated in 1904 or 1905. The 1905-1906 University of Texas Catalogue identified him as a freshman electrical engineering student who had entered the University as a graduate of the San Antonio Academy, which was one of 110 schools that were affiliated with the University of Texas at that time. Applicants to UT who held a diploma from an affiliated school could be admitted without having to take an entrance exam.

Goodman was listed as a sophomore engineering student in the UT catalogues for both 1906-1907 and 1907-1908. The 1908-1909 catalogue identified him as a junior law student. He was a member of the 1908 Longhorn football team and reportedly spent time playing left tackle and center. He was not a regular starter in 1908 but played often enough that he was one of just 13 players who were awarded varsity letters after that season, a very low number even for an era when starters played on both offense and defense and were rarely substituted out except in case of injury, and in which players generally had to get a significant amount of playing time in at least half the games of a season to qualify for a letter.

Louis Jordan (1911-14)

Louis John Jordan was born in 1890 and was a native of Fredericksburg, a town in the Texas Hill Country about 80 miles west of Austin that was founded in 1846 by German immigrants. Jordan’s mother and both of his paternal grandparents were born in present-day Germany before coming to Texas. He received his early education in the public schools of Fredericksburg, and after receiving a teaching certificate he worked as a schoolteacher for a few years while in his late teens before completing his preparatory education at the San Antonio Academy, from which he graduated in 1911 when he was 21 years old.

He entered UT as a freshman engineering student in the fall of 1911 and joined the Longhorn football team. Over the next three years he developed into arguably the greatest linemen in the early decades of Texas Longhorns football. He was reported in 1912 to be 6’1” in height (later reports claimed he was as tall as 6’4”), and he weighed around 205 pounds. He was a big man for a football player of his era, and an offensive guard that size would not have looked out of place on Longhorn teams even into the early 1960s.

The 1913 Longhorn team went 7-1 and won the championship of the Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association (TIAA). In that era team captains were typically chosen by a vote of the team’s returning lettermen mere weeks or even days after the conclusion of a season. Texas played its final game of the 1913 season on Thanksgiving Day, a game that resulted in a 29-7 loss to visiting Notre Dame. By the time that week ended Louis Jordan had already been elected team captain for the 1914 season.

A TIAA all-conference team was not named that year, but coaches from eight colleges in Texas gave their selections for an “all-state” team to the Houston Post. Jordan was one of nine players from the TIAA champion Texas Longhorns who earned a spot on the Post’s composite all-state team, and he was the unanimous choice as the state’s best right guard for 1913.22

As a 24-year-old senior in 1914, Jordan captained a Longhorn team that finished with a perfect 8-0 record, won the championship of the TIAA for a second straight year, and outscored their opponents by a combined 358-21.23 Decades later, Texas was retroactively named the national champion for the 1914 college football season by the Billingsley Report, but Texas does not claim a national championship for that year.

After the 1914 season, Louis Jordan was selected by famed football innovator Walter Camp to his All-America second team. Camp had picked “All-America” teams annually since at least the 1890s, but his selections were almost uniformly players from colleges in the northeast or midwest sections of the country for many years. Jordan was the first player from a southern college to make Camp’s All-America second team, and it was not until 1918 that Georgia Tech center Bum Day became the first player from a southern college to grace Camp’s All-America first team.

In addition to winning four letters in football, Jordan was also an exceptional thrower on the Longhorn track & field team, winning three letters in that sport and setting a state record in the hammer throw.

Jordan graduated from the University of Texas in 1915 and spent a year on the faculty of the San Antonio Academy, but resigned that position after one year to take a job as an engineer with the Public Service Company of San Antonio.24

He enlisted in the Army in 1917 after the United States officially entered what we now call World War I, and after going through the First Officers Training Camp at Leon Springs he was commissioned a lieutenant and shipped out to France in October of 1917. He was killed in action on March 5, 1918, and several reports indicated that he was the first officer from Texas to die while serving in that war. Jordan was one of 75 former UT students (including four Longhorn football lettermen) who died while serving in the military during World War I, according to the 1919 Cactus yearbook.

So highly esteemed was Louis Jordan as a UT student-athlete that he was the very first Longhorn athlete inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor after it was created in 1957.

Joe Ellis (1920)

Joseph Ferguson Ellis was born in 1896 and was a native of Lockhart, Texas, a city about 25 miles south of Austin. According to his obituary he received his early education in Lockhart’s public schools before attending the Marshall Training School in San Antonio, and then completing his preparatory education at the San Antonio Academy. He began his college career at Texas A&M and played on its freshmen football team in 1916, then left school to serve in the Army during World War I. After his discharge he enrolled at the University of Texas in the fall of 1919 and went on to become a three-sport letterman with the Longhorns, winning letters in baseball, track & field, and football. He was likely the fastest athlete UT had at the time, and reports from 1921 state that he had recorded a time in the 100-yard dash that was shy of the world record by mere tenths of a second.

He played halfback on the Longhorn football team in 1920 and was the second Joe Ellis to play for the Longhorns in the span of three years. A San Saba, Texas native named Joe Henry Ellis had been a standout halfback on the 1918 Longhorn squad. Joe F. Ellis missed a few games in the 1920 season due to injury, but was generally lauded for his play in the games he appeared in. The 1920 Longhorns finished with a spotless record of 9-0 and outscored their opponents 282-13. It was the last Longhorn team to finish with no losses or ties until the 1963 national championship team.

Joe F. Ellis elected not to return to the Longhorn football team in 1921, as he intended to concentrate on his baseball career. He was receiving interest from professional baseball clubs at least as early as the summer of 1921, and collegiate players could sign with professional clubs at any time since the amateur baseball draft was not instituted until over four decades later. Ellis had played catcher during his brief time at Texas A&M and was most experienced at that position, but he had also ably filled the shortstop position for the Texas Longhorns. The St. Louis Cardinals began pursuing him in the spring of 1922, hoping to sign him as a catcher. The Cardinals’ backup catcher from the previous year, William “Pickles” Dillhoefer, had died after a bout with typhoid fever on February 23, 1922, and their club was in need of depth at that position.

The Cardinals conducted their spring training sessions in Orange, Texas at that time, and a scout from the Cardinals visited Austin in early March looking to sign Ellis and bring him immediately to Orange.

After considering the option of finishing the spring semester at UT and joining the Cardinals in the summer, Ellis opted to sign with the team in late March, and reportedly received a clause in his contract that required the Cardinals to keep him on the major league club for the entire 1922 season “as a reward for reporting now instead of at the close of the season”.25

Ellis reported to the Cardinals’ training camp, but ultimately never played a game in the major leagues. A knee injury suffered during a practice game ended up sending him to a hospital, and one of his legs was in a cast for several weeks afterward. By May of 1923, it was reported that his “bum” knee had forced him to retire from pro baseball before his career had truly begun.26

As far as I am aware, Joe F. Ellis was the last San Antonio Academy graduate to win a football letter at the University of Texas. Though the Academy has not served high school students since 1926, no other school in its city has produced as many Longhorn football lettermen in the 99 years since then as the 14 that the Academy sent to UT between 1893 and 1920.

In addition to the UT football lettermen named above, there was at least one other San Antonio Academy graduate who was a member of the UT football team but did not letter.

Herbert Henne (1882-1932) was a native of New Braunfels, Texas who attended the San Antonio Academy after receiving his early education from his hometown’s public schools. He was the salutatorian of the Academy’s class of 1900 and was awarded the alumni trophy as “the athlete who stood highest in scholarship”. Henne attended the University of Texas from 1900 to 1903, and as a freshman in 1900 he was a backup guard on that year’s undefeated varsity football team and appeared in at least two games, but he was not awarded a letter by the Athletic Council. After graduating in 1903 with a Bachelor of Laws degree, Henne practiced law for nearly three decades until his death in 1932.

If any UT football or San Antonio Academy historians know of an Academy grad I’ve missed (by this I mean graduates from its prep school days, not ones who attended as middle school students post-1926), please let me know in the comments.

There is some football history between the two programs but it is mostly ancient. Before traveling to Nashville to face Vandy in 2024, the Longhorns had last played the Commodores in 1928. This Saturday’s game will be the first time Vandy has traveled to Austin since 1903. Aside from that game — which ended in a 5-5 tie after the referee called the game on account of darkness with three minutes remaining in the second half — all contests which Vanderbilt and Texas have played were either on Vanderbilt’s home field or at a neutral site in Dallas.

The aspect of Vandy and Texas’s shared history that I want to touch on in this post is the small number of student-athletes who played football at both schools. I know of three who have done so. The first was a halfback from the 1890s, the second a kicker who played during the first decade of the 2000s, and the last and most recent is a current Commodore defensive tackle who transferred there from Texas after the 2024 season. Below are their stories.

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Birch Wooldridge

Weston Birch Wooldridge was born in Missouri in 1876, but his family later moved to Texas and he grew up in Galveston. He was typically referred to by his middle name. Wooldridge attended Galveston’s Ball High School, which was one of the earliest public high schools in Texas — if not the earliest — to field a football team. He evidently played on Ball’s 1893 team, which reportedly had a 16-year-old left halfback named Wooldridge.1

Birch Wooldridge graduated from Ball in its class of 1894 and attended both Texas and Vanderbilt over the next few years. In the University of Texas catalogue for the 1895-96 session, he was listed as a first year student in the medical department. By the fall of 1896 he was an undergrad medical student at Vanderbilt and played on the school’s football team. At age 20, he was the regular left halfback of Vanderbilt’s 1896 football team and is a recognized letterman at that University. That team finished with a record of three wins, two losses, and two ties.

Birch Wooldridge transferred back to the University of Texas at some point after the fall of 1896, and in 1897 he played halfback at UT. Birch Wooldridge was not mentioned in UT’s catalogue for the 1897-98 session, but contemporary news articles included him in reports about games from UT’s 1897 football season. He was the team’s regular starter at left halfback and was often singled out for praise in reports following their games. He was 5’7” tall and reportedly a skilled ball-carrier. He scored three of the seven touchdowns that Texas scored in a 38-0 win over a Fort Worth team on November 25, a game that was played three weeks after Texas had lost to that same Fort Worth squad by a 6-0 score.2 Texas finished with a 6-2 record in that 1897 season.

University of Texas football records have long credited Birch Wooldridge as a letterman for both the 1897 and 1898 seasons, but he almost certainly was not a member of the team in the latter year.

The Cactus yearbook did not mention him in its section on the 1898 football team, and neither was he mentioned in newspaper reports on UT’s games of 1898 nor in that year’s UT catalogue. Wooldridge withdrew from the University in the spring of 1898, and he got into a memorable fight on campus with the registrar on his way out.

John Avery Lomax was an 1897 UT graduate who was a few months into his tenure as the University’s registrar in the spring of 1898. Lomax would work in a variety of roles for his alma mater and for UT’s alumni association over the years, and he went on to become a noted musicologist and preservationist of American folk music. George Tayloe Winston was UT’s president in early 1898, and according to The Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867-1948, Nolan Porterfield’s 1996 biography of Lomax, President Winston had become a very unpopular figure on campus by that time. The new registrar Lomax, fairly or not, was “seen by many as Winston’s toady and an administration spy in the student camp”.3

Birch Wooldridge came to believe “that Lomax was carrying damaging rumors about him to Winston” (Porterfield, 54) and resolved to withdraw from the University. After Wooldridge had officially withdrawn as a student but before he could leave the campus, he and Lomax happened to encounter each other, and fisticuffs ensued that were still remembered 16 years later in an early volume of The Alcalde, the magazine of the University of Texas Ex-Students’ Association.

Longtime engineering professor T.U. Taylor, writing in the March 1914 edition of the Alcalde about several notable fights and physical conflicts that had taken place on the UT campus in its first three decades, had this to say about the “Lomax-Wooldridge scrap” which had taken place 16 years earlier.

Very little time was spent in preliminaries or in discussion. Wooldridge first recalled to Lomax the cause of his grievance and history says that Wooldridge struck the first blow. Wooldridge was not a very large man but was strong as an ox, well trained, active and athletic, while Lomax was a student and, then as now, was pursuing the divine afflatus of poesy. It is asserted by some that Lomax tried to calm Wooldridge by reading a cow-boy poem to him, but the ire of Wooldridge was not to be soothed by any such homeopathic remedies, and he proceeded to break up the meter of the Registrar, leaving him nothing to do but sail in. An umbrella figured in the contest as a weapon of warfare, and was wielded by Lomax with such effect that the handle was broken short off and sailed afar. At another stage Lomax secured a rock with which he intended to quell his opponent but W.D. Potter of Gainesville, arriving on the scene about this time, took the rock away from Lomax and hostilities came to an end. The writer passed along the walk about thirty minutes after the fight where the first news he had of the battle was the torn walk and other evidences of a struggle. The walk was torn up from side ditch to side ditch, the abrasions on its surface showing that the fight was not a Sunday-school affair by any means. The piece of the broken umbrella was found and for several years was preserved as a souvenir.4

In the years after his departure from the University of Texas, Wooldridge lived at different times in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco and mainly worked as a salesman. Records and contemporary news accounts suggest that he was married at least five times. One of his earliest wives was Charlotte Burton, an actress of some note who appeared in over forty silent films between 1912 and 1920.

Wooldridge was living in California at the time of his death in 1965.

Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson came from a Georgia high school football powerhouse and played for the teams at both Vanderbilt and Texas.

Johnson was an all-purpose kicker for Parkview High School in the Atlanta suburb of Lilburn, and he played on Parkview’s teams that won back-to-back Class AAAAA state championships in 2000 and 2001. During his senior year he signed with Vanderbilt, and as a true freshman in 2002 he was Vandy’s punter and place-kicker and won Freshmen All-America honors as a punter from the Sporting News and Football Writers Association of America (FWAA). He averaged 43.8 yards on 66 punts, and as a kicker he made all 27 of his extra-point attempts and 8 of 13 field goal attempts.

In 2003 he elected to transfer from Vandy, and he ultimately decided on the University of Texas as his next destination. Initially he was set to major in business but ended up studying corporate communications, and his work in the classroom in Austin earned him second team Academic All-Big 12 honors.5

After sitting out the 2003 season following his transfer to Texas, Johnson was the Longhorns’ backup at the punting and kickoff specialist spots behind Richmond McGee in the 2004 season. As a junior in 2005 he was a member of UT’s BCS National Championship roster and was the team’s primary kickoff specialist while once again serving as the backup at punter behind McGee.

As a senior in 2006 he spent time in all kicking phases. He was the team’s primary punter, split kickoff duties with Hunter Lawrence, and spent most of the year as the team’s placekicker. He was hampered by a groin injury suffered six games into the season against Oklahoma, and two weeks later against Nebraska he had an extra point blocked, missed on a 39-yard field goal attempt at the end of the first half, and also missed on a 31-yard attempt late in the 3rd quarter. With 23 seconds left in regulation and Texas trailing the Cornhuskers 20-19, backup kicker Ryan Bailey was brought on in place of Johnson and made the game-winning 22-yard field goal. Bailey handled placekicking duties for the rest of the season. Trevor Gerland handled punting duties the following week in a win over Texas Tech, but Johnson returned a week later and remained the team’s punter for its final three regular season games and its 26-24 Alamo Bowl win over Iowa.

Aaron Bryant

Aaron Bryant attended Southaven High School in Southaven, Mississippi (just south of Memphis) and was rated as a four-star defensive tackle prospect in the 2022 recruiting class. He publicly committed to Texas shortly before the start of his senior year, and he went on to sign with the Longhorns a few months later. He was one of 28 high school prospects to sign with Texas in the 2022 class, which was rated at the time by 247Sports as the fifth highest-rated signing class, though at least 18 of those 28 signees will finish their college career with a program other than Texas.

He briefly appeared in two games as a true freshman in 2022 and retained his redshirt for that year. Bryant appeared in seven games as a redshirt freshman in 2023 and recorded his first collegiate tackle. He was hampered by an injury in his third season with the program, and he appeared in only four games and played less than two dozen total defensive snaps in the 2024 season. In December of that year he elected to enter the transfer portal with two seasons of eligibility remaining, and he ultimately signed with Vanderbilt.

This fall, Bryant has appeared in all eight games (starting in one) for the 7-1 Vanderbilt Commodores and has been credited with three total tackles and one tackle for loss. Bryant will face off against his former Longhorn teammates tomorrow afternoon at his former home field when the ninth-ranked Commodores travel to Austin to play 20th-ranked Texas.

If any Longhorn historians who happen to read this know of other Longhorns who also spent time with the football team at Vanderbilt, please let me know in the comments.

For that matter, the Longhorn football program has very little history with the state of Florida, period. By my count, they have played 12 total games against Florida colleges, and have only played three regular season games and three bowl games within the state of Florida. Texas played on the road against Florida in 1940, Miami in 1973, and Central Florida in 2007, and also played in the Orange Bowl games in Miami following the 1948 and 1964 seasons, and the Gator Bowl in the 1974 postseason. UT is now in its 133rd season of having a football program and has a 4-2 all-time record in games played in Florida.

Author’s note: the original version of this post erroneously stated that UT was 5-0 in games played in Florida, but a reader pointed out that the Longhorns lost in their road game against Miami in 1973. I regret the error.

Author’s note #2: the original version of this post stated that Texas had played in just two bowl games in Florida, the two Orange Bowl appearances. It was pointed out by the estimable Vance Duncan that the Longhorns also played in the 1974 Gator Bowl, where they lost to Auburn. Mr. Duncan was a UT student in the early 1970s, and his grandfather Isaac Vance Duncan was captain of the 1902 UT football team.

It’s been a long enough time since the Longhorns visited that state that the freshmen on this year’s team were probably still in diapers when Texas beat Central Florida 35-32 in Orlando on September 15, 2007. Even punter Jack Bouwmeester, who is by far Texas’s oldest current player at 26 years of age, was a mere eight-year-old living in Australia the last time Texas played in the Sunshine State.

With Texas taking their first road trip to play the Florida Gators since 1940, I thought it would be worth writing a short post on that game, partly to illustrate the differences in long-distance travel that the 1940 Longhorns experienced compared to the current squad, and to provide some education on the state of the two programs at that point in time.

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Texas played Florida on December 7, 1940 in what was for both teams the final game of that year’s season. Florida came into that game with a 5-4 record, which was a fine season by the standards of its program at the time, though the Gators recorded only one win that year against a team that finished with a winning record, and their record against conference opponents (2-3) put them in the bottom half of the Southeastern Conference standings.1

College football fans of this writer’s relative age bracket whose first impression of the Florida Gators was probably formed by watching the high-flying Steve Spurrier-coached teams of the 1990s might be surprised to learn that Florida was an also-ran in college football for several decades before the Spurrier era. Florida did not record its first nine-win season until 1960, while Texas did so in 1906, the year Florida organized its first varsity football team. On paper, Florida did not win its first conference championship in football until 1991.2

Florida’s 1940 team was led by first-year head coach Tom Lieb, a Minnesota native who had an interesting athletic and coaching career. While a student-athlete at Notre Dame in the early 1920s he played football on some of the earliest teams coached by the legendary Knute Rockne, and also played on Notre Dame’s ice hockey team and was a thrower on its track & field team. Lieb was a two-time collegiate national champion in the discus throw and held the world record in that event from September 1924 until May 1925.3 During a collegiate coaching career that spanned nearly three decades, Lieb was a head football coach at Florida and Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, the ice hockey head coach at Notre Dame while also serving as a football assistant under Rockne, and an assistant football coach and head track & field coach at Alabama.

The 1940 Texas Longhorns had a record of 7-2 overall and 4-2 in conference play going into the season-ending Florida game, which effectively put Texas in fourth place among the seven teams in the Southwest Conference. After some mediocre-to-bad years in the latter half of the 1930s, the 1940 Longhorn squad, which was led by fourth-year head coach Dana X. Bible, would win as many games as the team had in Bible’s first three seasons combined. They made their first ever appearance in the Associated Press (AP) rankings after a 3-0 start to the 1940 season, but fell out of the rankings after losses in consecutive weeks to Rice and SMU.

The Texas team that travelled to Gainesville, Florida in early December of 1940 was only a week removed from recording the most memorable win in program history at that time, a 7-0 upset of archrival and defending national champion Texas A&M on Thanksgiving Day. In that hard-fought contest, nine of UT’s eleven starters played for the entire game on both offense and defense, but the playing time would be far more spread out among the roster in the season finale against Florida, which was a re-match of a game the teams had played early in the 1939 season. Texas had beaten the visiting Florida Gators 12-0 in Austin on September 30, 1939, and went on to finish with a 5-4 record that year.

A direct flight from Austin to Gainesville today takes just under two and a half hours. Driving directly from Darrel K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium using today’s roads requires a trip of just over 1,000 miles, which would likely keep one on the road for at least 17-18 hours even with only brief stops for gas, food, and restroom breaks.

The 1940 Longhorn squad made the trip to Gainesville not by bus or airplane, but by train, which was the common mode of long-distance travel for the team well into the late 1940s. The train ride from Austin to Gainesville covered parts of three days and reportedly lasted for 42 hours total.

After a practice session in Austin on Wednesday December 4, the Longhorn team boarded a train that departed in the late afternoon. The train stopped in Pensacola, Florida in the afternoon on the following day, and the team deboarded there for a brief workout. After crossing from the Central to Eastern time zone, the team finally arrived in Gainesville at around noon on Friday, December 6, and got a practice session in that day before their game on Saturday.

When the Longhorns and Gators met on the gridiron on the afternoon of December 7, 1940, the former showed no ill effects from the long train trip. Texas thoroughly dominated the Gators to win by a score of 26-0. The Longhorns brought 36 healthy players on the trip, and all 36 saw action in the win over Florida after only 13 Longhorns had seen the field in the 7-0 upset win over Texas A&M the previous week. Coach Dana Bible made liberal use of his team’s reserve units during the game after the Longhorn starters controlled Florida on both sides of the ball with ease during their time on the field.

Fullback Pete Layden, who had scored the only touchdown in the win over A&M, rushed for a pair of touchdowns and passed for another against Florida. The Longhorns outgained the Gators in total yardage 383-78 and had an overwhelming 22-4 advantage in first downs. The Texas defense intercepted four Florida passes and recovered one fumble while allowing the Gators to complete only one of their 12 pass attempts.

With the win the Longhorns finished the 1940 season with a record of 8-2, and proved that their upset win over previously unbeaten Texas A&M was not a rivalry game fluke. They were not ranked in the final Associated Press poll for that season, which was taken the week after the Thanksgiving Day win over 2nd-ranked Texas A&M and before their subsequent win over Florida. But Texas was ranked #24 in the final ratings by the Williamson System, a mathematical formula by Paul B. Williamson that was used to rank college football teams from 1932 through 1963, and which published its final rankings after a season’s bowl games.4

The 1940 season represented a breakthrough for the Longhorns after their program’s malaise in the latter half of the 1930s, and they would go on to compile a record of 78-21-3 during the 1940s, with three Southwest Conference championships and four bowl wins during that decade. Pete Layden served as captain of the 1941 team, which briefly held the #1 ranking in the AP poll that season (the first Longhorn team to achieve that distinction), and members of that squad were famously featured on the cover of Life magazine in November 1941.

With no more than two or three exceptions, all of the men who suited up for the Longhorns in the 1940 season finale at Florida — which was played exactly one year before Japanese air forces attacked Pearl Harbor — went on to serve in the military during World War II. I don’t know the stories of the personnel on Florida’s 1940 team, but it’s a safe bet that the vast majority of them were in military service over the next few years as well. Four of the Longhorns who played in that game against Florida died while in uniform over the next four years.

James “Red” Goodwin started at center for the Longhorns against Florida, and while playing on defense he recorded the first of UT’s four interceptions that day. Soon after that game he was voted co-captain of the 1941 Longhorn team along with Pete Layden, but he instead enlisted in the Army Air Force in early 1941 and never played football again. Goodwin rose to the rank of captain in his years of service, and was killed during an air skirmish over Germany in April of 1944.

Chal Daniel, who started next to Goodwin at right guard against Florida and won All-America honors as a senior the following year, also served in the Army Air Force and was killed when his trainer plane crashed north of New Braunfels, Texas in February of 1943.

Jack Seale was a reserve end on the 1940 Longhorn football team and caught the second of the four touchdowns the Longhorns scored against Florida. He also competed with the Longhorn track & field team and finished 2nd in the javelin throw at the 1941 Southwest Conference meet. He did not return to UT in the fall of 1941 and initially joined the Royal Canadian Air Force for flight training, but was later transferred to the U.S. Army Air Force and went on to complete 55 air missions during World War II. He was killed in May of 1944 when the B-26 Marauder he was piloting was shot down over France.

And Charles Richardson, an Oklahoma native and another reserve end on the 1940 Longhorn team, played his last game with Texas in that year’s Florida game. He had another year of athletic eligibility, but instead joined the Army air corps. Lt. Richardson and two other air corps servicemen were killed when their plane crashed near La Grange, Texas in April 1942.

After defeating Florida in the 1939 and 1940 seasons, the Longhorns did not face the Gators again until 2024, when they won 49-17 in Austin. With the two teams now being conference opponents there should be many more matchups between them in the coming years.

The fourth and final forgotten letterman I want to highlight is a far more recent Longhorn: John Herrera, a walk-on defensive end who was a member of the program in the early 1980s.

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Herrera was a star defensive tackle at Judson High School in Converse, Texas, a short distance northeast of San Antonio. The Converse Judson Rockets were a high school football powerhouse throughout the 1980s and 1990s, winning five state championships on the field between 1983 and 2002, and winning a sixth title by forfeit in 1988, but its program was moribund for much of Herrera’s time at the school.

Judson had a record of 9-40-1 in the five seasons between 1972 and 1976, the last of those being Herrera’s junior year. In that 1976 season the Rockets went 2-7-1, but Herrera was praised in the local press for his aggressive play on the defensive line, and he was named to the All-District 29-4A first team as well as the San Antonio Express-News’s 1976 honorable mention All-City team. He was one of just two Judson players make the all-district first team on either offense or defense, and also one of two to be named to the All-City team that year.1

As a senior in 1977 Herrera helped lead a resurgence in the Judson football program’s fortunes that would carry on for decades after his graduation. Though not a hulking figure even for that time at 6’1” and 215 pounds, Herrera’s play at defensive tackle was regularly cited as a factor in the team’s success that year, and he was particularly praised for his performance in a 27-7 win over San Antonio Harlandale early in the season. In that game he reportedly recorded four sacks, was involved in eight other tackles, and pressured Harlandale’s quarterback into throwing several incomplete passes. The San Antonio Express named Herrera its Defensive Player of the Week following that game, calling him “a defensive tackle…that’s meaner than a Billy Martin with tight shoes”, which was most likely a reference to the manager of the New York Yankees, though San Antonio Holmes had an All-City linebacker that year also named Billy Martin. “Harlandale quarterback Ernie Villegas is probably still seeing a big No. 71 coming at him in his dreams …er, nightmares”, wrote Mike Bruton of the Express.2

That same week Herrera was named to the Associated Press Schoolboy Football Honor Roll. Joining him on that week’s honor roll was Houston St. Piux X quarterback Gary Kubiak, who went on to play at Texas A&M and in the NFL before going on to a long coaching career.3 Midway through the 1977 season John Herrera was reported to be Judson’s leading tackler, an impressive achievement for an interior lineman.

Big things were not expected of Judson going into the 1977 season after it had won just four games between Herrera’s freshman and junior seasons, and only nine games total over the previous five seasons. Dave Campbell’s Texas Football magazine picked the Rockets to finish fifth out of the seven teams in their district, but they surprised outside onlookers by recording an undefeated regular season, winning their first district championship in six years, and finishing with a record of 10-1. That 1977 campaign began what would ultimately stretch into a streak of 44 consecutive seasons in which the Judson Rockets finished with a winning record, which was a state record at the time the streak was snapped in 2021 but has since been surpassed by Refugio.

Herrera was one of four defensive linemen named to the 1977 Express-News All-City team.

Judson entered the 1977 Class 4A playoffs as the champion of District 29-4A and owner of an undefeated record, but they lost in the first round to San Antonio Holmes by a 20-14 score. The Judson Rockets would go 30-4 from 1977 to 1979, recording ten wins in each of those seasons and achieving their first playoff win in 1978. The team reached the state semifinals in 1982, then in 1983 they won their school’s first football state championship.

Nobody would have considered Judson to be a powerhouse at the beginning of John Herrera’s senior year, but between 1977 and 1998 the Rockets missed the playoffs only twice, and failed to record a double-digit win total in only three of those seasons.

Herrera went on to attend the University of Texas and walked on with the Longhorn football team. How long he was with the program and how many games he appeared in is unclear from the records and contemporary news articles I’ve been able to find. His name does not appear on any of the historic online rosters from 1978 to 1982 that are posted on the UT football website. In one of the Austin American-Statesman’s rare mentions of him, he was praised by head coach Fred Akers for his performance in a preseason scrimmage in late August of 1982.4

He was reportedly one of four walk-on players who got onto the field during UT’s 27-0 win over Texas Tech on October 30, 1982.5 The statistics posted on the UT football website for the 1982 season credit Herrera with a forced fumble in the Longhorns’ 50-0 win over Houston on November 6. I have found no other mentions of him through the rest of that season, one in which the Longhorns went 9-3 overall and were ranked as high as eighth in the Associated Press poll, but lost to unranked North Carolina in the Sun Bowl and fell to #17 in the AP’s final rankings.

John Herrera was awarded a varsity letter by the Longhorn program following the 1982 season, becoming the first Judson Rocket to earn that honor. Three others have since done so: running back Chris Samuels (1987-90), linebacker Robert Reed (1992-95), and walk-on defensive back Cody Boswell (2014). For most of the two decades that followed the 1982 season Herrera’s name was included in the All-Time Lettermen lists that were featured in the annual Texas Longhorn football media guides. For example, the picture below is a clipping from the all-time lettermen list in the 1990 media guide.

For unknown reasons, John Herrera’s name was removed from the list when it was updated for publication in the 2001 media guide, and it has not reappeared on the list in the 24 years since. Herrera was not the only casualty of the 2001 lettermen list update; John O’Keefe, an 1895 letterman who I wrote about in April, also had his name removed from the list that year.

Hopefully Herrera and O’Keefe will have their names re-appear on the official lettermen list in a future update, and that corrections will be made to recognize the other two “forgotten lettermen” I’ve written about this year, Arthur Griggs and Donnell Cameron.

Jack Bouwmeester is part of a large group of recent student-athletes who have remained in college past their 24th birthday. The post-COVID years in college athletics (2020-present) have produced several athletes who were years older than the average senior by the end of their careers. The NCAA did not count the 2020 football season against any athlete’s eligibility, and some who took advantage of that free year and also used a redshirt season and/or an injury waiver for an injury-shortened season have ended up playing five or six or more college football seasons. At this time in 2024 there were nine members of the Texas Longhorns’ 2019 recruiting class who were still playing college football at some level, in what was the sixth season since their high school graduation.

In Jack Bouwmeester’s case, he signed with Michigan State in December of 2018, when he was already 19 years old. He was a member of the Michigan State Spartans team in 2019 and 2020, but did not play in either season. He transferred to Utah and was the primary punter for the Utes for three seasons (2022-24), then entered the transfer portal after the 2024 regular season having one season of eligibility remaining, and he went on to sign with Texas. He turned 26 this past May and is likely at least two years older than any other player on the current Longhorn roster. (Defensive tackle Cole Brevard, another transfer portal addition, originally signed with Penn State in the class of 2020 and will turn 24 in November. All other seniors on the current Longhorn roster began their college careers in 2021 or later.)

At 26 years of age, Bouwmeester is far older than the average senior on this or most other teams throughout UT’s football history. Based on my own research, he is comfortably within the top one percent in terms of oldest players to ever suit up for the Longhorns, but he is not a historical anomaly. Were one to rank the oldest players in program history, Bouwmeester — who is older than half of players who were picked in the first round of the 2021 NFL Draft — wouldn’t even make the top fifteen.

When the University of Texas fielded its first varsity football team in 1893, the men who formed its original starting lineup ranged in age from 17 to 24. In 1894, UT’s right guard was 25 years old, and a few years later the team had a halfback who may have been as old as 28. Paul McLane, UT’s first football captain, was 19 when he helped organize the 1893 varsity squad. In the late 1930s, Texas had a team captain who was 29 years old.

Most of the program’s recognized lettermen from its 133 seasons have been between the ages of 18 and 22, but on the young side there have been a small handful of 17-year-olds and at least one 16-year-old, while on the older side I can name forty men who played football for Texas at age 25 or later, and there are likely more that I am unaware of. At least three played into their thirties.

In this post I will tell the stories of some of the “old men” of Texas Longhorn football history. For the most part these were men who had their college careers either interrupted or delayed due to service in the military, or who were born in the late 19th century and had an unorthodox educational path before enrolling in college.

The post will not proceed chronologically so much as starting with the oldest known UT football letterman and moving on to the stories of the next-oldest players. This topic should not be confused with that of “longest-lived Longhorn football players”, which I will cover in a future post.

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Nate Boyer

Nate Boyer was a military veteran who took up football for the first time at the end of his twenties while attending the University of Texas.

Boyer was born in 1981 and graduated from Valley Christian High School in Dublin, California (about 25 miles north of San Jose) in 1999. Five years later he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and over the next six years he served with the Green Berets and was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. After receiving his discharge from the Army, Boyer enrolled at the University of Texas and walked on with the Longhorn football program in 2010. Prior to that he had never played organized football in high school or at any other level. He made the team as a walk-on in 2010, saw his first on-field action in 2011 (at age 30), and for the next three seasons he was the Longhorns’ long-snapper. He filled that role for the last time during Texas’s 31-7 loss to Arkansas in the 2014 AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl, a game that was played less than two weeks before Boyer’s 34th birthday.

He signed with the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks as an undrafted free agent in 2015, but never made an NFL active roster.

John Robert Swenson

John Robert Swenson was a Swedish immigrant who played on the UT football team while a grad student in the early 1900s, at a time when he was 32 years old.

Swenson was born in Sweden in 1870 and was the youngest of the seven children in his family who survived childhood. His family moved to the United States when he was 11 years old, and they eventually settled in Davenport, Iowa. Swenson was a very good student and graduated as the valedictorian of Davenport High School’s class of 1889. He attended the University of Denver in Colorado and played football during his time there before graduating in 1896.

After spending a few years as a teacher he enrolled at the University of Texas as a graduate student in the early 1900s, and in 1902 he joined the UT football team (which was not yet known as the Longhorns). At 6’1” and 200 pounds, Swenson was the heaviest member of the 1902 varsity football team, and at age 32 he was its oldest player by six and a half years. And not only that, he was actually born earlier than all but one of the starters who played in UT’s very first varsity football game in 1893!

He was a sometime starter at left guard, but reportedly had knee ailments that kept him off the field for large chunks of the 1902 season, and according to the 1903 Cactus yearbook he only played in three of the team’s ten games.

Swenson graduated from Texas with a Master of Arts degree in 1904, and later spent many years as a professor on the faculty of the North Texas State Normal College in Denton, which later became the University of North Texas.

K.L. Berry

Kearie Lee Berry was a three-sport athletic star at Texas in the mid-1910s who later returned to school and played one more year of football at age 31 after spending nearly a decade in the Army. He had a long and distinguished military career, one that included spending over three years as a prisoner of war during World War II.

Berry was born in 1893 and was a native of Denton, Texas, and in news articles that mentioned him throughout his life he was almost always referred to by his initials K.L. He attended the University of Texas after graduating from Denton High School, and he played for the Longhorn football team along with his older brother Eugene Berry.

During his initial college career he was a highly-regarded lineman on the football team, the Southwest Conference’s heavyweight wrestling champion, and also a record-setting thrower in track & field who was twice the Southwest Conference champion in the shot put (1915-16). He won varsity letters in football in 1912 and 1914-15, and was elected captain of the Longhorn football team for the 1915 season, which at that time was an exceedingly rare honor for a junior.

Berry still had a year of athletic eligibility remaining after the 1915-16 academic year, but in 1916 he enlisted in the National Guard and spent several months deployed with the Army near the Texas-Mexico border in response to Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico in March of that year. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the Army in 1917 and ended up serving for nearly three decades.

Berry returned to UT in 1924 when the Army allowed him to complete his college education after he’d spent three years as a captain at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Though he was 31 years old and married with three young children by that point, he went out for the Longhorn football team that fall and not only won a spot as a starting guard but was voted to the All-Southwest Conference team at the end of the 1924 season.

Berry was stationed in the Philippines by late 1941, arriving there only a short time before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, which precipitated the U.S. formally joining World War II. Berry was captured by Japanese forces in 1942, survived the infamous “Bataan death march” at age 48, and spent 40 months as a prisoner of war before his release in 1945. He was promoted to brigadier general before retiring from active duty in 1946. The following year he was appointed the Adjutant General of Texas by then-governor Beauford Jester, and he served in that position for 14 years and under two successive governors before retiring in 1961.

K.L. Berry was among the earliest Longhorn student-athletes to be inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor after it was established in 1957, joining the Hall in its 1959 induction class. His older brother Eugene Berry was inducted into the Hall of Honor in 1972.

Charles Jungmichel

Charles Jungmichel was another Longhorn who had the beginning and ending of his collegiate career separated by several years of military service, and he turned 30 a few weeks after playing his last regular season game with Texas.

Jungmichel, who was born in 1917 in Boerne, Texas, attended Austin High School and was captain of the Austin Maroons football team as a senior in 1936. After his high school graduation, he attended Kilgore Junior College for a few years before enrolling at the University of Texas. He was already 22 years old when he played for the Longhorn freshmen football team in 1940.1 He enlisted in the Army the following year and remained in service throughout World War II.

He returned to Texas in 1946 following his discharge from the Army and re-joined the Longhorn football team, and he was a backup guard and center for two seasons. He won his first and only football letter in the 1947 season, by which point his younger brother Harold “Buddy” Jungmichel (who had been a two-year letterman at Texas in 1940-41) was in his first season as a Longhorn assistant coach. Texas finished the 1947 season with a record of 10-1 and beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl just over three weeks after Charles Jungmichel’s 30th birthday.

Ned McDonald

Ned McDonald did not begin his college career until he was into his mid-20s, and finished it shortly before turning 30. He would serve as a Longhorn team captain and later as a college football head coach.

McDonald was born in Caldwell, Texas on January 2, 1910. He was a star end on the Caldwell High School football team and was its 1928 team captain. He spent a few years playing for amateur football teams in Houston and did not enroll at the University of Texas until 1935. In his first year with the Longhorn football program he was a 25-year-old freshman. He did not see the field in his first year with the Longhorn varsity in 1936, but went on to win three letters playing the end position from 1937 to 1939. He and fellow senior Park Myers were elected team captains for the 1939 season, and ironically both had gone to high school in towns named Caldwell, McDonald being from Caldwell, Texas, and Myers from Caldwell, Kansas.

The Longhorns played their last game of the 1939 season on Thanksgiving weekend, barely a month before McDonald’s 30th birthday. He was a longtime football coach at the University of Virginia after serving in the Navy during World War II. He was UVA’s head coach for three unsuccessful seasons, leading the team to a 5-23 record from 1953 to 1955, but he was also a respected line coach with the program for 17 seasons (1946-52 and 1964-73), which included extended periods both before and after his brief time as head coach. The Virginia program named their annual award for most outstanding defensive player the Ned McDonald Award in his honor.

Lucian Parrish

Lucian Parrish came to the University of Texas well into his 20s and possessing very little in the way of a formal education, and by the time he left the University he was one of its most esteemed athletes and had received a law degree.

Parrish was born on January 10, 1878 and grew up in a large farming family, living for much of his youth in a tiny north Texas community called Joy. His family was very poor and he received a minimal education as a youth, only attending public school for the first time while in his late teens after he had saved up enough money from working on a local ranch to attend the public school in nearby Bowie.

He was placed in a grade at the Bowie school with students who were considerably younger than him but who were far more advanced in their own education. After attending the Bowie school for a year, he attended the North Texas Normal College in Denton (now the University of North Texas), which was designed at that time for the training of teachers. After his time at the North Texas Normal College he was a school teacher for two terms and continued to work on ranches in the summers to earn money for college.2

He was 25 years old when he first enrolled at the University of Texas in 1903. Some of his new classmates convinced him to try out for the football team, though he had never played the sport before. He was a four-year letterman and developed into a star at guard, and by his last year at UT he was elected captain of the 1906 football team and also served as captain of the track & field team. He was nicknamed "Father Parrish" due to his age, as he was 28 during his last season on the football team. He was a fairly big man for his era at 6’2.5” tall and 187 pounds, according to the 1907 Cactus yearbook.3 He was named to the 1906 All-Southern team, and well into the 1920s he was considered one of the best guards in the history of the UT football program.4

Parrish was also a four-year letterman in track & field and set both UT school records and Southern college records in the hammer throw. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree he worked as an assistant football coach while pursuing a Bachelor of Laws degree, which he received in 1909. He practiced law in his native Clay County and was elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1918 and 1920, representing the state’s 13th congressional district. He was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate when he was seriously injured in a car accident in March of 1922, and he died of his injuries 12 days later. He was inducted into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor in 1970.

Marion Harold and Edgar Harold

The brothers Marion and Edgar Harold were born and raised in Blanco, Texas, and both played for the Longhorn football team while in their late 20s.

Marion was born in March of 1882, and Edgar in January of 1884. Both of their parents came from an immigrant background. Their father was the son of Irish immigrants, while their mother was a native of England who had moved to the United States while in her teens. They got a late start on their collegiate education and reportedly enrolled at the University of Texas in 1908, when Marion was already 26 and Edgar was 24. Edgar had been 22 when he graduated from Blanco High School in 1906.5

Edgar won two letters playing tackle for the Longhorn football team in 1910 and 1911, while Marion won his only letter in 1911. During the 1911 season, 27-year-old Edgar was the regular starter at right tackle while 29-year-old Marion was a sometime starter at left guard.

David John Brady

David Brady’s life intersected with an interesting period of UT’s history. He was one of the institution’s earliest students, and returned to campus more than a decade later and played for one of its earliest football teams while in his late twenties.

Brady was born in Texas in 1868 and grew up in Austin. His parents were both natives of either Ireland or England (sources differ on his mother’s birthplace). He enrolled at the newly-opened University of Texas in 1883 when he was 15 years old, and he was an academic student during the University’s very first session. He was a student for only a short time, and in 1886 he was evidently convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to two years in prison, but was pardoned just two months into his sentence. He briefly served in the Army in the early 1890s, and returned to the University of Texas for the 1896-97 academic year and played on the UT football team in 1896, when he was 28 years old.

He was reportedly a starter at guard for at least five of the seven games that Texas played in the 1896 season, but he was not mentioned at all by the 1897 Cactus yearbook in its section on the football team and its players. Official program records do not list Brady as a football letterman, though Lou Maysel’s 1970 history of the program, Here Come the Texas Longhorns, did include Brady’s name in its own list of UT’s all-time football lettermen through the 1969 season.

Joseph Maytubby

Joseph Maytubby had one of the most interesting life stories from among the men who played during the first decade of the UT football program, and he suited up for one season while in the latter half of his twenties.

He was born in present-day Oklahoma (then called Indian Territory) to a Chickasaw father and a white mother. His birthday was uniformly identified as March 14, but sources vary on whether his birth year was 1868, 1869, or 1870. Maytubby himself admitted well into adulthood that he did not know the exact year of his birth.

He attended Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina (which became Duke University in 1924) and was a star football player and award-winning orator while a student there. Maytubby was elected captain of Trinity’s 1895 football team, but the college’s president disbanded the team before any games could be played, and Trinity did not field a football team again until 1920. He graduated in 1896, and Duke University now recognizes him as its first Native American graduate.

He enrolled at the University of Texas that same year as a law student and played fullback and halfback on the UT football team of 1896. He was most likely somewhere between age 26 and 28 that season. Maytubby left an impression during his one season in Austin, and after he was seen in attendance at a Texas football game four years later, a writer for the on-campus newspaper The Texan referred to him as “one of the best football players we ever had”.

I wrote a long post on Joseph Maytubby and his life at Burnt Orange Nation in 2021.

A Duke student writing for The Chronicle — who clearly had read that 2021 post — wrote an article on Maytubby in December 2024 that added a few extra details.

Grady “Rats’ Watson

Alfred Grady Watson was a Texas football star at the high school, military, and collegiate level in the early decades of the 20th century, and was also one of the earliest University of Texas products to play professional football.

Watson was born on February 10, 1894, and during his football career he was most commonly referred to by his middle name Grady or by the nickname “Rats”. His Pro Football Reference page refers to him as “Rat Watson”.

He came to the University of Texas after graduating from Orange High School in southeast Texas, and played on the 1913 UT freshmen football team. He transferred to Southwestern University the following year, later joined the National Guard, and in 1916 he was called into active duty and ended up playing quarterback on the famed football team of the Second Texas Infantry, which featured several former stars from Texas colleges and dominated teams formed by other military units. In its time, the Second Texas Infantry football team was regarded as one of the best football teams ever assembled.

After completing his military service, Watson returned to the University of Texas in 1920, when he was 26 years old. He played quarterback for the Longhorns for two seasons and made the All-Southwest Conference team in 1920. He was 27 when he played his final season for Texas in 1921. He went on to play professional football for parts of five seasons and suited up for four different early NFL franchises.

Magnus Mainland

Magnus Mainland transferred to Texas in the first decade of the 1900s while in his mid-20s, and was not only a football letterman but an important figure in UT’s early basketball history.

Mainland was born in November 1879 and was a native of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. His family immigrated to the United States when he was 19, and they settled in Racine, Wisconsin. He played the then-new sport of basketball (which had been invented in 1892) while a student at the Wheaton College Academy in Illinois, and after attending Wheaton College as a freshman in the 1904-05 academic year, he transferred to the University of Texas to study engineering, a field of study not offered at Wheaton.

Mainland was one of the biggest men on the UT football team at about 185 pounds, and he won letters in the 1905 and 1906 seasons. He turned 27 during the latter year. In 1906 he helped organize the University of Texas’s first basketball team, on which he was not only a player but also its coach and manager. He coached the team again in 1907.

I previously wrote about Mainland four years ago this month in a Burnt Orange Nation post on “UT’s Forgotten Olympians”.

Archie Gray

Archie Gray was a native of central Texas who attended both Texas A&M and Texas, served in the Army during World War I, played for the UT football team while in his late twenties, and went on to a successful legal and political career.

Archibald Duncan “Archie” Gray grew up in the tiny community of Baileyville, and may have attended the public schools in nearby Calvert. Sources differ on whether he was born in 1895 or 1896. He attended Texas A&M in the years immediately prior to World War I, then during the war he served in the Army Signal Corps. After his discharge he enrolled at the University of Texas and played guard on the Longhorn football team from 1920 to 1922, winning letters in 1921-22. The 1922 season began shortly after his 26th or 27th birthday. He was UT’s student body president as a senior, and graduated in 1923.

Gray had a long legal career and held public office as the mayor of Ennis, Texas, and was later the district attorney for Ellis County.

Don Weedon

Don Weedon arrived at UT in the late 1930s, and due to circumstances similar to players mentioned earlier in this post, he won letters for football seasons that were several years apart.

Weedon was born in January 1919 and raised in Bryan, Texas. He attended Bryan’s Stephen F. Austin High School (which was renamed Bryan High School in 1971) and played for its football team, whose line coach was Wilson “Cheesie” Cook, a former Texas Longhorn lineman from the early 1930s and co-captain of the 1932 Longhorn squad. Weedon attended Lon Morris College in Jacksonville, Texas for the 1937-38 academic year and played tackle for its football team, then enrolled at the University of Texas in 1938.

Weedon was a member of UT’s highly-touted 1938 freshmen football team, which boasted three future All-Americans and four eventual inductees into the Texas Athletics Hall of Honor. Weedon played guard on that 1938 freshmen squad, which defeated the Longhorn varsity in a mid-November scrimmage. The Longhorn varsity was not good that year and had a record of 0-8 at the time that their freshmen squad beat them, but amazingly they finished their season with a 7-6 win over Texas A&M.

Weedon played on the Longhorn varsity for the first time in 1939 and was primarily a backup at guard, but he also spent time at tackle and was a starter in UT’s game against SMU. He was expected to contend for a starting spot in the 1940 season, but he was declared academically ineligible after the 1940 spring semester. He remained at the University and worked toward regaining his eligibility, and in the spring of 1941 he was again seen as a potential starter on the Longhorn line for the upcoming season, but he declined to sit for his final exams and again became ineligible for that year’s football season.

Weedon got married on Christmas Day in 1941 and enlisted in the Army Air Force five months later. He served in the AAF for nearly four years, and after his discharge in the spring of 1946 he returned to UT and re-joined the Longhorn football team. The 1946 Longhorn team had many former players from the early 1940s who had returned after some years of military service. Even on a roster that was largely filled with World War II vets who had been away from college for two years or more, Don Weedon was the oldest player at age 27. Weedon and his wife had a three-year-old son by that point, and Don was one of nine players on the 1946 Longhorn team who were fathers.6

Weedon spent most of the 1946 season as a backup, but started a few late season games at right guard. He played in the NFL for one season as a backup guard on the 1947 Philadelphia Eagles, who won the NFL East Division but lost 28-21 to the Chicago Cardinals in that season’s NFL Championship. During his brief pro football career, Weedon bought a garage and gas station on Guadalupe Street in Austin a short distance north of the UT campus, and he ran it until his death in 1981. He employed several Longhorn football players at his business during summers, including such early 1980s stars as All-American defensive tackle Kenneth Sims and running back A.J. “Jam” Jones. The list of pallbearers at Weedon’s funeral included former Longhorn head coach Darrell Royal, longtime Longhorn defensive coordinator Mike Campbell, and early 1940s program legend Noble Doss, who had been a teammate of Weedon’s on the 1939 team.7

Aside from the men already named, there are have been at least nine others (including Jack Bouwmeester) who played for the UT football team past their 26th birthday, and no less than 18 more who suited up for the program at age 25. (I am not counting in that group the impostor Ron Weaver, a 30-year-old man who was a backup defensive back for the 1995 Longhorn team while fraudulently using the birthdate and identity of a former 23-year-old acquaintance named Ron McKelvey.)

Having already written 5,000 words I won’t go into detail on the stories of each of those 25 or 26-year-olds, but will point out several team captains who were in that age range.

Star running back and 1934 team captain Bohn Hilliard was 26. Marine veteran Ahmard Hall, a fullback and co-captain of UT’s 2005 national championship team, turned 26 during his final season in Austin. And ex-minor league baseball player and star wide receiver Quan Cosby, a co-captain as a senior in 2008, turned 26 only a week before his last game as a Longhorn.

1912 team captain Frost Woodhull, who won his first and last football letters at UT eight years apart, was 25 years old in his final season. As was 1920 team captain and World War I vet Maxey Hart, 1926 captain Mack Saxon, 1928 captain Rufus King, 1935 captain Joe Smartt, 1946 co-captain and World War II vet Audrey Gill, and 1947 senior Joe Magliolo, who had been a co-captain in 1943 before serving in the Navy.

If you know of any Longhorn players who I’ve missed who suited up for the team at age 27 or later, send me a message or let me know in the comments.

In April I wrote about another forgotten UT football letterman: John O’Keefe, a halfback who played on the 1894 and 1895 Texas varsity teams and actually scored the first touchdown in the first game ever played between the University of Texas and Texas A&M. Unlike Griggs, O’Keefe actually was recognized as a letterman for many years, but his name was removed from the all-time lettermen list in 2001 for reasons that remain unclear.

This post will feature another forgotten letterman in the person of Donnell Cameron. Cameron was a Tennessee native who who enrolled at UT as a law student and played as a backup guard on its 1898 team. He qualifies as a “forgotten letterman” because UT football records erroneously credit a different man named Cameron with his 1898 letter.

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The 1898 University of Texas football team had a substitute player with the last name Cameron. That much we know from page 176 of the 1899 Cactus yearbook, which gave the last names of each of the Varsity’s “First Team” players from the 1898 season.

This man has long been identified in UT football records as Donald Cameron. Below is a clipping from the current Texas Longhorns all-time football lettermen list (which, as of this writing, was last updated in the spring of 2024) showing the first section of last names beginning with “C”. Donald Cameron is listed as an 1898 letterman.

Donald Cameron was a prominent student at UT in the early to mid-1890s. He was born in 1875 in Wheelock, Texas (a small community about 15 miles north of Bryan) and enrolled at the University of Texas in the year that he turned 16. Before graduating with both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree he was the president of his senior class, a tutor in Latin and Greek, and a member of Kappa Alpha. Cameron was also involved in athletics during his years in Austin. He was a member of the University’s Tennis Association, was president of the UT track team in 1895, and set UT’s school record in the mile run (five minutes and 27 seconds).1

The first organized reunion of UT’s athletic lettermen occurred in 1916, and in preparation for that event the Athletic Council published an “Athletic Record” pamphlet that listed all known lettermen, members of what it referred to as the “Order of the ‘T’”. This pamphlet listed UT’s historic athletic lettermen alphabetically by last name, along with columns indicating the sport(s) in which they’d won their letter(s) and their last known city of residence. Below is a clipping from page six of that pamphlet, which identifies D. Cameron as a football and track letterman who was then living in Boston, Massachusetts.

This clearly points to the aforementioned Donald Cameron, who by 1916 was a few years into his tenure as a Latin professor at Boston University, where he would teach until his death in 1940. But there is ample and convincing evidence that it was not Donald but a different Cameron who played on the 1898 varsity football team, and that Donald has been erroneously credited with another man’s football letter for well over a century.

For starters, none of Donald Cameron’s obituaries published by newspapers in Texas (his home state) or Massachusetts (where he was a college professor for over three decades) made any mention of him playing football during his college days. Neither did any Texas newspaper articles written about him during his lifetime on the numerous occasions that he returned to his home state to visit friends and family.

Contemporary UT publications all but tell us that Donald Cameron couldn’t have played on the 1898 football team. The University of Texas Record published in May of 1902 (at a time when the University was less than 20 years old) contained an “alumni catalogue” of many of its graduates and former students who attended from 1884 through 1901. In its pages are a treasure trove of one-paragraph mini-biographies of students from UT’s earliest era. About Donald Cameron, it told readers the date and place of his birth, the names of his parents, where he was educated before entering UT, and several offices and academic posts he held during his time as a student. It did not mention him being a member of the UT football team, but it did say that he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1896 and was a teacher of Latin and Greek at San Antonio High School from 1897 to 1899.2 This last fact alone would make it extremely unlikely that he could have played on his alma mater’s football team in 1898.

The Cactus yearbook also pointed to someone other than Donald being the man with the last name Cameron who played on the 1898 team. The UT yearbooks of that period were inconsistent from one year to the next in terms of how much information they provided on the University’s athletic teams and the players who formed them, but the 1899 Cactus was unusually detailed in its section on the 1898 football team. On page 178 it featured a “Statistics of Football Teams” list that noted for each player what position they played, their academic class and what department they were enrolled in, their city of residence; their age, height and weight; and the number of games played that season.

According to this list, the member of the 1898 football team named Cameron was a 20-year-old guard from Coleman, Texas who was a senior law student, and despite weighing a mere 176 pounds he was the team’s second-heaviest player. At least three of these details differ from the facts of Donald Cameron’s life as shown in the above mini bio from the 1902 University of Texas Record. He was 23 years old in the fall of 1898, was never a law student, and hailed from a town that was over 200 miles from Coleman.

Page 56 of the same Cactus yearbook listed that year’s senior law class of 1898-99, and one of the 59 names on that list was Dowell Officer Cameron. This man’s first name was actually Donnell, and the misspelling of his name on that page of the yearbook suggests that the yearbook’s typist may have copied from a list of names written in the cursive handwriting common at that time and misread “Donnell” as “Dowell”.

Given what is known about Donnell Cameron and his background, it is a virtual certainty that he, not Donald, was the 1898 football letterman named Cameron.

Donnell Officer Cameron was born on September 12, 1878 in White County, Tennessee. Officer was his mother’s maiden name, and it appears that throughout his life he was commonly referred to by his initials D.O. His father, William Newton Cameron, was a Tennessee native and one of 13 children born to his family. W.N. Cameron was a student at Burritt College in Spencer, Tennessee when his home state seceded from the Union in 1861. He enlisted in the Confederate Army soon afterward and was made a lieutenant in the 25th Tennessee Infantry. He was twice captured by Union forces during the Civil War, and it was during his second stint in Union custody that he was part of a group of Confederate prisoners who became known in the South as the “Immortal Six Hundred”.

W.N. Cameron returned to Tennessee after the war and married Luisa Officer in 1867. They had three children, Donnell being the middle child. The Cameron family lived in Sparta, Tennessee for most of the next two decades, but also spent a three-year period living and farming in Modesto, California. The family moved from Sparta to Coleman, Texas in 1889, when Donnell was 10 or 11 years old. W.N. Cameron had worked in banking during his last years in Sparta, and after moving to Texas he was a founder of the institution that became the Coleman National Bank.3

Donnell Cameron may have attended Coleman’s public schools as a youth, but Coleman High School historian Ralph Terry tells me he can find no record of Cameron graduating from CHS, which had its earliest known graduating classes in the middle of the 1890s. Cameron returned to his native state for the beginning of his college education and enrolled at Cumberland University in Lebanon (about 30 miles east of Nashville) in 1895. He went out for the Cumberland football team that fall, and as a 17-year-old freshman he was a regular starter at center, which was then often referred to as the “center-rush” position. Cumberland had organized its first football team only a year earlier in October of 1894.

Cameron transferred to Austin College in Sherman, Texas at some point after the fall of 1895, and in the fall of 1896 he was the captain and fullback of Austin College’s first varsity football team. The team only played one intercollegiate game that season, a 22-6 loss to Texas A&M on November 26.4

Cameron resigned as the team’s captain soon after the loss to A&M due to a dispute with Austin College’s athletic association over whether the team captain or an association-approved committee should be the final authority on decisions relating to the team’s training and workouts.5

Cameron returned to Cumberland University after his brief time at Austin College, and he would graduate from Cumberland in the spring of 1898 with a Bachelor of Laws degree. Later in 1898 he enrolled at the University of Texas as a senior law student and joined the UT football team, which was playing just its sixth season after the formation of the first varsity squad in 1893. Cameron was a substitute player on the UT football team during the 1898 season, appearing in three of its six games. The Cactus yearbook identified him as a guard, though the published lineup for UT’s October 29 game against Galveston listed him as a right tackle. He was most likely a football letterman for three different schools given his time at Cumberland, Austin College, and UT.

I have not found any contemporary reports describing his play while on the team at Texas, but a later account by one of his teammates provides further evidence that the Cameron of the 1898 team was Donnell and not Donald. Ed Overshiner, the starting center on UT’s 1898 and 1899 teams, was one of several former players who wrote letters to the Alcalde (the magazine of the UT ex-students’ association) in 1915 to share their memories of the early years of Texas football. Overshiner had begun his college career at Texas A&M and played on its football team during the 1896 and 1897 seasons. He graduated in 1898 and enrolled at UT later that year as a law student.

Overshiner wrote that he had intended to leave football behind and fully devote his time to his law studies after arriving in Austin, but was convinced by some members of the UT varsity football team to come out for its early practices in 1898. A&M and Texas had not played each other in football during Overshiner’s time at the former institution, and in his 1915 letter to the Alcalde he recalled his first practice with the Texas varsity.6

When I first went on the field all the men were strangers to me, save one who ran so high and precipitately headlong, that I was sure that I had met him before. It developed that he was Cameron, who had skinned my face in a game that A. and M. played at Sherman against Austin College in the fall of 1896. In those days we wore duck jackets; the result was a skinning when your bare flesh happened to get sideswiped.

Cameron attended the University of Texas from 1898 to 1899. He evidently did not receive a degree, but his Bachelor of Laws degree from Cumberland and the year of additional legal education at UT was apparently enough for him to start a career in law after he returned to Coleman in 1899. By early 1900 he held elected office as the County Attorney for Coleman County. He served in that office for a few years, then moved to British Columbia, Canada in around 1905 along with his older brother James Oscar Cameron, and there they founded the Cameron Lumber Company.

They ran that company for many years, beginning with James as its president and Donnell as its secretary. Their business grew over the years, and by the early 1940s the Cameron brothers owned several companies that were officially subsidiaries of the Cameron Investment and Securities Company Ltd.7 Donnell Cameron became a naturalized Canadian citizen during his long residence in that country.

Between 1943 and 1946 Donnell Cameron mourned the deaths of his brother and sister, and then his wife, who died from a heart attack in December of 1946 after 40 years of marriage. He re-married a year later and returned permanently to the United States in 1948, settling in Los Angeles, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became an American citizen once again in 1950 after his naturalization papers were approved.

One of his grandsons, also named Donnell Cameron (a recording engineer and music producer in California), confirmed for me in an email that his grandfather had played football at the University of Texas.

Donnell Officer Cameron died on January 24, 1971, at the age of 92. The Texas Longhorns won their first three national championships in football within his lifetime, but he has never been recognized as a program letterman under his own name.

After cross-referencing UT’s all-time football results with the list of recognized national champions in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision Records, I found that the Longhorns have played against a team considered a national champion (at least on paper) from the previous year on 46 occasions.

Earlier this week I wrote about nine of those games, all of them wins by the Longhorns against teams that claimed a national championship from the previous season at the time.

I said in that piece I would have another post on the full history of “Texas Longhorns vs. defending national champions”, and this will be the completion of that work. Before diving further into those historic results, some clarification is in order to define which teams really count as “defending national champions” for this exercise.

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The NCAA itself has never recognized an official national champion for football at the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) level, which was formerly known as Division I-A. Until the advent of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) and its successor, the College Football Playoff (neither of which were organized or officially run by the NCAA), there was nothing resembling an annual championship game or playoff bracket to determine a champion for the highest level of college football.

The college football national champions listed in the NCAA record book for every season since 1869 (the year that Princeton and Rutgers played what is now considered the first college football game) are those that were named as such either by a major poll of human voters at the end of a season (the Associated Press and the Coaches Poll being the best-known and most-cited out of that group), or by getting the top rating in a mathematical formula designed by an NCAA-recognized “major selector”. Some of those national championships awarded by virtue of a team’s ranking in a math/computer ranking were done so in real time, while others were the result of a formula being applied retroactively to results and game scores from years far into the past. This multitude of selectors using a variety of methods to determine the best college football team in a particular year has led to many seasons in which multiple teams claimed national championships, with some claims being much stronger than others.

The Associated Press (AP) did its first college football poll during the 1936 season, while the Coaches Poll began in 1950. Most national champions for seasons prior to 1936 were named by a mathematical or computer ranking formula and not a human poll, and the vast majority of those titles were awarded retroactively.

For example, the Sagarin Ratings (created by statistician Jeff Sagarin) have rated the best teams in college football in real time since the 1978 season. Sagarin’s formula was also used to retroactively name national champions for the seasons between 1919 and 1977, and because the Sagarin Ratings are a recognized “major selector”, the teams selected as champions by its formula are included in the NCAA’s record book. The Billingsley Report, which began rating college football teams during the 1970 season, later used its methodology to name national champions from the first century of college football (1869 to 1969), and it has been a recognized major selector by the NCAA since 1996.

Most of the earliest math-based systems that have ranked college football teams in real time began naming national champions during the 1920s or 1930s, and some of them would — like the much later Billingsley Report and Sagarin Ratings — go on to name national champions for prior seasons. So most schools that now claim national championships for seasons prior to the 1920s are claiming titles that were “awarded” decades after the fact.

Some programs are more enthusiastic than others in claiming such retroactive national championships. Princeton claims national championships for all of the 28 seasons in which at least one NCAA-recognized selector chose it as the best team. Those 28 claimed titles range chronologically from 1869 to 1950 and 25 of them were awarded retroactively; only the last three of those championships (1933, 1935, and 1950) were awarded to Princeton by a selector at the time. The first seven national championships Princeton claims are from seasons in which its team played three or fewer games!

A bit closer to home for most readers of this newsletter, there’s Texas A&M. The Aggies went undefeated in 1939 and were ranked #1 in the final AP poll. For over seven decades this was the only national championship that A&M claimed. Then in 2012, as the Aggies were preparing for their first season in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), they famously “updated” their Wall of Champions at Kyle Field to include previously unclaimed national championships from 1919 and 1927, seasons for which they had been retroactively named champions by the Billingsley Report and Sagarin Ratings, respectively.

During preparation for this post, Auburn announced that it would officially claim seven national championships in football — ranging from the years 1910 to 2004 — that its program had never previously claimed.

The Texas Longhorns, on the other hand, only claim national titles from the four seasons in which the team was ranked #1 in the final AP and/or Coaches Poll (1963, 1969, 1970, and 2005). The Longhorns do not claim national championships for five other seasons (1914, 1941, 1968, 1977, and 1981) in which they were named champions by math-based ratings system but not by a major human poll. UT’s longtime rival Oklahoma has a similar policy in claiming national titles.

In this post I’ll go through each and every instance of the Texas Longhorns playing a team now listed in the NCAA record book as a national champion from the previous year, but will start with the games that most closely resemble tomorrow’s season-opener at Ohio State: those played against teams who were named national champs at the time and who actually claim a championship from the season in question.

I will make note of the games I already covered in detail in my previous post and will not repeat my full summary of those contests.

The Texas Longhorns vs. defending national champions — recognized at the time and officially claimed by the school

1936 — Texas vs. SMU
1936 — Texas at TCU
1936 — Texas at Minnesota

The NCAA record book lists four national champions for the 1935 season: Minnesota, Princeton, SMU, and TCU. (Note: 1935 was the last college football season played before the advent of the Associated Press poll.) All four were named as national champions by at least one contemporary selector, and in the following year the 1936 Texas Longhorns faced not one, not two, but three of those defending national champs! And in consecutive weeks!

In 1935, SMU went 12-0 in the regular season and was named national champion by the Dickinson System and Houlgate System (two contemporary math-based rating formulas), though the Mustangs went on to lose 7-0 in the Rose Bowl to a 7-1 Stanford team that had been rated fifth by the Dickinson System.

TCU went 11-1 in the 1935 regular season, with its only loss coming by a 20-14 score against SMU in a late November game that some sportswriters at the time called the “Game of the Century”. TCU ended its season with a 3-2 win in the Sugar Bowl over SEC champion LSU. The Williamson System, a math-based system which did its final ratings of the 1935 season after the bowl games, ranked TCU first, SMU second, and LSU third.

Minnesota was at its historic peak as a football power at that time, as the Golden Gophers compiled a record of 27 wins, one loss, and four ties in the four seasons between 1933 and 1936 and claimed national championships in the three latter years (1934-36). Its 1935 team was named national champion by three contemporary rating systems, while the Williamson System that had ranked TCU, SMU, and LSU ahead of Minnesota dinged the Golden Gophers for not having played as strong a schedule.

The 1936 season was a forgettable one for Longhorn fans, as the team finished with the worst record in program history at the time at 2-6-1, and head coach Jack Chevigny resigned after just three seasons at the helm. After beginning that season 1-2-1, Texas played the first of three straight games against a 1935 national champion when it hosted a 3-1 SMU team on October 31. Texas played one of its better games of that season against the Mustangs, taking a 7-0 lead early on. But they were unable to add any more points to the scoreboard in an eventual 14-7 loss. SMU proved to be far below the level of its 1935 team, and followed up its win over Texas by losing three straight Southwest Conference (SWC) contests.

The following week, Texas faced TCU, which returned star quarterback and future Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Sammy Baugh for his senior year but had struggled to a 3-2-1 start that included its first-ever loss to Texas Tech (then a member of the Border Conference) and its first loss to Texas A&M in 12 years. The Horned Frogs rebounded to go 6-0-1 in the second half of the season and outscored their last seven opponents 119-12, capping off the season with a 16-6 win over Marquette in the Cotton Bowl. That second half resurgence by the defending national champion Horned Frogs included a dominating 27-6 win over the Longhorns on November 7.

One week after being blown out (by the standards of that time) by TCU, Texas travelled to Minneapolis for a November non-conference matchup with second-ranked Minnesota, which was two weeks removed a 6-0 defeat at the hands of third-ranked Northwestern, its first loss since the end of the 1932 season. Texas was 1-4-1 and at arguably the lowest point in program history going into its 1936 game on the road against two-time defending champion Minnesota, making it one of the most straightforward mismatches on paper of any Longhorn game ever. Minnesota took a 35-0 lead early in the 3rd quarter before Texas got onto the scoreboard, and three Longhorn touchdowns brought the final score to a slightly more respectable but still lopsided 47-19. The 19 points Texas scored were more than the combined total Minnesota allowed to its other seven foes that season (13), and it was the most points scored by a Minnesota opponent in a single game in four years.

That 1936 Minnesota team went on to finish 7-1 and was named national champion by multiple selectors, including the Associated Press in what was its first season to award a national championship.

1939 — Texas vs. TCU

I wrote about this game in my previous post. Texas won 25-19 over a TCU team that would finish 3-7 a year after having gone undefeated and being named the AP’s national champion. It was the first time the Texas Longhorns beat a team that had claimed a national championship from the previous season.

1940 — Texas vs. Texas A&M

I also covered this game in some detail in the previous post. Texas A&M was the AP’s 1939 national champion and took a 19-game winning streak into its Thanksgiving Day game against Texas in the 1940 season, looking for a win and a claim on a second consecutive national title. But Texas scored a touchdown in the game’s first minute and played outstanding defense for the final 59 minutes to come away with an upset 7-0 win over the heavily-favored Aggies.

1951 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

The 1950 Oklahoma Sooners went 10-0 in the regular season and claimed their program’s first national championship after finishing first in the final AP and United Press/Coaches Poll, the latter of which was in its first season of existence. The Sooners would go on to lose to Kentucky in the Sugar Bowl, which didn’t matter at the time because both major polls did their final rankings before a season’s bowl games.

When Texas played the defending national champion Sooners in 1951 they took a 9-0 first half lead and managed to hold it for a 9-7 win. I wrote a bit more about this game in my previous post.

1952 — Texas vs. Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl

Texas closed its 1952 season with a dominating 16-0 win in the Cotton Bowl over Tennessee, which had finished the 1951 season with the #1 ranking in both the AP and Coaches Poll, but, like 1950 champion Oklahoma, went on to lose its bowl game. Tennessee was recognized as a national champion for the 1951 season due to its finish in the major polls, though four other programs also claim a national title for that year: Georgia Tech, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan State.

I covered the 1952 Texas-Tennessee game in my previous post. Texas rushed for 269 yards as a team, while its defense mauled Tennessee’s line so aggressively that the Volunteers finished with -14 rushing yards.

1956 — Texas vs. Oklahoma
1957 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Texas did not fare as well in its next two matchups against a defending national champ. Oklahoma won 47 consecutive games between the 1953 and 1957 seasons and claimed national championships in 1955 and 1956.

The 33rd win in that 47-game streak was a 45-0 thrashing of the 1956 Texas Longhorns, one of the worst teams in program history. OU more than doubled the Longhorns’ offensive output in that matchup and forced seven Texas turnovers. Texas finished that season with a 1-9 record, which led to the resignation of head coach and UT alum Ed Price and the eventual hiring of Oklahoma alum Darrell Royal.

The Longhorns fought much harder a year later in Royal’s first time coaching against his alma mater. The 1957 Texas Longhorns were 2-1 coming into the game against the defending national champion Sooners, having lost in the previous week to South Carolina. The game was tied 7-7 at halftime, but two Oklahoma touchdowns in the second half allowed the Sooners to pull away late and win 21-7.

Oklahoma’s winning streak ended at 47 a few weeks later when it lost 7-0 to Notre Dame on November 16, 1957, but the Sooners finished 10-1 and were fourth in the final AP poll. Texas had an overall record of 6-4-1 but finished second in the SWC standings. After losing to Oklahoma in 1957, Texas would beat the Sooners in 12 of the next 13 matchups in that rivalry.

1961 — Texas vs. Ole Miss in the Cotton Bowl

Ole Miss’s 1960 team finished 10-0-1, was ranked 2nd in the final AP poll, and was named national champion by the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA). Ole Miss is one of four programs that claims a national title for the 1960 season, including Minnesota, which went 8-1 in the regular season and was the #1 team in the final AP and Coaches Poll, but lost to sixth-ranked Washington in the Rose Bowl.

In 1961 Ole Miss spent six weeks in the top two spots in the AP’s rankings and beat its first six opponents by a combined score of 204-13, but its hopes for a repeat national championship were effectively ended after a 10-7 loss to then sixth-ranked LSU. The Rebels finished the regular season with a 9-1 record and were fifth in the final AP rankings, and they received a Cotton Bowl invitation to face third-ranked Texas, which had held the #1 ranking for two weeks in November before a shocking 6-0 loss at home to an unranked TCU team on November 18.

Ole Miss substantially outgained the Longhorns in their Cotton Bowl matchup, but Texas won by a 12-7 score, helped greatly by its defense recording five interceptions. “Ole Miss led in total yardage 319 to just 183 — but made more mistakes than the United Nations”, wrote Wayne Thompson of the Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger.

Alabama, which went 11-0 but did not have to face either #4 LSU or #5 Ole Miss in SEC play, was the #1 team in the final AP and Coaches Poll. Had the College Football Playoff existed at that time, the 1961 national champion might have been very different, but that’s a subject for another post.

1965 — Texas at Arkansas

Arkansas claimed its only national championship after an 11-0 season in 1964. The Razorbacks beat top-ranked and defending national champion Texas 14-13 on October 17, and held the #2 ranking in the final AP and Coaches Poll, which were still done before the bowl games. Unbeaten Alabama was the #1 team in both polls and claimed a national championship on that basis, but went on to lose to Texas 21-17 in the Orange Bowl. The FWAA and Helms Athletic Foundation, which both chose their national champions after the bowl games, picked Arkansas after the second-ranked Razorbacks beat sixth-ranked Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl.

When Texas and Arkansas met in 1965, the Longhorns were ranked #1 and the FWAA’s defending national champion Razorbacks were ranked third. Texas trailed 20-0 in the 2nd quarter, but came back to take a 24-20 lead in the 4th quarter. But Arkansas took back the lead for good following an 80-yard drive that ended with a one-yard touchdown with 1:32 left on the clock. Arkansas won 27-24.

Texas lost three of its next four games and finished the regular season with a record of 6-4. This was the first of three consecutive four-loss seasons for the Longhorns, which would eventually prompt their move to the wishbone triple-option offense beginning with the 1968 season.

Arkansas won the rest of its regular season games in 1965 and had the #2 ranking and a 22-game winning streak going into the Cotton Bowl against LSU. This was the first season in which the AP conducted its final poll after the bowl games (the Coaches Poll would not make that change until 1974), and Arkansas had a chance to win its second national championship with #1 Michigan State losing 14-12 to #5 UCLA in the Rose Bowl. But the Razorbacks lost 14-7 to LSU, and 9-1-1 Alabama (the only team in the AP’s pre-bowl top four to win its bowl game) vaulted past three previously unbeaten teams in the final AP rankings to take the #1 spot.

1968 — Texas vs. Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl

The wishbone offense was first unveiled by the Texas Longhorns during the 1968 season. That campaign began with a 20-20 tie against Houston and a 31-22 loss to Texas Tech in Lubbock, and ended with the Longhorns winning their last eight regular season games (in which they averaged 37.6 points per game) and dominating eighth-ranked Tennessee 36-13 in the Cotton Bowl. I wrote about that game in my prior post.

Tennessee was technically a defending national champion from the 1967 season. USC was the consensus national champ for 1967, as it was the top-ranked team by the AP, UPI, FWAA, and several other selectors. 10-1 Oklahoma and 8-2 Notre Dame (who were ranked 3rd and 5th in 1967’s final AP poll) were named champions by a pair of math-based ratings systems, but neither program claims a championship for that year. Tennessee, which went 9-1 in the regular season and was the SEC’s champion, was ranked 2nd in the final AP poll, but was named the 1967 national champion by the Litkenhous Ratings. Litkenhous did its final ratings shortly before Christmas and before the bowl games were played, which benefitted Tennessee because the Volunteers lost 26-24 to third-ranked Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl.

The 1967 season is one of six for which Tennessee claims a national championship, though the Volunteers have only been named champion by the AP or Coaches Poll on two occasions (1951 and 1998).

1975 — Texas vs. Oklahoma
1976 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

After dominating college football in the mid-1950s, Oklahoma had its second extended run as national college football powerhouse during the ten seasons from 1971 to 1980, in which the Sooners compiled a record of 105-11-2 with seven major bowl wins and two national championships.

OU’s 1974 team went 11-0 and allowed no opponents to score more than 14 points. They were consensus national champs that year, and when Texas played the defending national champion Sooners in 1975 it was a battle of two undefeated teams both ranked in the top five. In the end, #2 Oklahoma prevailed 24-17 over #5 Texas.

Oklahoma was ranked in the top three by the Coaches Poll and the AP going into the bowl games at the end of the 1975 season, but ascended to #1 in the final polls and claimed a second consecutive national championship after #1 Ohio State lost in the Rose Bowl and #2 Texas A&M lost its final two games to Arkansas and USC (in the Liberty Bowl). Texas remained in the top ten for the rest of that season and was #6 in the AP’s post-bowl rankings after finishing 10-2.

The Sooners were once again defending champions when they played Texas in 1976, which would be Darrell Royal’s last season as the Longhorns’ head coach. Oklahoma came into that game unbeaten at 4-0 and ranked third by the AP, while Texas was 2-1 and ranked 16th. It was before this game that Royal accused Oklahoma of having spied on the Longhorns’ secret practices. The Texas defense thoroughly dominated Oklahoma for most of the game, and a pair of Longhorn field goals represented the game’s only points midway through the fourth quarter. Oklahoma’s offense had only converted one first down in the entire game up to that point, but a Longhorn fumble gave Oklahoma the ball with 5:25 left in the game, and just under four minutes later the Sooners scored on a one-yard run to tie the game at 6-6 and potentially take the lead with a successful PAT. But the snap on OU’s extra point attempt was way off target, and the game ended in a tie, the first in the Texas-Oklahoma rivalry since 1937.

Texas lost four of its last seven games to finish 5-5-1, while Oklahoma finished 9-2-1 and was denied a third straight national title.

1982 — Texas vs. SMU
1983 — Texas at SMU (at Texas Stadium in Irving)

SMU claims two national championships from the early-1980s “Pony Express” era. In 1981, SMU went 10-1 and was ranked fifth in the final AP poll. Clemson, the only team to finish that season undefeated, was the consensus national champion, but the National Championship Foundation named six(!) different teams as national champs for that year: Clemson, Nebraska, Penn State, Pittsburgh, SMU, and Texas. Of that group, only Clemson and SMU actually claim national championships for 1981. (Texas went 10-1-1 in 1981, gave SMU their only loss of the year and also tallied wins over the teams that finished 7th and 8th in the final AP poll, but also had an embarrassing 42-11 loss to unranked Arkansas.)

So the SMU Mustangs were technically a defending national champion when Texas hosted them on October 23, 1982. SMU came into that game ranked fourth, while Texas was 3-1 and had fallen from 13th to 19th after a loss to Oklahoma two weeks earlier. The official attendance for the 1982 Texas-SMU game was 80,157, which was the second-largest crowd ever to attend a game at Memorial Stadium up to that point. Texas trailed 23-17 late in the 4th quarter and had a chance to get the ball back with SMU having a 3rd down near midfield, but a 46-yard touchdown pass to a wide open Craig James clinched a 30-17 win for the Mustangs.

It was UT’s only loss in SWC play that season, and the Longhorns would finish out the 1982 campaign with a 9-3 overall record. SMU finished 11-0-1, with the only blemish on its record being a 17-17 tie vs. ninth-ranked Arkansas in its last regular season game. The Mustangs beat sixth-ranked Pittsburgh in the Cotton Bowl by a 7-3 score and finished second in the final AP and Coaches Poll. Penn State, which had won a #1 vs. #2 battle over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, was named 1982 national champion by nearly every NCAA selector. But SMU was named national champion by the First Interstate Bank Athletic Foundation, which had formerly been the Helms Athletic Foundation and had been naming college football national champions since 1942. SMU’s football program claims a national championship for 1982 on that basis, and it was the last national championship for football awarded by the former Helms Athletic Foundation.

So when Texas and SMU met in conference play in 1983, the Longhorns were once again facing a technical defending national champion. SMU had graduated running back stars Eric Dickerson and Craig James, but still had a strong team and were undefeated and ranked ninth going into the October 22 game, which was played not at SMU’s home stadium but at the much larger Texas Stadium in Irving, then home to the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. The Longhorns were 5-0 and ranked second, and had just beaten Oklahoma and Arkansas in consecutive weeks.

The 1983 Longhorns had an often suspect offense but also one of the best defensive units — if not the best — in program history. Texas limited SMU to 216 offensive yards and forced four Mustang turnovers, while the Longhorn offense had a huge advantage on time of possession but committed six turnovers of their own. The game was tied 6-6 at halftime, and a Texas touchdown in the 3rd quarter gave the team a 13-6 lead. An SMU touchdown with just under three minutes remaining in the 4th quarter cut the lead to 13-12, and SMU lined up for a two-point conversion attempt hoping to take the lead. But UT’s All-American defensive back Jerry Gray tipped the ensuing pass intended for an SMU receiver to preserve the Longhorn lead. A safety in the final minute gave Texas a 15-12 cushion, and that was the final score.

Texas held the #2 ranking for the rest of the regular season and had a chance to claim a national title with a win over #7 Georgia in the Cotton Bowl, but a heartbreaking 10-9 loss (about which no more needs to be said here) dashed those hopes. SMU went 10-1 in the 1983 regular season, lost to Alabama in the Sun Bowl, and was ranked 11th in the final Coaches Poll and 12th in the final AP poll.

1986 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

The 1986 Texas Longhorns finished 5-6 in the final season of head coach Fred Akers’s tenure. By far the most lopsided of those six losses was a 47-12 drubbing at the hands of Oklahoma in a game where the Sooners outgained the Longhorns 396 to 29 in rushing yardage. Oklahoma was the defending consensus national champion from the 1985 season, in which the Sooners went 11-1 and beat #1 Penn State 25-10 in the Orange Bowl. This was the last of three national titles Oklahoma would claim during the Barry Switzer era.

Oklahoma began the 1986 season ranked #1, but fell from that spot after losing 28-16 to #2 Miami on September 27. The Sooners won the rest of their games and were ranked third in the final AP poll, while Penn State claimed that season’s national championship after beating #1 Miami in the Fiesta Bowl. Speaking of Miami…

1990 — Texas vs. Miami in the Cotton Bowl

In one of the most pitiful endings to a Longhorn season ever, Texas committed five turnovers and saw its quarterbacks sacked nine times in a 46-3 humiliation at the hands of the defending national champion Miami Hurricanes in the Cotton Bowl after the 1990 regular season. In 1989, Miami went 10-1 in the regular season and was ranked second going into the bowl games, but rose to #1 in both polls after beating seventh-ranked Alabama in the Sugar Bowl while top-ranked Colorado lost to Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl.

Texas and Miami were ranked third and fourth, respectively, when they met in the Cotton Bowl to end the 1990 season. Both were in a position to potentially claim a national championship if either #1 Colorado or #2 Georgia Tech lost their bowl games, but when those teams both won their bowl games it rendered the result of the Cotton Bowl moot for national title considerations. Colorado (11-1-1) finished #1 in the final AP poll, while Georgia Tech (11-0-1) received the most votes in the Coaches Poll, and both claimed national championships for that year.

1996 — Texas vs. Nebraska in the Big 12 Championship

I wrote about this game in my previous post and won’t repeat all of that here. Texas and Nebraska met in the first Big 12 Championship game after that conference’s formation in 1996. Nebraska had won back-to-back national championships in 1994 and 1995, and if not for a missed field goal in the final seconds of the Orange Bowl they would have also won a title in 1993.

Texas had a record of 7-5 and was a three-touchdown underdog when it prepared to face third-ranked Nebraska in the 1996 Big 12 Championship. Nebraska had amassed a record of 46-2 since the start of the 1993 season and was hoping to claim a third straight national title. But a 37-27 upset win by the Longhorns spoiled those plans.

The Cornhuskers went on to beat Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl and were ranked sixth in the final AP and Coaches Poll. Had they beaten Texas they likely would have ended up with a share of that season’s national championship, as the two teams ranked ahead of them before the Big 12 Championship (Florida State and Arizona State) both lost in their respective bowl games.

1998 — Texas at Nebraska

Two years after ending Nebraska’s national championship hopes, the 1998 Texas Longhorns upset another highly-ranked Cornhusker team and dealt them their first home loss since the 1991 season. Nebraska had rebounded from their disappointing finish to the 1996 season by going unbeaten in 1997 and finishing #1 in the final Coaches Poll (Michigan was the AP’s choice for national champion).

Defending national champ Nebraska was 7-1 and ranked seventh when it hosted Texas on October 31, 1998. Texas was 5-2 in head coach Mack Brown’s first season in Austin and had lost a pair of early season games against highly-ranked UCLA and Kansas State, while Nebraska had lost to Texas A&M three weeks earlier. Texas scored a touchdown with 2:47 left in regulation to take a 20-16 lead, and Nebraska got as far as midfield on its final possession before turning the ball over on downs.

The Longhorns would finish 15th in the final AP poll after posting a 9-3 record and winning the Cotton Bowl over Mississippi State.

2001 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 200 team went 13-0 and won the BCS National Championship in Bob Stoops’s second season as head coach. The following year, OU won its first four games and was ranked third going into the Red River Shootout against fifth-ranked Texas. That matchup against the defending national champions turned out to be an offense-challenged contest in which the teams combined for only 90 net rushing yards and one offensive touchdown, punted 12 times, and had three field goal attempts that were either blocked or otherwise missed.

Texas trailed 7-3 at halftime, and the Longhorns’ second half possessions resulted in three punts, three interceptions, and a turnover on downs with 35 seconds left in the 4th quarter. Oklahoma’s offense performed only marginally better in the second half, but its defense came through to provide the game-sealing points when Texas had the ball in the shadow of its own end zone and Sooner safety Roy Williams tipped a Chris Simms pass that went right into the hands of linebacker Teddy Lehman, who walked into the end zone for a two-yard touchdown to help make the final score 14-3.

Oklahoma would go on to extend its winning streak to 20 games, but its drive for a second consecutive national championship took a hit after a loss to third-ranked Nebraska, and it ended entirely after a shocking 16-13 loss at home to unranked Oklahoma State in late November. That defeat helped Texas edge by OU in the Big 12 South standings, and the Longhorns went on to play Colorado in the Big 12 Championship game, where they fell 39-37.

2005 — Texas vs. USC in the Rose Bowl - BCS National Championship Game

Nine years after foiling Nebraska’s drive for a third consecutive national championship, the Longhorns topped two-time defending national champion USC, a team that had won 34 straight games. This was another game I wrote about in my previous post.

Texas trailed 38-26 in the 4th quarter, but came back to score a pair of touchdowns in the game’s final 6:42, with Longhorn quarterback Vince Young scoring the game-winning points on a nine-yard touchdown run on a 4th-and-5 play with just 19 seconds left on the clock. With the win the Texas Longhorns claimed the fourth national championship in their program’s history.

2024 — Texas at Michigan

One year ago, the third-ranked Texas Longhorns got a convincing 31-12 win over tenth-ranked Michigan in their second game of the 2024 season. The Michigan Wolverines had gone 15-0 and won the College Football Playoff Championship for the 2023 season, the 12th national championship that the Wolverines claim.

Texas followed up its victory over the defending national champs with wins in its next four games and ascended to the top spot in the AP rankings, and the Longhorns remained in the top five throughout the season even with a pair of losses to Georgia, the second of which came in overtime in the SEC Championship game. Texas reached the semifinals of the College Football Playoff for the 2024 season before losing to eventual national champion Ohio State, who they will take on Saturday to open their 2025 season.

The Texas Longhorns vs. defending national champions — titles awarded retroactively and/or not claimed by the school

In addition to the games summarized above, there have been at least 23 other instances when the Texas Longhorns played a team that the NCAA record book now names as a national champion from the previous season, but this section covers national championships that were either awarded retroactively or are otherwise not claimed by the programs in question.

1911 — Texas vs. Auburn

In their penultimate game of the 1911 season, the Texas Longhorns beat Auburn 18-5. In the previous season, Auburn had gone 6-1 and outscored opponents 176-9, their only loss being by a 9-0 score to Texas. In 1996, the Billingsley Report’s margin of victory formula retroactively named Auburn national champion for the 1910 season. Auburn did not claim a national championship for that season until just this month, when it announced it would claim seven national championships (most of them awarded retroactively) it had not previously recognized. In claiming a 1910 title Auburn cited not the Billingsley Report (which has changed its formula a pair of times since 1996) but ratings from statistician Loren Maxwell, a Georgia native who has produced computer rankings for Georgia high school football and college football.

1916 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Texas defeated Oklahoma 21-7 during the 1916 season. In the previous year, Oklahoma had gone 10-0 and won the Southwest Conference championship. (Oklahoma was a member of the SWC for the five seasons from 1915 to 1919.) The Billingsley Report retroactively named OU’s 1915 team as national champion in the early 2000s, and NCAA record books since 2004 have included OU as a national champion for that year, but the Sooners do not officially claim that title.

1920 — Texas vs. Texas A&M

The Texas Longhorns capped off an undefeated 1920 season by beating Texas A&M 7-3. UT’s points, which came courtesy of a 4th quarter touchdown run by halfback Francis Domingues, were the first points scored against A&M in two years, dating back to UT’s 7-0 win over the Aggies in 1918. Texas A&M had gone 18 games without allowing a single point going into the 1920 Thanksgiving matchup with the Longhorns. A&M’s 1919 team went undefeated, and decades later it was retroactively named a national champion by both the Billingsley Report and the National Championship Foundation. A&M did not officially claim a national championship for the 1919 season until 2012.

1922 — Texas vs. Vanderbilt (at Dallas)
1923 — Texas vs. Vanderbilt (at Dallas)

Texas and Vanderbilt played each other on the gridiron seven times during the 1920s, with six of those games being held in Dallas. Vanderbilt had one of the top football teams in the South during the early part of that decade. Its 1921 team went 7-0-1, tying Georgia and beating its other seven opponents by a combined 154-14. Vandy’s 1922 team (which was captained by future longtime Rice head coach Jess Neely) went 8-0-1, tying Michigan and outscoring its other eight foes 177-16. Both of those Vandy teams were retroactively named national champions for their respective seasons by the Berryman Quality Point Rating System (QPRS), but Vanderbilt does not claim a championship for either season. (Auburn scoffs at such modesty!)

Texas played Vandy in the years that immediately followed both of those seasons, losing to the Commodores in 1922 by a score of 20-10, and beating them 16-0 in 1923.

1928 — Texas vs. Texas A&M

Texas A&M’s 1927 team had a record of 8-0-1, with a scoreless tie against TCU and wins by 14 points or more against its other eight opponents. The 1927 Aggies were retroactively named national champions by statistician Jeff Sagarin over five decades later. As with their retroactive 1919 championship, the Aggies did not claim this title until 2012 when they joined the SEC.

A&M’s 1928 team went 5-4-1 overall and finished near the bottom of the SWC standings. Texas won the conference that year and ended its season with a 19-0 win over the Aggies.

1937 — Texas at LSU

Sagarin and his ratings retroactively named LSU as the national champion for 1936, a season in which the Tigers went 9-1-1 with a tie against Texas and a loss to Santa Clara in the Sugar Bowl while holding their other nine opponents to seven points or less. LSU does not claim a championship for that season. Texas played LSU again in Baton Rouge the following year in Baton Rouge, losing by a 9-0 score.

1946 — Texas vs. Oklahoma A&M

Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) went undefeated during its 1945 season, recording wins over, among others, Arkansas, SMU, TCU, Tulsa, and Oklahoma. The Cowboys were ranked fifth in the final AP poll of that season, and went on to beat seventh-ranked Saint Mary’s 33-13 in the Sugar Bowl. Seven decades later in 2016, a blue ribbon commission of the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) named retroactive national champions for the seasons from 1922 to 1949, those that were played during the AFCA’s early existence and before the first Coaches Poll in 1950. The commission named Oklahoma A&M as national champion for 1945, and Oklahoma State officially claims it as its sole national championship in football.

Oklahoma State claiming a championship from 1945 easily ranks among the weakest and most laughable of all retroactive national title claims. The consensus champion for 1945 was Army, which took full advantage of World War II-era transfer rules to assemble one of the most absurdly talented and stacked teams college football has ever seen. The Army Cadets went 9-0 and finished #1 in the final AP poll, and they scored decisive wins over the teams ranked #2 (Navy), #6 (Michigan), #8 (Penn), #9 (Notre Dame), and #13 (Duke), beating them by an average score of 43-7. Army’s roster included 1945’s Heisman Trophy winner Doc Blanchard, 1946’s Heisman winner Glenn Davis, four consensus All-Americans for the 1945 season, and five players later inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Texas beat Oklahoma A&M 54-6 when the teams played in 1946, a season in which the Cowboys finished 3-7-1.

1950 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 1949 team went 11-0, won the Big 7 Conference, finished 2nd in the final AP poll, and beat ninth-ranked LSU 35-0 in the Sugar Bowl. Notre Dame was that season’s consensus national champion and received nearly ten times as many first-place votes as Oklahoma in the final AP poll. OU was retroactively named a national champion by the Billingsley Report and the College Football Researchers Association (CFRA) but does not claim a championship for that year.

Oklahoma was on a 23-game winning streak when it met Texas in the 1950 season. Third-ranked Oklahoma edged fourth-ranked Texas 14-13 that afternoon, the difference being a missed extra point attempt by the Longhorns after a 4th quarter touchdown. That 1950 Oklahoma team went on to finish the regular season 10-0 and was voted the AP’s and UPI/Coaches Poll’s national champion, but the Sooners went on to lose 13-7 to seventh-ranked Kentucky in the Sugar Bowl. Speaking of Kentucky…

1951 — Texas vs. Kentucky

The 1950 Kentucky team that beat #1 Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl was ranked seventh in the final regular season polls by both the AP and UPI, but was retroactively named 1950 national champion by Jeff Sagarin decades later. The Wildcats have since officially claimed a championship for that season. Texas opened its 1951 season by hosting Kentucky (then coached by future college football coaching legend Bear Bryant in his sixth season at the school) and won 7-6.

1954 — Texas at Notre Dame
1954 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Maryland was the consensus national champion for 1953 after finishing first in the final AP and Coaches Poll, but the Terrapins went on to lose to fourth-ranked Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. For their part, the 1953 Oklahoma Sooners began that season with a seven-point loss to top-ranked Notre Dame and a tie against Pittsburgh, but would win the rest of their games to finish 9-1-1. Notre Dame spent most of that season ranked #1 until a late season tie against Iowa, and the 9-0-1 Fighting Irish were #2 in both major polls at the end of the regular season.

Notre Dame was named national champion by eight contemporary selectors but does not claim a championship for 1953. Neither does Oklahoma, which was retroactively named national champion by the Berryman QPRS and the CFRA. Texas faced both teams the following season. The Longhorns lost 21-0 on the road to then second-ranked Notre Dame on September 25, and lost 14-7 two weeks later to top-ranked Oklahoma. Oklahoma went on to finish the 1954 season undefeated but ended up finishing third in both major polls behind undefeated Ohio State (the AP’s champion) and UCLA (#1 in the final Coaches Poll).

1958 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 1957 team finished 10-1 (the loss was the program’s first since 1953), won the Orange Bowl, and was ranked fourth in the final AP and Coaches Poll. The Sooners were retroactively named 1957 national champions by the Berryman QPRS, but the program does not claim a title for that year.

When Texas and Oklahoma played in 1958 both teams were undefeated, with Oklahoma being ranked second and Texas 16th in the AP poll. The Longhorns upset the Sooners 15-14 in what was Darrell Royal’s second season leading the UT program, and after beating Arkansas the following week they moved up to #4 in the rankings, but went on to lose three of their last five games of that season. Oklahoma did not lose another game in 1958; the Sooners outscored their last eight opponents 233-26, won the Orange Bowl, and were fifth in the final AP poll. (Note: from 1947 to 1958, the Sooners did not have a single season in which they experienced more than two losses.)

1968 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 1967 team went 10-1, finished third in the final AP poll, and beat second-ranked Tennessee 26-24 in the Orange Bowl. The Sooners (whose only loss was a 9-7 defeat at the hands of Texas) were named national champions by the Poling System. Tennessee, which was beaten by Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl and finished with a 9-2 record, was named national champion by the Litkenhous Ratings in late December of 1967 before the bowl games were played. As noted earlier, Tennessee officially claims a national championship for 1967, but Oklahoma, which has an obviously stronger claim, does not. USC was the consensus national champion for that season.

A year later in 1968, Texas trailed Oklahoma 20-19 late in the 4th quarter before a two-yard Steve Worster touchdown run and Happy Feller PAT gave the Longhorns a 26-20 lead with 39 seconds left. It was the second win by the Longhorns in a winning streak that would stretch to 30 games before ending with a loss to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl at the end of the 1970 season.

1974 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma finished the 1973 season — Barry Switzer’s first the Sooners’ as head coach — with a 10-0-1 record, and they were ranked third in the final AP poll and second in the final Coaches Poll. OU was named national champion by the DeVold System and the Dunkel System, but does not claim a championship for 1973.

The Sooners were ranked second when they traveled to Dallas to face rival Texas early in the 1974 season. Oklahoma was a three-touchdown favorite over the 17th-ranked Longhorns, but the Texas defense gave the Sooners all they could handle. Texas led 13-7 early in the 4th quarter, but an Oklahoma touchdown tied the score, and later a 37-yard field goal with 5:25 left in the game gave OU a 16-13 lead that would end up being the game’s final score. Oklahoma handily beat its last seven opponents, with only one of them (sixth-ranked Nebraska) playing them to within 14 points. OU was the AP’s national champion for that season, but was not eligible for the Coaches Poll rankings due to being on probation.

1978 — Texas vs. Arkansas

The 1977 Arkansas Razorbacks — coached by Lou Holtz in his first year in Fayetteville — finished 11-1, beat second-ranked Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl, and finished third in both major polls. Their only loss came by a 13-9 score at home against Texas, who was ranked second at the time. The Rothman FACT ratings named Arkansas, Notre Dame, and Texas as tri-national champions for the 1977 season, but only Notre Dame — which beat previously undefeated Texas in the Cotton Bowl and finished with the #1 ranking in both major polls — claims a championship for that year.

When Arkansas and Texas played in Austin during the 1978 season, they were ranked third and eighth, respectively. Texas beat the Razorbacks 28-21 in a come-from-behind win after Johnny “Lam” Jones caught a four-yard touchdown pass with 6:15 left in the 4th quarter. Texas was ranked as high as sixth that season, but two losses in the season’s second half dropped them in the rankings, and after beating Maryland 42-0 in the Sun Bowl the Longhorns were #9 in both major polls.

1979 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 1978 team went 10-1 in the regular season, losing only to Big Eight Conference rival Nebraska by a 17-14 score in mid-November. OU, whose team was led by Heisman Trophy-winning running back Billy Sims, was ranked #1 for most of that season, but dropped to fourth after the loss to Nebraska. The Sooners got some measure of revenge on the Cornhuskers when both teams were invited to the Orange Bowl, and Oklahoma beat Nebraska 31-24. The 11-1 Sooners were ranked #3 by both major polls at the end of the 1978 season. Alabama (11-1) was ranked #1 by the AP and FWAA, USC (12-1) was ranked #1 in the UPI/Coaches Poll, and Oklahoma was the choice of several math-based ratings systems. The Sooners do not claim a championship for 1978.

When Texas and Oklahoma played in 1979 it was another battle of highly-ranked rivals. Fourth-ranked Texas had an outstanding defensive effort to upend the third-ranked Sooners by a 16-7 score. One of UT’s touchdowns was scored by tight end and Oklahoma native Steve Hall, who was seldom used as a passing target during his career. Texas rose to #2 in the AP rankings after the win over OU, but lost three games over the rest of its season and was #12 in the final AP poll. Oklahoma, as was its wont at the time, won the rest of its games after the loss to Texas and finished with an 11-1 record and the #3 ranking in both major polls.

1981 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 1980 team had a 2-2 record over its first four games, including a 20-13 loss to Texas, but won its last seven regular season games and beat #2 Florida State in the Orange Bowl. Unbeaten Georgia was that season’s consensus national champion, but three selectors chose Oklahoma, which does not claim a championship for that year.

In the 1981 Red River Shootout, the third-ranked Longhorns fell behind the tenth-ranked Sooners 14-3 early in the first half, a pair of Longhorn fumbles setting up those scores. But Texas scored 31 unanswered points in the second half to run away with a 34-14 win. Texas ascended to the #1 spot in the AP rankings following that win, but in the very next week the Longhorns fell flat in a shockingly lopsided 42-11 loss to unranked Arkansas. Texas did not lose another game in 1981 but tied Houston, which led them in second place in the SWC standings at 6-1-1 behind 7-1 SMU, who Texas beat 9-7.

The Longhorns finished the 1981 season with a 14-12 win over third-ranked Alabama in the Cotton Bowl and were #2 in the final AP rankings. Oklahoma had a down season by its standards at the time, finishing with a 7-4-1 record and suffering its most losses in a season since 1970.

1984 — Texas vs. Auburn

The 1983 Texas Longhorns served notice that they were a team to be reckoned with when they dominated fifth-ranked Auburn on the road in a 20-7 win in their first game of that season. That Auburn team, which had several future NFL veterans, went unbeaten the rest of the way and won the Sugar Bowl over eighth-ranked Michigan. Auburn was ranked third by both major polls at the end of that season, and its resumé included wins over the teams ranked fourth, sixth, eighth, and fifteenth. Miami finished #1 in both major polls and was the consensus national champion for 1983, but Auburn was named as the champion by the College Football Researchers Association (CFRA), the New York Times, the Rothman FACT ratings, and the Sagarin Ratings. Auburn did not officially claim a national title for 1983 until just last week.

Texas and Auburn had a rematch in Austin early in the 1984 season, and the Longhorns were once again victorious, this time by a 35-27 score. Texas went 6-0-1 to begin the 1984 season and was never ranked lower than fourth, but then went on to lose four of its last five games, and all of those losses came by margins of 14 points or more.

1987 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 1986 team was the preseason #1 team in both major polls. The Sooners lost 28-16 to Miami in a #1 vs. #2 matchup on September 27, but won the rest of their games to finish 11-1 and with the #3 ranking at the conclusion of the season. Penn State, which went unbeaten and defeated #1 Miami in the Fiesta Bowl, was far and away the consensus national champion for 1986. The CFRA, New York Times, and four math-based ratings systems picked Oklahoma as that season’s champion, but the Sooners do not claim that title.

Oklahoma was once again the preseason #1 team in 1987, while Texas was not ranked. The top-ranked Sooners bowled over the Longhorns 44-9 during their annual October matchup in Dallas. Texas went on to finish 7-5 in David McWilliams’s first season as head coach, while Oklahoma went 11-0 in the regular season and spent virtually the entire season as the top-ranked team before losing 20-14 to #2 Miami in the Orange Bowl.

2004 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s 2003 team was led by fifth-year head coach Bob Stoops and a staff that included five future Division I head coaches. The Sooners were the top-ranked team throughout the regular season and took a 12-0 record into the Big 12 Championship against #12 Kansas State, but lost that game 35-7. Somehow this only dropped them from first to third in the major polls and they were invited to play #2 LSU in the Sugar Bowl, where they lost 21-14. USC (which was the #1 team in the final AP and FWAA rankings) claims a championship for that year, as does LSU (which was #1 in the final Coaches Poll). Oklahoma was chosen as the champion by the Berryman QPRS, but does not claim that title.

In the 2004 Red River Shootout, second-ranked Oklahoma won a defensive struggle over fifth-ranked Texas by a 12-0 score. OU went undefeated in the regular season and won the Big 12, but lost to top-ranked USC in the Orange Bowl. Texas won its last six regular season games before memorably beating Michigan 38-37 on a last-second field goal in the Rose Bowl Game.

2008 — Texas vs. Missouri

Missouri’s 2007 team had one of the best seasons in that program’s recent history. The Tigers won the Big 12 North division and briefly held the AP’s #1 ranking after a 36-28 Border War win over second-ranked Kansas in late November, but they were felled by Oklahoma by a 38-17 score in the Big 12 Championship. Missouri was ranked fourth in the final AP poll and fifth in the final Coaches Poll. LSU won the BCS National Championship game over Ohio State and was the recognized national champion for the 2007 season, but math-based selector Anderson & Hester picked Missouri as that season’s champion. The Tigers do not claim that title.

The following year, Texas played Missouri during a brutal stretch of the 2008 season in which they took on four teams ranked in the top eleven in as many weeks. One week after a memorable 45-35 win over top-ranked Oklahoma in the Red River Shootout, Texas ascended to the #1 ranking and hosted both eleventh-ranked Missouri and the Saturday morning broadcast of ESPN’s College GameDay. Texas walloped Missouri 56-31 that night, and held the #1 ranking for two more weeks before a gut-punch 39-33 loss on the road at Texas Tech.

2012 — Texas at Oklahoma State

Oklahoma State’s 2011 squad boasted a high-flying Air Raid offense and was one of the best teams in the country. The Cowboys won their first ten games and rose from ninth to second in the AP rankings with two regular season games left. OSU’s women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke was killed in a plane crash that also took the lives of three other people just one day before OSU’s November 18 game at Iowa State. A heavy-hearted Cowboys team took a 24-7 lead early in the 3rd quarter, but did not score again in regulation. The game went into overtime after a late missed field goal, and Iowa State prevailed after the second overtime by a 37-31 score. They remained in the top three in the AP’s rankings, but could not pass Alabama in the BCS ratings formula, even after a 44-10 win over Oklahoma. Second-ranked Alabama went on to win the national championship with a 21-0 win over top-ranked LSU in the BCS Championship, while Oklahoma State beat fourth-ranked Stanford in the Fiesta Bowl.

The Colley Matrix computer ranking system chose Oklahoma State as the 2011 national champion, one of four times its choice has differed from the result of the BCS or College Football Playoff Championship. Oklahoma State does not claim a championship for that year.

Texas played Oklahoma State in their fourth game of the 2012 season. Texas led 28-26 going into the 4th quarter, and there were four lead changes in the game’s final ten minutes. The Longhorns trailed 36-34, but a Joe Bergeron touchdown with 29 seconds left put them back on top at 41-36 to allow them to escape Stillwater with a win. Texas was ranked as high as eleventh that season, but finished third in the Big 12 (which had only ten teams by that time) with a 5-4 conference record, and the Longhorns were 19th in the final AP rankings.

And there you have it! The full history of the Texas Longhorns playing teams that were considered defending national champions at the time, or playing teams that were named national champions for the prior season years later. If the SEC continues its recent pattern of college football prominence there should be more such games in store for the Longhorns in the coming years.

The Ohio State-Texas rematch is one of the most highly-anticipated dates on the 2025 college football regular season schedule, as both teams are loaded with future NFL Draft picks and figure to be top contenders to make the College Football Playoff field again come December, and also because the game will be preceded by the final appearance of Lee Corso on ESPN’s College GameDay program before his retirement.

With Texas in the very rare position of opening its college football season against a defending national champion, I went down the historical rabbit hole of past instances of Texas Longhorn football teams playing against a national champion from the previous season. After cross-referencing UT’s all-time football results with the list of recognized national champions in the NCAA’s official Football Bowl Subdivision Records, I found that the Longhorns have played against a national champion from the previous year on at least 46 occasions. Some of those games are ones that Longhorn fans and players would prefer to forget, but that group of games also includes some that are among the most iconic in program history.

In diving into those historic results there is a lot that can be learned about college football changed over the latter decades of the 20th century, the history of how national championships have been awarded in college football since the first human polls and math-based systems of analysis emerged, and about how some programs are much more enthusiastic than others in claiming national titles awarded years after the fact by retroactive computer rankings and such. I’ll cover the full history of Texas Longhorn games played against defending national champs in a later post, but for this one will focus on nine specific games in that history, all of which resulted in wins for Texas.

These nine games are not the only instances of the Texas Longhorns beating a defending national champion. Texas has actually won games over a team that the NCAA record books now record as a national champion from the prior year on at least 25 occasions. When looking only at teams named national champion by the Associated Press (AP) or Coaches Poll, the Longhorns are 8-6-1 all-time when playing them in the following year. But for this post I chose to focus on what I saw as the most consequential or memorable wins over teams that were considered national champions at the time, and not those against squads that were awarded national championships retroactively by a math-based ratings system or football research group decades later. (So no games involving Auburn for this exercise.)1

This post will proceed in chronological order from the first to most recent game, and the years listed for each game indicate the season in which they were played.

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1939 — Texas vs. TCU

TCU’s 1938 team went 11-0 and won the Sugar Bowl over Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) by a 15-7 score. The Horned Frogs, who were led by Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Davey O’Brien, were named that season’s national champions by the now-familiar Associated Press (which was then only in its third year of conducting weekly polls of national sportswriters and awarding a national championship at the end of a college football season) and were named co-champions with undefeated Tennessee by the Williamson System.2

The Texas Longhorns sported a 4-3 record when they prepared to play defending national champion TCU on November 18, 1939. TCU had experienced a sharp downturn in its fortunes following the graduation of O’Brien and All-American center Ki Aldrich (the top overall pick in the 1939 NFL Draft) and came into that game with a record of 2-5.

TCU led Texas 19-14 going into the 4th quarter, but took intentional safeties on two occasions after gaining possession in the shadow of its own end zone on a muddy field following two Texas drives that stalled deep in TCU territory. The second of those safeties cut TCU’s lead to 19-18. TCU punted the ball out of bounds back to Texas following that safety, and shortly afterward Longhorn fullback Gilly Davis ran for a 66-yard touchdown to put Texas ahead 25-19 with about six minutes left in the game. TCU drove into Longhorn territory twice in the game’s final minutes, but both possessions were stopped by interceptions on passes to the end zone.

UT’s win over TCU in 1939 couldn’t be called an upset, as that Horned Frog team was a far cry from the one that had represented the school just one year earlier, but it was notable for being the first occasion in which the Longhorns beat a team recognized at the time as a national champion from the previous season. TCU finished that season with a record of 3-7, almost equaling their total losses from the previous four seasons combined (8).

Texas went on to finish the 1939 season with a 5-4 record, which was a breakthrough that helped the team emerge from the most fallow period in its program’s history at that time. Texas had finished 1-5 in conference play in the four seasons (1935-38) that preceded that year. The Longhorns would go on to compile a record of 55-13-2 and win three conference titles over the next seven seasons (1940-46).

1940 — Texas vs. Texas A&M

The Texas A&M Aggies went 11-0 in the 1939 season and were the consensus national champions of that year, being recognized as such by the Associated Press (AP) and at least five other contemporary selectors. The Aggies returned a number of starters from that team for the 1940 season, most notably fullback John Kimbrough (a two-time All-American who would finish as the runner-up in the 1940 Heisman Trophy balloting and was the second overall pick in the 1941 NFL Draft) and All-American guard Marshall Robnett.

For the Texas Longhorns, the 1940 season — their fourth season under former Texas A&M head coach Dana X. Bible — continued the program’s turnaround that had begun in the previous year. They held a 6-2 record — already their most wins in six years — when they prepared to host defending national champion Texas A&M on November 28.

Texas A&M was unbeaten and had won 19 straight games dating back to the start of the 1939 season. The Aggies were ranked second by the AP in the week leading up to the annual Thanksgiving Day game against Texas and were a decided favorite over the Longhorns, having soundly beaten SMU and Rice in their two most recent games, those teams being the ones which had dealt Texas its two losses. It was expected that a win over the Longhorns was all that separated Texas A&M from receiving an invitation to play in the Rose Bowl, which would present a matchup with third-ranked Stanford, and A&M would surely be a contender for national championship honors from the various bodies that awarded them at the time.

But the Texas Longhorns had other plans.

Texas received the opening kickoff, and within the game’s first minute came one of the most legendary plays in the Longhorn program’s history. On the third offensive play, Texas right halfback Noble Doss ran toward the A&M end zone on a pass play and got enough separation from a defending John Kimbrough to make an over-the-shoulder grab — later dubbed “the Impossible Catch” — to gain 31 yards before being pushed out of bounds just short of the goal line. Longhorn fullback Pete Layden scored on a one-yard touchdown run shortly afterward, and the extra point kick gave Texas a 7-0 lead with only 58 seconds having elapsed on the game clock.

The teams played to a stalemate for the next 59 minutes, with the Longhorns preserving their early lead and keeping the Aggies from reaching the end zone. The Longhorn defense recorded five interceptions, and Doss (who is still the program’s co-leader in career interceptions) was credited with four of them.

This was the era of one-platoon football where free substitutions were not yet allowed and every player lined up on both offense and defense. Nine of the eleven Longhorn starters played for the entire game in that 7-0 win, and only two were substituted out at any point. Those members of the squad who helped foil Texas A&M’s dreams of a second straight national championship in 1940 became known as “The Immortal 13”, and this was the most monumental upset win in the program’s history up to that time.

Texas beat Florida the following week to finish 8-2. The Longhorns continued to build on the progress made in the 1940 season when they achieved the #1 ranking in the AP poll for their first time ever in 1941, and they would win three SWC titles in the four seasons that followed that campaign.

Texas A&M dropped to sixth in the final AP poll of the 1940 season after the loss to Texas and was denied a shot at Stanford in the Rose Bowl.3 Stanford instead defeated seventh-ranked Nebraska 21-13, and was subsequently named national champion by the Poling System and the Williamson System. Texas A&M went on to close its season with a 20-12 win over 12th-ranked Fordham in the Cotton Bowl.

1951 — Texas vs. Oklahoma

The 1950 Oklahoma Sooners went 10-0 in the regular season and claimed their program’s first national championship after being ranked #1 in the final AP and Coaches Poll, the latter of which was in its first season of existence and was organized at that time by the United Press (UP). Both the AP and UP did their final polls before the bowl games, which benefitted Oklahoma because the Sooners lost to seventh-ranked Kentucky 13-7 in the Sugar Bowl to close that season.

Oklahoma was ranked fourth in the first AP poll of the 1951 season but fell to 11th after losing 14-7 to tenth-ranked Texas A&M in its second game. One week later, the sixth-ranked Texas Longhorns took a 9-0 1st quarter lead against the defending national champion Sooners and held on to that lead the rest of the way for a 9-7 win to drop OU’s record to 1-2.

Oklahoma went on to win the last seven games on its schedule by double digits to win the Big Seven Conference championship, and the Sooners were tenth in that season’s final AP poll. Texas rose from sixth to fourth in the AP rankings after the win over Oklahoma brought its record to 4-0, but the Longhorns went 3-3 the rest of that season, with losses to Arkansas, Baylor, and Texas A&M.

1952 — Texas vs. Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl

The 1951 Tennessee Volunteers finished the regular season undefeated at 10-0 and were ranked #1 in the final polls by both the AP and United Press/Coaches Poll. Like Oklahoma, who had finished #1 in both polls in 1950, Tennessee went on to lose their bowl game, falling 28-13 to third-ranked Maryland in the Sugar Bowl. (Two years later, Maryland was ranked #1 by both major polls at the close of the 1953 season but lost 7-0 to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl.)

Tennessee was recognized as a national champion for the 1951 season by virtue of its #1 finish in the two major polls, though four other programs also claim a national title for that year: Georgia Tech, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan State, all of which went undefeated and were chosen as national champion by at least one contemporary selector.

Tennessee’s hopes for a repeat championship in 1952 took a hit when it lost 7-0 to tenth-ranked Duke in its second game. The Volunteers went on to have a solid year, posting a regular season record of 8-1-1 and finishing eighth in the final AP poll. They were invited to the Cotton Bowl, where they faced the tenth-ranked Texas Longhorns.

Texas had gone 8-2 in the 1952 regular season, losing two early non-conference games against Notre Dame and Oklahoma (who finished third and fourth in that season’s final AP poll) before going undefeated in SWC play. Texas dominated Tennessee at the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Day 1953, as its four-man backfield of quarterback T. Jones, fullback Richard Ochoa, and halfbacks Gib Dawson and Billy Quinn — all of whom had won first team All-SWC honors for that season — led a rushing attack that gained 269 yards while the Longhorn defense held the Volunteers to -14 rushing yards and a paltry 32 total offensive yards in a 16-0 win.

It would not be the last time that a Longhorn team defeated the Tennessee Volunteers a year after that team had claimed a national title.

1968 — Texas vs. Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl

Tennessee opened its 1967 season with a 20-16 loss on the road to eighth-ranked UCLA, then went on to win its last nine regular season games. (That UCLA team would ascend to the #1 ranking in early November, but lost its last two games to USC and Syracuse.) Tennessee held the #2 ranking in the final AP poll and Coaches Poll, both of which were taken before the bowl games were played in that season. USC, which went 10-1 overall and beat top-ranked UCLA in its last regular season game, was the consensus national champion for 1967 and received the final #1 ranking from both the AP and Coaches Poll.

In late December, the Volunteers were named national champions for the 1967 season by the Litkenhous Ratings, which was a math-based selector that picked NCAA football national champions from 1934 until 1984. Tennessee ended that season with a 26-24 loss to third-ranked Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. The Volunteers claim a national championship for 1967 based on its pre-Orange Bowl selection by Litkenhous. Oklahoma, which went 10-1 (its only loss came by a 9-7 score against Texas) and beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl, was named national champion by the Poling System but does not claim a title for that year.

The Texas Longhorns went into the 1968 season having recorded four losses in three consecutive seasons. The team unveiled the wishbone triple-option offense that fall, and it would have a profound effect on college football in the two decades to come. Texas stumbled out of the gate in its first two games with senior Bill Bradley (a future NFL All-Pro safety) starting at quarterback, tying a ranked Houston team 20-20 and falling 31-22 on the road to Texas Tech. The Longhorns made a switch at quarterback to junior James Street after the loss to Texas Tech and went on to win their next 30 games.

The team averaged 37.6 points per game over the eight regular season contests in which Street started at QB in 1968, and won its first conference title in five years. The Longhorns were ranked fifth in the final regular season AP poll and prepared to face eighth-ranked Tennessee in the Cotton Bowl.

Though most college football fans at the time would have called USC the defending national champion, the Volunteers did have a claim — however weak — to a 1967 national title, courtesy of the Litkenhous Ratings. The 1968 Volunteers opened their season with a 17-17 tie against eventual SEC champion Georgia, then rolled off five straight wins and were ranked as high as fifth by the AP before a loss to Auburn on November 9. They finished second in the SEC after winning their last three regular season games.4

Texas demolished the (kinda sorta) defending national champion Volunteers on a 33-degree New Year’s Day afternoon at the Cotton Bowl, racing out to a 28-0 lead at halftime en route to a 36-13 win. Having played an entire regular season with the new wishbone offense, the Longhorns showed Tennessee and the rest of the college football world how deadly it could be. The Texas running game gained 279 yards and “crumpled Tennessee’s proud defense like a cardboard box”, as the AP’s report put it.5 The threat of the Longhorn rushing attack made life easier for their All-American receiver Cotton Speyrer, who caught a pair of touchdown passes from James Street on play-action plays that covered 78 and 79 yards.

The Longhorns moved up from fifth to third in the final AP poll, which was permanently taken after the conclusion of the bowl games beginning with the 1968 season. Texas ranked behind only unbeaten Ohio State (that season’s consensus national champ) and Penn State. The DeVold System and Matthews Grid Ratings both named the 9-1-1 Longhorns national champions for 1968, but the program does not claim that title.

Texas went undefeated in 1969 and was the consensus national champion for that year, then in 1970 they won all ten regular season games and finished #1 in the final Coaches Poll (which was still taken before the bowl games), but lost to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl. The Longhorns claim national championships for both the 1969 and 1970 seasons.

1996 — Texas vs. Nebraska in the Big 12 Championship

In one of the most stunning upsets in UT’s football history, the 1996 Longhorns knocked off two-time defending national champion Nebraska in the first Big 12 Championship game. Nebraska was a three-touchdown favorite over the Longhorns and had compiled a record of 46-2 since the start of the 1993 season. If not for a missed field goal at the end of the 1994 Orange Bowl the Cornhuskers might have been pursuing a fourth straight national championship in 1996.

Nebraska had its 26-game winning streak snapped with a 19-0 loss to Arizona State early in the 1996 season, but by the time the Big 12 Championship arrived the Cornhuskers were 10-1 and ranked third in both major polls behind undefeated Florida State and Arizona State. Texas came into the game with a 7-4 record and, remarkably, was only six weeks removed from its team waking up with a 3-4 record following a 28-24 loss to Colorado on October 26.

Longhorn quarterback James Brown passed for 353 yards to lead Texas to a 37-27 victory, the most iconic of his throws being a 61-yard play-action pass completion — on a play simply known as “roll left” — to tight end Derek Lewis on a 4th-and-1 play from UT’s own 29-yard line with just under two and a half minutes remaining in the 4th quarter.

Texas was clinging to a 30-27 lead at the time, and the long pass play to Lewis gave them a fresh set of downs inside the 11-yard line and kept the potent Nebraska offense from getting possession with a chance to take the lead. A Priest Holmes touchdown on the next play increased UT’s lead to 37-27 with 1:53 left on the clock, and the Longhorns went on to win by that score.

That upset win by Texas ended Nebraska’s chance for a third consecutive national championship. The Cornhuskers went on to beat Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl and were ranked sixth in the final AP and Coaches Poll. Had they beaten Texas they likely would have ended up with at least a share of that season’s national championship, as the two teams ranked ahead of them before the Big 12 Championship (Florida State and Arizona State) both lost in their respective bowl games.

1998 — Texas at Nebraska

Nebraska rebounded from the disappointment of its loss to Texas in 1996 by going unbeaten in 1997 and finishing #1 in that season’s final Coaches Poll (Michigan was the AP’s choice for national champion).

Nebraska went into the 1998 season as a defending co-national champion and was 7-1 and ranked seventh when it hosted Texas on October 31. Texas was 5-2 in Mack Brown’s first season as head coach and had lost a pair of early season games against highly-ranked UCLA and Kansas State, while Nebraska had lost to eventual Big 12 champion Texas A&M three weeks earlier. Texas trailed Nebraska 16-13 late in the 4th quarter before a 2-yard touchdown pass from Major Applewhite to Wane McGarity helped put the Longhorns ahead 20-16 with 2:47 left in regulation. Nebraska got as far as midfield on its final possession before turning the ball over on downs. It was Nebraska’s first home loss since 1991, and its first loss at home to an opponent not ranked in that week’s AP poll since 1978!

The Longhorns would finish 15th in the final AP poll after posting a 9-3 record and winning the Cotton Bowl over Mississippi State.

2005 — Texas vs. USC in the Rose Bowl - BCS National Championship

Nine years after foiling Nebraska’s drive for a third consecutive national championship, the Longhorns topped two-time defending national champion USC on the biggest stage possible, winning 41-38 in a game for the ages at the 2006 Rose Bowl to clinch their program’s fourth national championship.

This was one of the most hyped college football games of the current century, as USC and Texas had entered the 2005 season as the #1 and #2 teams in both major polls and maintained those spots throughout the year. USC garnered 56 of the 65 first-place votes in the AP’s final regular season poll, and 55 out of 62 first-place votes in the last regular season Coaches Poll. USC’s game-breaking running back Reggie Bush won that season’s Heisman Trophy over Texas quarterback Vince Young, while the 2004 Heisman winner, USC quarterback Matt Leinart, was third in the 2005 Heisman voting. There were numerous future NFL veterans to be found on both rosters, and the teams combined to produce seven consensus All-Americans in 2005.

The game more than lived up to the hype. An entire book could be written about it, and its main turning points are likely already familiar to most people who will read this post. Texas took a 16-7 lead late in the 2nd quarter, but USC made a field goal in the final seconds of the first half, and outscored Texas 28-10 over the first one and a half quarters in the second half.

USC took a 38-26 lead with 6:42 left in regulation, but Texas scored a pair of touchdowns in the game’s final minutes to upend the Trojans 41-38. Quarterback Vince Young’s iconic game-winning nine-yard touchdown run to the right corner of the end zone came with just 19 seconds left on the clock. All readers who are old enough to have watched that game remember exactly where they were and who they were with when that moment occurred.

2024 — Texas at Michigan

In their first-ever visit to Michigan Stadium, the third-ranked Texas Longhorns got a convincing 31-12 win over tenth-ranked Michigan on September 7, 2024. The Michigan Wolverines had gone 15-0 and won the College Football Playoff Championship for the 2023 season, but their 2024 iteration turned out to be far below that level. Consecutive losses in early November to Oregon and Indiana dropped Michigan’s overall record to 5-5, but the Wolverines finished with wins against Northwestern and eventual national champion Ohio State to finish the regular season 7-5, then defeated Alabama in the ReliaQuest Bowl.

Texas followed up its victory over the defending national champs with wins in its next four games and ascended to the top spot in the AP rankings. The Longhorns remained in the top five throughout the season even with a pair of losses to Georgia, the second of which came in overtime in the SEC Championship game.

Texas reached the semifinals of the College Football Playoff for the 2024 season before losing to eventual national champion Ohio State, who they will take on later this week to open their 2025 season in what is surely an extremely rare week one matchup of defending national champion vs. preseason #1 team.

Baird was founded in 1880 and became the seat of Callahan County just three years later. That county’s original seat, Belle Plain (a community about five miles south of Baird), had been bypassed by the Texas and Pacific Railway and would suffer a rapid drop in population. Belle Plain’s post office was closed during the first decade of the 20th century, and that community has long been a ghost town.

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Baird High School’s athletics teams have always competed among the small schools of west Texas, and its football team has competed in Class 1A — the schools in which play only six-man football — since 2019 after playing 11-man football for roughly a century before that. At the time of the University Interscholastic League’s most recent realignment in February 2024, Baird High reported an enrollment figure of just 92 students.

It is not a town or high school from which you would expect an All-American athlete to emerge and star in multiple sports for the University of Texas, but in the 1920s and 1930s it was home to future Longhorn great Judson Atchison. He’s not a particularly well-remembered figure in Longhorn sports history, but had a remarkable career and an interesting life both on and off the athletic fields, and he crossed paths with several notable athletes and sporting figures of his era.

Atchison played on the gridiron in Austin in the mid-1930s during what was a very trying period for the Longhorn football program. He was called “the best running back I ever saw” by one of the best-known sportscasters of his time, was a teammate of a future Major League Baseball legend while starring with a semi-pro football team in Hawaii, was a record-setting long jumper in college, and served in the Army during World War II and witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This is his story.

Judson Atchison’s early years

Judson Holmes Atchison was born in the central Texas town of Hillsboro on October 9, 1916, but largely grew up in Baird, which is roughly 150 miles west of Hillsboro. He was given the middle name Holmes after his mother’s maiden name.

Atchison was a standout on the football field for Baird from his earliest days as a high school student. As a freshman in 1930, he once scored six touchdowns in a single game. The following year, he ran for a game-winning 55-yard touchdown in one contest with less than a minute remaining on the clock. At some point in his high school days he attained the nickname “Big Bertha”, and he was still occasionally referred to by that moniker during his college years. He was also commonly referred to both by his given first name and the shortened “Jud”.

As a senior in the 1933 football season, “Big Bertha” Atchison was reported to be 6’2” and about 170 pounds. In a game against Moran, he returned an interception 102 yards for a touchdown while playing on defense, and it was believed to be the longest play in the state that year.1 He was responsible for 149 of the 222 points that Baird scored as a team in 1933, fully two-thirds of their total. Despite his gridiron heroics, Baird had an average football team for most of Atchison’s years on the roster, going 22-16 from 1930 to 1933. The team finished 8-2 during his senior season, but at that time only district champions qualified for the playoffs, and a loss in district play kept the Bears at home once the regular season concluded.

Atchison was also a star on the track, competing in sprints, the long jump, and pole vault during track & field seasons. He was his district’s champion in the pole vault as a junior, and also won that event at the Region 2 track meet in Abilene as a senior in 1934, the first year that regional track meets were held in advance of the Texas high school state meet. His winning pole vault height at regionals in 1934 was 11’6”, and he reportedly reached just shy of twelve feet at another competition, which was a good height for a high school pole vaulter in the 1930s. A high jump or pole vault competitor at that time had to both clear the bar and make a potentially hazardous landing in a sand pit or a bed of sawdust, not on an elevated bed of soft foam rubber, as became common in the 1960s. Atchison would say decades later that he decided to move away from the pole vault and concentrate on other events “after breaking two poles and almost landing on them”.2

In addition to winning the pole vault, he also took first place in the long jump (often referred to at the time as the broad jump or “running broad jump”) and 100-yard dash at the 1934 regional meet, leaping 21’5” to win the former, and crossing the finish line in a time of 9.9 seconds to win the latter.3 He was the meet’s high point performer, scoring 18.5 points by himself to power Baird to a meet-winning 21 team points. He did not place in any of his events at the state track & field meet in Austin two weeks later.

Judson Atchison’s freshman year at UT

Atchison was one of 34 graduates in Baird High School’s class of 1934, and he enrolled at the University of Texas in the fall of that year. College freshmen were not allowed to compete on varsity athletic teams at that time, so during his first year in Austin he played halfback on the Longhorn freshmen football team and ran sprints and competed in the long jump for the UT freshmen track team.

After never having jumped further than 22 feet in the long jump during high school, he surprised onlookers by uncorking a jump of 23’10” at a meet in April of 1935, a distance that was mere inches shy of the winning jump at the previous year’s Southwest Conference (SWC) championship meet. In May, he was the individual high-point scorer at a meet that featured the freshmen track squads from Texas, Texas A&M, and Rice after winning the 220-yard dash and long jump, running the third leg of UT’s winning 440-yard relay team, and tying a teammate for first place in the 100-yard dash.

The 1935 football season

Atchison suited up for the Texas Longhorn varsity football team for the first time as a sophomore in 1935, and team observers could tell that expectations were high for him based on his assigned jersey number alone. Jack Chevigny was going into his second season as UT’s head football coach, having led the Longhorns to a 7-2-1 record the previous year. Chevigny had worn the number 12 during his days as a star blocking back at Notre Dame, and it was considered his lucky number. In the 1934 season he had assigned that number to running back Hugh “Big Bad” Wolfe, a future All-American. But Wolfe had not passed enough classes in the spring of 1935 and was declared academically ineligible to play football that fall. In Wolfe’s absence, the #12 jersey was given to Judson “Big Bertha” Atchison.4

Atchison spent most of the 1935 season as a backup at fullback and left halfback, but he made a few notable plays during his time on the field. In a 12-7 win over Oklahoma on October 12, the winning points for the Longhorns came on a 38-yard touchdown pass from Atchison to halfback Duke Gilbreath in the 2nd quarter. A week later, Atchison got the start at left halfback when Texas hosted Centenary, which had dealt the Longhorns one of their two losses the previous year. Texas trailed 7-0 late in the first half when Atchison threw a touchdown pass to backup quarterback Johnny Morrow that tied the score at 7-7 before halftime. Texas went on to win that game 19-13, which improved its record to 3-1 going into Southwest Conference play. But the highlights for Texas and Atchison would be few after that, as the Longhorns went 1-5 over the remainder of the 1935 season, with all of their losses coming by nine points or more.

Atchison started again at left halfback against Rice in the week after the Centenary win. He had a nine-yard touchdown run for UT’s first score, but he also had three turnovers in the game, two of which led to Rice touchdowns. He lost a fumble deep in UT territory on the game’s opening possession, and Rice scored seven plays later to take an early 7-0 lead. With Rice leading 16-6 at the end of the 3rd quarter, Atchison mishandled a punt return and the ball was recovered by Rice, which increased its lead to 22-6 a few minutes later. Rice would win by a final score of 28-19. Despite Atchison’s struggles against the Owls, he was picked by Rice head coach Jimmy Kitts as his second-team left halfback when he made his All-Southwest Conference team selections for the Newspaper Editors Association (NEA) a month later. Atchison was the only Longhorn who made Kitts’s 1935 All-SWC team.

A week after the Rice loss, Texas fell 20-0 to an undefeated SMU team who Chevigny had told reporters was “at least five touchdowns stronger on paper.”5 The Longhorns rebounded with a 25-6 win over Baylor, but closed the season with losses to TCU, Arkansas, and Texas A&M.

Judson Atchison would have been a prime contender for the SWC’s long jump crown in the spring of 1936, but after his fall semester grades came in he was declared ineligible for spring athletic competition. The winning long jump at the 1936 Southwest Conference meet was 23 feet, 7 and 7/8 inches, a distance Atchison had bested as a freshman the previous year. Had he been eligible during the spring of 1936, Atchison might have qualified for that year’s NCAA track & field championships and had the chance to compete against Jesse Owens, who became a legend by winning four events at that year’s NCAA finals and then four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics. (University of Texas sprinter Harvey “Chink” Wallender finished 2nd behind Owens in the 200-meter final at the 1936 NCAA championships.)

The 1936 football season

Atchison and several other backfield regulars from 1935 returned in the fall of 1936 along with star fullback Hugh Wolfe, who had been academically ineligible for the 1935 season. The 1936 season began promisingly enough for the Longhorns, with a 6-6 tie at home against a ranked LSU team, then a 6-0 win over Oklahoma. Texas appeared poised to improve its record to 2-0-1 the following week when it hosted Baylor and held an 18-0 lead going into the 4th quarter, but the wheels of the Longhorns’ 1936 season fell off after that. Baylor scored three unanswered touchdowns in the final frame for a shocking 21-18 comeback victory, and Texas would lose six of its last seven games.

Four of those losses (including the Baylor game) came by margins of seven points or less, but the Longhorns also had a lopsided 27-6 loss to TCU and a 47-19 loss on the road against defending national champion Minnesota, which went on to claim its third straight national title that year.6 Texas trailed Minnesota 35-0 in the 3rd quarter of that game before getting onto the scoreboard, and Judson Atchison had a hand in two Longhorn touchdowns in the second half. The first was a pass from him to Hugh Wolfe that Wolfe then lateraled to Jay Arnold, who ran to the end zone for an 18-yard touchdown. A Minnesota halfback mishandled the ensuing kickoff, and Atchison sped down the field and recovered the loose ball, then ran it into the end zone to make the score 47-19.

Atchison started at left halfback two weeks later against Texas A&M. The Aggies sported a 3-1-1 record in conference play and were still in contention for the SWC championship going into that game, but a 7-0 upset win by Texas dashed those hopes. UT’s only touchdown came on a two-yard run by Atchison in the 1st quarter, which came two plays after he’d connected with right halfback Red Sheridan for a 39-yard pass that gave Texas a first down on the 3-yard line. Atchison intercepted a pass while on defense in UT’s final game of the 1936 season, a 6-0 loss to SWC champion Arkansas on a very rainy December 5 afternoon in Little Rock. Jack Chevigny resigned as head coach after the season, having led Texas to a 13-14-2 mark in three seasons.

The 1937 track & field season

The 1937 track & field season went much better for Texas in general — and Judson Atchison in particular — than the 1936 football season. Atchison won the long jump at the Southwest Conference meet with a leap of 24’4.5”, and ran the second leg on UT’s 440-yard sprint relay team as it set a new conference record with a time of 41.6 seconds. His exploits helped Texas capture the conference’s team championship for a sixth consecutive year. Atchison qualified for the long jump competition at the NCAA championships in June, but did not place.

The 1937 football season

The 1937 football season was UT’s first under new head coach Dana X. Bible, who signed a then unheard of ten-year, $150,000 contract with Texas after leading Nebraska to six Big Six conference championships in eight seasons. This was the first time that UT’s athletic authorities had opened up their checkbook to such an extent to lure a big time coach to Austin. Bible’s $15,000/year salary in 1937 dollars is roughly equivalent to $330,000 today when adjusted for inflation.

With Bible’s arrival in Austin came a number of changes to the Longhorn football program, one of which was — unintentionally on Bible’s part — the selection of team captain for 1937. The longstanding tradition at UT was for the team’s lettermen to meet at the end of a season and elect from the players who were still eligible one who would serve as team captain for the following season. In many years, the next team captain was elected mere days after a season had been concluded.

After the 1936 season, the Longhorns elected Homer Tippen (an incoming senior end from Richmond, Texas) as their captain for 1937. But only a month and a half after becoming the captain-elect for 1937, Tippen was ruled ineligible after a review of Southwest Conference game records showed that he had briefly appeared in UT’s 1934 game against Oklahoma. This was before the time of redshirt years, and several decades before a college football player could appear in as many as four games in a season and still retain a year of eligibility without burning their redshirt. College freshmen had been ineligible for varsity competition for more than a decade and a half by this point, and student-athletes had just three seasons of varsity eligibility. A player appearing on the field for even one play was enough to knock that year off their eligibility punch-card, and the rules were ruthlessly enforced. Homer Tippen had played with the Longhorn varsity during the 1935 and 1936 seasons, and had been a member of the team in 1934 but had only left the bench very briefly during one game.

The Longhorn coaches either didn’t remember Tippen’s having been substituted in late in the 1934 Oklahoma game, or thought it wouldn’t count against his eligibility since that was a non-conference game. But once it was discovered that the records showed Tippen having participated in the 1934 season in addition to 1935 and 1936, that meant his collegiate eligibility was exhausted.7

Rather than elect a new captain for the 1937 season, the team agreed to adopt the policy that Coach Bible had used at Nebraska, which was to name captains for individual games.8 Senior halfback Judson Atchison was the first beneficiary of this policy, as he was named team captain for the Longhorns’ 1937 season opener against Texas Tech on September 25, but a knee injury suffered in practice two days before kickoff kept him on the sidelines for that game, which Texas won 25-12.9 He made his first appearance of the 1937 campaign the following week during the 4th quarter of a 9-0 loss to an LSU team that would finish that season with the #8 ranking.

A week later, he had another good performance against Oklahoma. He did not start the game but substituted in at left halfback in place of sophomore Charlie Haas. The halfbacks in Dana Bible’s single-wing and double-wing offenses might be called on as ball-carriers, passers, blockers, or punters from one play to the next, and also had to play on defense, as this was nearly a decade before substitution rules were relaxed to the point that two-platoon lineups could be used. So in making lineup decisions a coach had to weigh how to deploy an offensive star who might be a liability on defense, and vice versa.

Texas had the ball at the Oklahoma 44-yard line and was trailing 7-0 when Atchison replaced Haas at left halfback in the 2nd quarter. Soon afterward, a long Texas pass intended for end John Peterson fell incomplete near the sideline, but the official nearest to the play controversially ruled pass interference on Oklahoma, giving Texas a first down on the 18-yard line.

News accounts differed on which Longhorn threw that pass. The recap given by Austin’s Sunday American-Statesman said it was right halfback B.F. “Beefus” Bryan. The Oklahoma News said it was fullback Lewis Gray. The Daily Oklahoman, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and Waco Sunday Tribune-Herald all credited Atchison. But all agreed that two plays later Atchison caught a pass in the left flat from Gray and ran into the end zone for a touchdown. Gray kicked the extra point to tie the game at 7-7, and neither team scored again. Texas did not have a winning record in any of Atchison’s three seasons with the Longhorn varsity, but they went 2-0-1 against Oklahoma.

In a near repeat of the 1936 season, Texas had a decent record after the Oklahoma game, but went on to lose five of its last six games, as a talented Longhorn backfield still getting used to Coach Bible’s system couldn’t overcome inconsistent play on the line.

A 14-10 deficit late in the 4th quarter against Arkansas became a 21-10 loss when Atchison made a wild pass attempt while trying to avoid being tackled in the end zone for a safety, and his heave was intercepted and returned for an easy seven-yard touchdown. Texas lost 14-7 at home on October 23 against a Rice team that had gone scoreless in its first three games, but would go on to win the SWC championship that season. The Longhorn offense scored no points a week later in a 13-2 loss to SMU. Texas’s only points in that contest came on an intentional safety that SMU took late in the game when it had the ball in the shadow of its own end zone and held a safe 13-0 lead.

As the 1937 calendar flipped from October to November, the Longhorns’ record stood at 1-4-1 overall and 0-3 in conference play. With three games remaining on their schedule, Texas had no chance at winning the SWC crown, but they could still play spoiler to another rival’s ambitions. Judson Atchison helped spoil Baylor’s season the following week in the performance he would be best remembered for.

Judson Atchison vs. Baylor in 1937

Baylor entered its November 6 game against Texas with a record of 6-0, having cumulatively outscored its foes 131-16. The Bears recorded two of those victories over Arkansas and TCU, the teams that had finished atop the SWC standings the previous year. A 4-0 start garnered them the #15 spot in the Associated Press rankings when the first poll of the 1937 season was done in mid-October. Following wins over #13 Texas A&M and TCU, they rose to #4 in the November 1 poll and even received two first-place votes. Baylor was being discussed as a potential Rose Bowl invitee if they maintained their early success, though some of their fans were wary due to fresh memories of the 1935 season, in which the Bears had a 6-0 start followed by a 2-3 finish.

Morley Jennings was in his 12th season as Baylor’s head coach, and his Bears had gone 3-7-1 against the Longhorns during his tenure. While his team was off to a hot start in 1937 and coming off wins against four straight tough opponents, he publicly expressed concerns about facing the talented but underachieving 1-4-1 Longhorns. Jinx Tucker, the longtime Waco Times-Herald sports writer, quoted Jennings as saying, “Any team can play one great game a year, and Texas has not played its best game as yet. If we are unfortunate enough to be the opponent of Texas when the Longhorns decide to do that, then it may be too bad.”10

Baylor’s rise in the rankings had caught the attention of national college football observers, and veteran CBS radio man Ted Husing — one of the best-known and most popular sportscasters of that time — traveled to Waco to do the play-by-play call of the Texas-Baylor game for a nationwide radio audience. Southwest Conference football games had been broadcast by radio stations across Texas for a few years, but this was likely the first Texas Longhorn game ever to receive a coast-to-coast radio broadcast.

With three games left in his college career and his team over halfway through a third straight disappointing season, Judson Atchison had little but pride to play for, but for the Baylor game there were two extra incentives. One was the fact that he and his teammates had spent a year stewing over their 4th quarter collapse against Baylor in 1936 and were ready to exact revenge. Atchison’s other incentive was financial; an uncle offered to give him one acre of land for every point he scored in the game, and that uncle ended up having to make good on his promise. He had shown flashes of football brilliance in his career, but was never consistently good enough to garner widespread all-conference mention. But on that November afternoon in Waco, nearly everything clicked for Judson Atchison, and virtually all who saw that game believed he was the best player on the field.

Atchison started at left halfback and his roommate Hugh Wolfe, who most saw as the backfield star for the Longhorns, was the starting right halfback. Atchison ran for 13 yards and a first down on his first carry of the game, which came on UT’s second possession of the 1st quarter. A few plays later, he carried the ball 24 yards to the Baylor 20-yard line. On a 4th-and-3 play from the 13-yard line, Atchison gained five yards for a first down, but fumbled and lost the ball to Baylor. He made up for that turnover on Texas’s next possession.

The Longhorns took over at their own 46 after a Baylor punt, and Atchison gained 32 of the team’s 54 yards on that drive on three touches, the last of which was an 18-yard touchdown run in which he “shook off a bevy of Bears”, according to the Sunday American-Statesman.11 In the Waco Tribune-Herald’s description of the play, “Atchison broke right through the line, was tackled by the secondary, but broke away on the 10-yard line and went over for a score.”12 The Cactus yearbook described the play similarly, saying Atchison “ripped his way through right guard, reversed his field, shook loose a horde of Baylor tacklers, and raced over the goal line standing up”.13

The extra point was no good, and Texas led 6-0. Baylor answered early in the 2nd quarter and tied the score at 6-6. A few minutes later, Atchison was hurt while playing defense and was substituted out for Beefus Bryan.

He returned to the field at the start of the 3rd quarter, as Texas received the second half kickoff. The Longhorns went three-and-out on their first possession and Atchison (who was the team’s primary punter) punted the ball away, but he intercepted a Baylor pass shortly afterward and returned it to the Baylor 35-yard line. Four plays later, Texas had a first down on the 7-yard line, but they were unable to get into the end zone and turned the ball over on downs after a 4th down pass from fullback Wallace Lawson to Atchison was knocked down by a Baylor defender. Baylor drove from its end of the field to the Texas 10-yard line, but lost the ball back to the Longhorns on a 4th down fumble. Atchison had a 12-yard carry later in the quarter on another drive that ended with a Texas punt.

Atchison was substituted out of the game late in the 3rd quarter, but returned for UT’s second defensive possession of the 4th quarter. He batted down a Baylor pass on 2nd down, and the Bears punted two plays later. Atchison returned that punt 17 yards, then had a 10-yard carry on UT’s next offensive play. He was intercepted on a pass intended for Wolfe, giving Baylor back the ball deep in its own territory, but Baylor lost the ball to Texas on a fumble on its ensuing possession. Two Atchison carries later, Texas had a 3rd-and-1 at the Baylor 17, with the game still tied and the 4th quarter in its final minutes. He was stopped for a 1-yard loss on 3rd down, and Hugh Wolfe lined up for UT’s first field goal attempt of the game. His kick — reported to have been taken from around the 26- to 28-yard line — was good, putting Texas ahead 9-6.

Atchison remained in the game on defense for Baylor’s final possession. He knocked down a pass attempt on a 2nd-and-1 play from Baylor’s 44-yard line. The Bears went on to convert on a 4th-and-1 to give them a first down near midfield, but Atchison recorded his second defensive interception of the game three plays later, and the Longhorns ran out the rest of the game clock on three plays, preserving a 9-6 upset win over the 4th-ranked Bears.

Individual statistics from the game were not reported, but based on the play-by-play account given by the American-Statesman, Atchison finished the game with 115 yards from scrimmage, one rushing touchdown, and one completed pass to Hugh Wolfe for 10 yards. He also intercepted two passes and deflected at least two others while he was on defense, and returned most of Baylor’s punts.

Ted Husing, was effusive in his praise for the play of Atchison and Wolfe while filling play-by-play duties for CBS. The Austin American and Fort Worth Star-Telegram both quoted Husing as saying during the broadcast that Atchison was the best running back he had ever seen.14 Atchison got to hear a recording of Husing’s radio call of the game at an Austin listening party the following week.15 When recalling Husing’s compliments many years later, Atchison modestly said, “He just saw me once. Had he seen my other games he wouldn’t have said that.”16

Husing, a pioneer in the field of sports radio, had been doing play-by-play commentary of college football games for over a decade and had no doubt seen his share of All-American players. However hyperbole-tinged Husing’s praise of Judson Atchison might have been, he was far from alone in his use of superlatives to describe Jud’s performance in the Baylor game.

Jinx Tucker, the Waco Tribune-Herald sports editor who had worked for Waco newspapers since 1920 and was not easily impressed nor predisposed to overrate Longhorn athletes, wrote after the game that Atchison was, “The greatest backfield man in this sensational upset which will reverberate over the nation”, and went so far as to say that against Baylor he had “played a running game as great as any halfback in the history of football in this city.”

“We just couldn’t be beat”, Atchison told Austin American sports editor Wilbur Evans after the game. “National champions could not have taken us today.” Having lost soundly to the previous year’s national champions from Minnesota, Atchison knew what a championship team looked like.

Evans wrote in his “Top O’ the Morn” column on the Monday after the game: “We have been waiting three long years to see the Baird Bomber explode with all that speed and elusiveness of his, but it was well worth waiting for. He really went to town at an opportune time and his piston-like strides pounded Baylor’s bowl hopes deep into the Waco turf. Those very near the Texas team have felt all along that Atchison had it in his system, but the West Texas lad lacked the confidence to prove it.”17

After their upset loss to Texas, the 1937 Baylor Bears would fall 13-7 the next week against SMU. Two weeks later, they lost 13-7 to Rice in what served as a de facto Southwest Conference championship game, and their final season record was 7-3.

The rest of the 1937 football season

After looking like world-beaters in their win over Baylor, the Texas Longhorns reverted to their prior form the next week against TCU. Texas achieved only six first downs (one of them due to a TCU penalty) and committed four turnovers in a 14-0 loss to the Horned Frogs on November 13, and Atchison himself gained only 11 net yards on five carries.

The Longhorn defense played a valiant game in the team’s season-ending Thanksgiving Day matchup with archrival Texas A&M, but the offense was lacking. Texas had just 137 offensive yards in a 7-0 loss to the Aggies, which left the Longhorns with a 1-5 conference record for a third straight season. In his final game in a Longhorn uniform, Judson Atchison bounced back from the TCU loss with a performance against A&M that the Bryan Eagle said was one of the two best by the Longhorns that day, calling him “an all-around star with his running, brilliant kicking, and pass interceptions”.18 He was the most successful of the Longhorn ball-carriers on the day (which wasn’t saying much) and recorded a pair of interceptions while on defense.

According to SWC statistics that were compiled by two publicity officials at Texas A&M, Atchison ran for a total of only 205 yards in the 1937 season (this figure may have only included conference games), but his 5.69 yards per carry average was the best of all SWC backs who had a substantial number of carries, and his punting average of 38.52 yards was also a SWC best.19

Atchison received honorable mention on the 1937 All-Southwest Conference teams voted on by both the Associated Press (AP) and United Press (UP), while his roommate Hugh Wolfe was the UP’s All-SWC first team fullback and was also named to its All-America second team. Two weeks after UT played its last game of the 1937 season, the 1938 NFL Draft was held on December 12, 1937 in Chicago. Hugh Wolfe became the first Texas Longhorn ever to be selected in an NFL Draft when the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Steelers) took him with the 19th overall pick.20

1938 track & field season

The Texas Longhorns, winners of six consecutive track & field conference championships, had a strong team in the spring of 1938, with fast relay quartets and several individuals who were threats to win their events. Judson Atchison won the long jump at the Drake Relays in late April with a leap of 24’9”, which was just short of the Southwest Conference record. He also ran the second leg of UT’s 440-yard sprint relay team that set a new Drake Relays meet record of 41.5 seconds in a preliminary heat, but lost to Rice in the final.

Two weeks later, he defended his SWC title in the long jump by winning that event with a top distance of 24 feet and 0.25 inches. Texas saw its team championship streak end when it was bested by Rice by less than three points, with the Owls’ winning margin in team points coming by virtue of the Longhorn sprint relay team being disqualified for an illegal baton exchange after they’d finished 2nd in that race.

At the NCAA championship meet in Minneapolis, Atchison tied for fourth in the long jump with a top leap of 24’8.5”. Less than five inches separated the top five finishers, with USC’s Bill Lacefield winning with a jump of 25 feet, 1 and 1/8 inches. One of the stars of that meet was Rice’s Fred Wolcott, who won both the 120-yard high hurdles and 220-yard low hurdles, tying the American record in the former event. Wolcott was the best American hurdler in the late 1930s and early 1940s, winning three Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) national championships in the 110-meter hurdles and four in the 220-yard hurdles. Wolcott, who was from Snyder in west Texas, had run against Atchison when they were both in high school, and Atchison had actually beaten Wolcott to win the 100-yard dash at the 1934 regional track meet.

Atchison had played three seasons with the Longhorn varsity football team from 1935 to 1937 and was out of eligibility in that sport. He was still a UT student in the fall of 1938, and he helped coach that year’s crop of Longhorn freshmen gridders. UT’s 1938 freshmen football team included several future program greats (including five UT Athletics Hall of Honor inductees) who would go on to be key members of the legendary 1941 Longhorn team that was the first in school history to achieve the #1 ranking in the AP poll.21

1939 track & field season

Though Judson Atchison was out of football eligibility by 1938, he still had one year of track & field eligibility because academic ineligibility had prevented his participation in the 1936 spring season. He started off the 1939 track season slowly, but regained his normal form as the season went on. He became the first three-time winner of the long jump at the Texas Relays, and his winning jump of 24’8” set a new meet record. He suffered what was described as a “slight” leg injury while competing at a tri-meet with Rice and LSU in mid-April, and was held out of a pair of later meets leading up to the SWC championships.

Atchison placed in three events at the SWC championship meet. He won the long jump for a third consecutive year, albeit with a subpar jump of 23’4.5”. He was also entered in the 100-yard dash and finished third in the final heat, with Rice’s Fred Wolcott winning in 9.8 seconds while running into a cross-wind after having broken the conference record the day before with a 9.5 time in a preliminary heat with more favorable wind conditions. Atchison also ran the second leg of UT’s winning sprint relay team, which clocked a time of 42.4 seconds.

His efforts were not enough to bring Texas the team championship, as Rice was the meet’s winner for a second straight season, aided once again by the disqualification of a Texas runner. UT’s Joe Hart won the 880-yard run, but after the race he was disqualified “for breaking out on the turn” when an official ruled that he had bumped into a runner on his right while attempting to pass another runner in front of him. Texas would finish 10.5 points behind Rice and in second place.

A month later, Atchison won the long jump at the NCAA championship meet in Los Angeles, setting a new personal best with a jump of 24’9.25”. Finishing 1.25 inches behind him in 2nd place was LSU sophomore Billy Brown, who had beaten Atchison at an April meet after flying 25’4.75”. Brown was one of the best American jumpers of his generation and had competed in the triple jump at the 1936 Summer Olympics as a 17-year old. He would later win the long jump at the 1941 NCAA championships, and was the American record holder in the triple jump from 1941 until 1956.

Another notable track athlete who Atchison bested for the NCAA long jump crown was Michigan’s William Watson. Watson had become the first black student-athlete elected team captain of any varsity sport at the University of Michigan when he was voted captain of that year’s Wolverine track & field squad. He not only finished fourth in the long jump at the 1939 NCAA championships (his best jump was 24’0.5”), but also took second place in both the discus and shot put. He was later an AAU national champion in the decathlon in 1940 and 1943, and would have been a top contender to win the decathlon at the 1940 Olympics had that year’s games not been cancelled due to World War II.

Elsewhere at the 1939 NCAA track & field championships, Rice’s Fred Wolcott repeated as champion in both the 120-yard high hurdles and 220-yard low hurdles, and the mile run was won by USC’s Louis Zamperini. Zamperini’s life as a star distance runner, World War II prisoner of war, and Christian evangelist was the subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling 2010 book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, which was partially adapted for the screen by the 2014 film Unbroken.

Judson Atchison was just the fourth Texas Longhorn to win an individual event at the NCAA track & field championships, and the first to win the long jump. Four Longhorns have been NCAA champions in the outdoor long jump since then, most recently Marquise Goodwin in 2012.

Atchison’s career best in the long jump (24’9.25”) would not be impressive by today’s college track standards. 1988 was the last year in which the winner of the collegiate long jump at the Texas Relays failed to jump at least 25 feet, and on only six occasions since then has the winner not jumped at least 26 feet. To compare it with UT’s current track & field conference mates, Atchison’s NCAA-winning jump from 1939 would have placed 7th at last year’s Southeastern Conference outdoor meet.

But he was unquestionably an elite long jumper for his time, and was reportedly still among the top ten long jumpers in Longhorn history as late as the early 1980s.

Judson Atchison in Hawaii

After completing his athletic career at the University of Texas in 1939, Atchison accepted a life-changing invitation from his good friend and former roommate Hugh Wolfe. Wolfe had played with the NFL’s New York Giants in 1938 after winning All-America honors as a senior at Texas in 1937. The Giants won the 1938 NFL Championship, then traded Wolfe to the Philadelphia Eagles in the offseason, but Wolfe elected to end his pro football career rather than report to the Eagles. He was hired in 1939 to coach a semi-pro team in the Hawaiian Football Association, and he invited Atchison to be a member of his team.

This Hawaiian league was commonly referred to as a “Senior League” (to differentiate it from the local high school or “prep” league), and in 1939 it was comprised of just three teams: the football team from the University of Hawaii, a local Healani squad sometimes referred to as a “town team”, and a team called the Hawaiian Polar Bears that was sponsored by the Polar Bar Ice Cream Company. Wolfe coached the Polar Bears, whose roster was primarily made up of local products but also included former college players who had suited up for Arizona, California, Cornell, Ohio State, Oregon, Santa Clara, and Stanford. Jud Atchison joined this squad and was its only player from a southwestern college.

Atchison arrived in Hawaii in September of 1939, when it was still a U.S. territory and twenty years away from being admitted to the union as the 50th state. Ted Husing’s description of Atchison as “the greatest running back I have ever seen” was mentioned in local news stories to hype him as a key addition to the Polar Bears team, and Hawaii writers sometimes referred to him as “the Texas Tornado”.

Atchison wasted little time in showing that the hype was not unwarranted. He scored a touchdown on a 40-yard reception, was successful on two extra-point attempts, and intercepted a pass on defense in helping the Polar Bears to a 14-13 win over Healani in their first game, which was played before a reported 17,000 fans.22 He was hobbled by a shoulder injury in their next game, a 12-6 loss to the University of Hawaii. But in a rematch with the Hawaii Rainbows team three weeks later, he scored the Polar Bears’ only touchdown and kicked the ensuing extra point in a 7-6 win.

Atchison was described as the “big star” of the league’s championship game against Healani on November 9, in which he gained 141 total yards, scored a touchdown on a 24-yard run, made the extra point following another touchdown by his team, and batted down a would-be touchdown pass on a 4th down play by Healani while on defense in the fourth quarter. His heroics helped the Polar Bears to a 13-7 win. The Honolulu Advertiser’s Red McQueen wrote afterwards, “Never has a greater backfielder been seen on a local gridiron than the Bears’ Jud Atchison.”23

Most of the Polar Bears’ imported players from the mainland returned home after the conclusion of the team’s season, but Atchison elected to remain in Hawaii and joined the local Healani team that he had helped the Polar Bears defeat twice, and he went on to play halfback in three December games Healani played against collegiate opponents. Atchison ran for a 75-yard touchdown that was Healani’s only score in a 21-6 loss on December 6 to Fresno State, a team that went 10-1-1 that year. He rushed for two touchdowns and passed for a third in an 18-7 win over College of the Pacific on December 20. And on Christmas Day, he was in the Healani lineup for a 28-0 loss to an Oregon State team that went 9-1-1 overall in the 1939 season and finished third in the Pacific Coast Conference.

Atchison sailed from Hawaii back to the mainland in January of 1940 and returned to UT that spring to take additional geology courses. It was reported later year that he had taken graduate courses towards a master’s degree in geology, but it is unclear whether or not he even graduated with a bachelor’s degree.24 His son Sandy Atchison believes he did not, as there was no bachelor’s degree to be found among the papers and records that Jud left behind, and his Army discharge paperwork from 1944 indicated that he had not received a college degree but had “completed all but one course for a BS degree” in petroleum geology.

He returned to Hawaii in September of 1940 and played for another season with the Polar Bears, giving more of the standout performances on the gridiron that local fans had become accustomed to. He remained in Hawaii in the spring of 1941 and worked as a surveyor while also competing in AAU track and field meets. He didn’t quite have the elite form of his Longhorn days, but still managed to break the Hawaii territorial broad jump record with a jump of 23’7.5”.25

He began his service in the Army during this period, having enlisted in March of 1941 after registering for the draft five months earlier. Early on in his military service he put his geology education to work in an engineers battalion at Schofield Barracks, an Army installation on the island of Oahu about ten miles northwest of Pearl Harbor.

In the summer of 1941, it was reported that Atchison would not be playing football that fall, “as he has retired from the gridiron permanently.”26 As it turned out, he didn’t stay off the gridiron for long. When his former team was organized in October of 1941 — this time as the Honolulu Bears — he was an assistant coach but not a player. As in past years, the team was bolstered by several former college standouts who came to Hawaii for the senior league season. The most celebrated of their mainland imports in the fall of 1941 was a 22-year-old former multi-sport star from UCLA named Jackie Robinson. Yes, that Jackie Robinson.

Robinson — as I suspect most readers of this post already know — became an all-time American sports icon when he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and broke Major League Baseball’s “color line” by becoming the first black man to play in that theretofore all-white league. But in the fall of 1941, Robinson was better known as a football and track star. He had played halfback on UCLA’s undefeated 1939 football team, and was the winner of the long jump competition at the 1940 NCAA track & field championship. He also starred in basketball for the UCLA Bruins, but that program was far from the powerhouse that it would become after the legendary John Wooden took over as head coach in 1948, and the team finished in the cellar of the Pacific Coast Conference in both seasons that Robinson played. He was the first UCLA athlete ever to win letters in four sports, and baseball was actually the one in which he least distinguished himself during his college years.

In the six months between Robinson’s withdrawal from UCLA in early March of 1941 and his arrival in Hawaii in mid-September, he competed in amateur golf tournaments, played with the semi-pro baseball team of the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Atascadero, California, and was a member of the collegiate all-star football team that played the NFL’s defending champion Chicago Bears in a preseason charity game at Soldier Field before a crowd of over 98,000 fans on August 28.27 The Bears won 37-13, but Robinson was one of the college all-star standouts and scored one of their two touchdowns in the game. A week after the College All-Star Classic in Chicago, he played in another college all-stars vs. pros football game in Los Angeles on September 3, this one featuring players who’d spent their college years on the west coast. Robinson started at right halfback for the collegians, but left the game in the second quarter with an ankle injury and did not return.

Judson Atchison and Jackie Robinson likely had never met before Robinson joined the Honolulu Bears football team for the 1941 season. They did not compete against each other during the 1939 track & field season (the only one in which their collegiate track careers overlapped), though Atchison did compete against — and lose badly to — Jackie’s older brother Mack Robinson (then a student-athlete at Pasadena Junior College) in the long jump at the Drake Relays in 1937, only a year after Mack won the silver medal in the 200 meters at the 1936 Summer Olympics.28

Also on the 1941 Honolulu Bears roster was Robinson’s former UCLA teammate Ray Bartlett, who had been one of four black players to suit up for UCLA’s 1939 football team at a time when very few college football programs had integrated rosters. Atchison remained on the sidelines purely in a coaching capacity as the Bears played their first few games in October. In an October 16 “Pigskin Gossip” column, a Star-Bulletin sportswriter predicted that Atchison “is going to feel the football itch so strong one of these days that he’ll roll into a uniform and start packing that pigskin around.”29

Jud Atchison finally got off the sidelines and put on a football uniform in November and played games not only for the Honolulu Bears but also the team of the Engineers unit at Schofield Barracks. On November 1, he substituted in at his familiar halfback position during the Bears’ game against Na Alii. He scored the team’s first touchdown on a one-yard run in the first quarter. On the last play of the second quarter, Atchison received the snap from just shy of midfield and threw a pass to Jackie Robinson for a 25-yard gain, then as Robinson was being tackled he lateraled to a teammate who ran another 28 yards to the end zone, but that scoring play was nullified after an official ruled that Robinson was down before he lateraled the ball.

The Bears went on to beat Na Alii 25-6, though Robinson would suffer a sprained ankle in that game which hobbled him for the rest of his time in Hawaii. A week later on November 8, Atchison suited up for the “Engineer Red Raiders” football team in a game against the 98th Coast Artillery Comets. The Engineers won 19-0, and Atchison reportedly “ripped off many long gains during a brisk workout in the second period.”30 On November 15, he had a 34-yard touchdown run that was described as “the day’s thriller” in a 6-6 tie between the Engineers and the 35th Infantry, which ended a 19-game winning streak by the 35th Infantry team.31

Sandy Atchison says that his father’s time playing football in Hawaii’s military league “was the roughest football that he ever played. Guys would tape wrenches onto their arms and there was no shortage of dirty play.”

Just four days after the game against the 35th Infantry, Atchison started at quarterback for the Honolulu Bears in a 27-13 loss to the University of Hawaii on November 19. Robinson, playing at far less than 100 percent, substituted in during that game but did not record any rushing statistics.

In the Bears’ sixth and final game of the 1941 senior league season on December 3, Atchison started at right halfback while Robinson came off the bench as a substitute in a 19-13 loss to Healani. Atchison had a very long and wind-aided punt during the game, but he and Robinson were not reported to have made any other particularly exciting plays.

Jud Atchison and Jackie Robinson probably only played together for parts of three games, but notably, the white west Texan and the black southern Californian shared a backfield in the integrated Hawaiian senior league at a time when the Southwest Conference was still more than two decades away from having its first black football player, and 29 years before the University of Texas had its first black football letterman. Also, the 1941 Honolulu Bears may have the distinction of being the only football squad ever, at any level, to have two NCAA long jump champions on the same roster. (If any reader can name another such team, please do so in the comments.)

As for whether Atchison and Robinson had any personal interactions on or off the field, we may never know. Robinson’s 1972 autobiography I Never Had It Made (which was published a few weeks after his death) devoted only one paragraph to his time in Hawaii in 1941, and he did not write about any of his Honolulu Bears teammates. When I asked Sandy Atchison if he knew anything about his father playing football in Hawaii with Jackie Robinson, he said his father never mentioned to him that he knew Robinson, and this was the first he had ever heard about Jud crossing paths with him. He also offered that Jud was not a man who liked to talk about himself, and that “he never talked about his athletic legacy”, even with his own kids.

Judson Atchison in love and war

Atchison originally came to Hawaii in 1939 for what he assumed would be a few weeks’ vacation, during which he would play football for one of his best friends. But instead of returning to Texas and working as an oil field geologist, he ended up making Hawaii his home for the rest of his life, a decision that a local girl had something to do with.

He made his first arrival in Hawaii in September of 1939 onboard the S.S. Matsonia, which sailed to Honolulu after picking up passengers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Also on the ship for that voyage was 20-year-old Mary Rattray, a Hawaii native who had attended the University of Southern California after graduating from a private high school in Honolulu. Mary was accompanied on the boat by her mother and her two siblings. Her father, a native of Scotland who had settled in Hawaii after moving to the United States at age 21, had died of heart disease a year earlier. Sandy Atchison says Mary could not afford to continue her college education after the 1938-39 academic year due to the death of her father, and in any case she had to return home to help care for her mother, who battled ALS in her final years before passing away in 1946.

Sandy says, “It was love at first sight” when Jud and Mary met on the Matsonia. Coincidentally, both of their mothers had the first name Beulah. They began dating soon afterward, and Jud became close to the Rattray family. When a man registered for the military draft at that time, he had to name on his draft card a “person who will always know your address”. When Atchison registered for the draft in October of 1940, he named Mary’s mother (“Mrs. A.C. Rattray”) as that person. Jud and Mary became engaged in May of 1941, and married a year later. When Mary’s younger sister Ruth got married in 1944, it was Jud who escorted her to the altar.

In the year between Jud’s engagement and wedding, the United States entered World War II. After initially being assigned to an engineers battalion at Schofield Barracks near Honolulu, he was reportedly assigned to the neighboring Wheeler Field (now Wheeler Army Airfield) in September of 1941.32 Wheeler Field was one of the primary targets of the Japanese air units that attacked U.S. military installations in and around Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and 33 people at Wheeler Field were killed in the attack.

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor occurred early on a Sunday morning, and Jud happened to be visiting his fiancée’s family during that weekend. Mary’s family lived on the east side of Honolulu, about 24 miles from Wheeler Field. Sandy says his parents were awoken that morning by the sound of aircraft flying over the Rattray home, those planes likely being Japanese dive bombers that flew around the east side of the island of Oahu and then westward over Honolulu on their way towards Pearl Harbor during the second wave of the attack. According to Sandy, Mary drove Jud from her family’s home back to the base that morning, and in the chaos following the attack on the island it took her essentially all day to make the trip back home.

Jud Atchison was publicly reported in the weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack to be a sergeant in the 64th Engineer Battalion, but he ended up working as a counter-intelligence officer with the U.S. Army, as his Army Separation Qualification Record form makes clear. A summary of his duties and activities in that post included, “Collected, evaluated, and disseminated information pertaining to enemy activity, sabotage, or subversive activities.”33 He spent the duration of his military service in Hawaii, and was honorably discharged in December of 1944.

Judson Atchison’s post-war years

After the war, Jud Atchison worked for two years with Honolulu Rapid Transit, then began a long career in the insurance business. He worked for several years with American Factors (aka Amfac), later for John Hancock, and by the end of his career he owned his own insurance agency. He and his wife Mary lived in Hawaii for the rest of their lives and raised their two children there.

The former Longhorn athletic star was geographically far removed from the Longhorn football program during his long Hawaii residence. He kept up with the team’s fortunes as much as he could, but Longhorn games were rarely shown on TV in Hawaii. For decades, his only opportunities to see Longhorn football players in person was attending the Hula Bowl, a post-season all-star game of college football players that was played in Honolulu from 1947 until 2008. Forty-four Texas Longhorns participated in the Hula Bowl during Atchison’s lifetime.34

Among the many notable players who participated in the 1966 Hula Bowl was Texas Longhorns All-American linebacker Tommy Nobis, who had been the top overall pick in the NFL Draft six weeks earlier. Jud Atchison and his son Sandy attended that year’s Hula Bowl game at the invitation of Texas Tech head coach JT King, who was coaching the South squad. King had been a teammate of Atchison’s on the 1935-37 Longhorn football teams. Sandy remembers watching that game from the sidelines and getting to meet Nobis and USC running back Mike Garrett, the 1965 Heisman Trophy winner.

After his days as a UT student, Jud Atchison did not attend a Longhorn football game again until 1976, when he and Mary traveled to Dallas for that season’s Texas-Oklahoma game along with Hugh Wolfe and his wife. He did not attend a Longhorn home game again until November of 1985, when he was inducted into the University of Texas Athletics Hall of Honor. Jud’s induction into the Hall of Honor “was a highlight in his life”, according to Sandy. His wife Mary had died only six months earlier, mere weeks shy of their 43rd wedding anniversary. Getting to visit the UT campus and see old friends and other Longhorn greats helped raise his spirits during a difficult period in his life.

Jud Atchison and the other living members of that year’s Hall of Honor induction class were recognized in a pregame ceremony at Memorial Stadium before the Longhorns’ game on November 23, 1985, which, ironically enough, was against Baylor. Texas beat the 15th-ranked Bears that day, 17-10.

During the same trip that brought Jud to Austin for his induction into the UT Hall of Honor, he made a visit to his old west Texas stomping grounds in Baird. The following week, Abilene Reporter-News sports editor Bill Hart wrote an article on Atchison and his memories of competing in athletics for Baird High School and the University of Texas. He was also profiled in an article in Honolulu’s Sunday Star-Bulletin & Advertiser on December 8, 1985, which covered bits of his collegiate exploits (the writer amusingly labeled Atchison’s college team as “the then-little-known University of Texas Longhorns”) but focused primarily on his many years living in Hawaii.35

Judson Atchison passed away on March 7, 1987, at the age of 70. Had he lived nine years longer he could have seen the Texas Longhorns’ first and only trip to Hawaii, in which they defeated the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors 38-17 in Honolulu on September 2, 1995 in their first game of that season.

Texas is poised to match or possibly break a number of program records relating to the draft.

The most Longhorns ever picked in a single draft is 17. That number was achieved in the 1984 NFL Draft, which lasted for 12 rounds and featured 336 total picks. The NFL Draft has since been shortened, and has featured just seven rounds since 1994. The league has added more franchises since then, and rule changes have added compensatory picks to the pile, so over the past decade some drafts have had as few as 254 selections or as many as 262.

Last year’s NFL Draft saw 11 Texas Longhorns picked, which was touted as a record for the first seven rounds of a draft, but this is an imperfect comparison to previous years. In that legendary 1984 draft, the final pick of the seventh round was #196 overall. Ten of the seventeen Longhorns drafted that year went in the first seven rounds, but 14 were taken within the first 243 picks, a number more equivalent to the picks in a seven-round draft now.

Most Longhorns selected through pick #257

This week’s draft is slated to include 257 total picks. I looked at previous draft years and found the ones that featured the most Longhorns taken within the first 257 picks.

1984 — 14
1982 — 12
2024 — 11
1942, 1944, and 1948 — 10
1952 — 9
1947 — 8

I think the Longhorns have a more than decent chance of matching 1984’s record, and will all but certainly surpass last year’s figure.

Most Longhorns drafted in the first 32 picks

It would be a shock if three Longhorns — namely offensive tackle Kelvin Banks, defensive back Jahdae Barron, and wide receiver Matthew Golden — are not taken in the first round tonight. No other Longhorn is projected to go in the first round tonight, but this should be the third time that three Longhorns are picked within the first 32 picks of an NFL Draft, the first two occasions being in 1942 and 1980.

In the 1942 draft, halfback Orban “Spec” Sanders was the 6th overall pick, followed at #11 by blocking back Vernon Martin, and end Malcolm Kutner at #26. Every draft since 1967 — the first one conducted after the AFL-NFL merger — has featured at least 26 picks in the first round, but prior drafts had considerably shorter rounds. In 1942 when UT All-American Mal Kutner was taken with the #26 pick, he was actually the first pick of the 4th round!

In the 1980 draft, former Longhorn wide receiver and Olympic sprinter Johnny “Lam” Jones was the 2nd overall pick. Johnnie Johnson, who was twice a consensus All-American cornerback, was taken fifteen picks later at #17. And Derrick Hatchett, another star in the defensive secondary who was named a 2nd team All-American by the Associated Press in 1979, was picked at #24.

It doesn’t seem likely that another Longhorn will hear their name called in tonight’s first round after Banks, Barron, and Golden, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Most Longhorns drafted in the top 100

Defensive lineman Alfred Collins is widely projected as a 2nd-3rd round pick. Opinions vary on safety Andrew Mukuba, quarterback Quinn Ewers, tight end Gunnar Helm, defensive tackle Vernon Broughton, defensive end Barryn Sorrell, offensive lineman Cam Williams, offensive lineman Hayden Conner, and running back Jaydon Blue, but most of them should have a draftable grade on just about every team’s board.

There is also speedy wide receiver Isaiah Bond, who in most years would easily be a top 2-3 round pick, but his projection is murky due to a recent arrest for sexual assault. Bond has publicly professed his innocence in the matter and has filed a federal lawsuit against the woman accusing him of assault, claiming that she made false statements against him.

The Longhorns seem assured of having at least 12 players drafted this week. That number becomes 13 if Isaiah Bond’s legal issues don’t scare every team into taking him off their board, and goes to 14 or higher if a franchise takes a late round flier on a boarderline prospect like receiver and return specialist Silas Bolden, or linebacker David Gbenda.

The aforementioned Kelvin Banks, Jahdae Barron, and Matthew Golden should all be taken within the first 30 picks, and possibly before pick #20. If enough of the others who have projections between the 2nd and 4th rounds get taken within the first 100 picks, that could set another UT record.

These are the NFL Drafts which had the most Longhorns taken in the top 100 picks:

1942 — 7
1984 — 6
1944, 1971, 1980, 2010, and 2024 — 5

I’d put the over/under on the number of Longhorns picked in the top 100 of this week’s draft at 5.5. Collins and Helm I think are the Longhorns most likely to be picked after the probable first round trio, and Mukuba and Ewers seem the next-most-likely to get into that range.

Eleven different draft-eligible Longhorns can find at least one mock draft projecting them to go in the first three rounds. It’s highly unlikely that so many will be picked that early, but could Texas have seven or more go within the top 100 picks?

C.J. Vogel of On Texas Football, for example, predicts eight Longhorns to be picked in the first 75 spots!

Any number above six would be the new program standard in the modern draft era, and surpassing seven would be an all-time program record.

“Mr. Irrelevant” and the lowest-drafted Texas Longhorns

Three Texas Longhorns have been the top overall pick in an NFL Draft: linebacker Tommy Nobis in 1966, running back Earl Campbell in 1978, and defensive end Kenneth Sims in 1982.

We’re unlikely to see another Longhorn go #1 until the end of Arch Manning’s college career, but we could see a Longhorn become this draft’s “Mr. Irrelevant”, the nickname given to the final pick in a draft. A number of draft-eligible Longhorns are believed to have scouting grades that could get them picked in the 6th or 7th round, or be a priority free agent target if they go undrafted, so it will be worth watching the final picks of the seventh round to see if any borderline Longhorn prospects get taken.

Two past Longhorns have been Mr. Irrelevant: Jack Rhodes and Walton Roberts.

Jack Rhodes, a native of Lexington, Texas, was picked with the 200th and final selection of the 1939 NFL Draft, which lasted 22 rounds. He was an All-Southwest Conference guard for Texas as a senior in 1938, and was selected to play in the annual East-West game. He graduated from Texas with a B.S. in physical education in 1940 and did not have a pro football career. He served in the Navy during World War II, returned to UT after his discharge and graduated with a Master’s in Education, and went on to attend the University of Houston as a doctoral student and received an Ed.D. in 1950. He was a professor of Health, Safety, and Physical Education at U of H for many years, and was also a sometime assistant football coach.

Halfback Walton Roberts, an all-stater at John Tyler High School before coming to UT, was the 330th and final pick of the 1944 NFL Draft. He had been a backup halfback on UT’s 1941 and 1942 teams and was expected to contend for a starting position as a senior on the 1943 squad, but he was called into active service in the Army in the spring of that year, and he was still in the Army when he was picked in the 1944 NFL Draft. He returned to UT in 1946 and attempted to re-join the Longhorn team, but there was heavy competition for spots in the backfield due to the program not only having several talented returning returning lettermen from the 1945 season, but also several other former players who were back in school after a year or more of military service. Roberts ended up leaving the team a few weeks into the 1946 season. He passed the bar exam in 1949 and had a long career as a lawyer.

Three other Longhorns came within two spots or less of being their draft’s Mr. Irrelevant.

Guard Joe Arnold was the next-to-last pick in the 1952 NFL Draft, going in the 30th round at pick #359.
Tight end Stephen Clark was the next-to-last pick of the 12th and final round of the 1991 draft, going #333 overall.
And cornerback Eric Jeffries was picked in the 12th round with the #333 overall pick in the 1987 NFL Draft, just two spots before Mr. Irrelevant.

In terms of overall pick number, the lowest-drafted Longhorn ever is linebacker Randy Braband, who was pick #417 in the 1973 NFL Draft, which featured 17 rounds and 442 total picks.

In the 30 years since the NFL Draft was reduced to seven rounds, the lowest-drafted Longhorn has been defensive tackle Moro Ojomo, who was pick #249 in the 2023 draft.

Drafted players who transferred to Texas

The transfer portal era has resulted in a lot more players entering the NFL Draft after playing for two or more college programs. Texas has been active in its pursuit of players who enter the portal, and after several years where it felt like most of UT’s incoming transfers rarely made an impact, the Longhorns have benefitted from a number of future pros taking their talents to Austin on their way to the NFL. But the majority of drafted Longhorns are still athletes who signed with Texas out of high school and were developed in the program.

Of the 11 Longhorns drafted in 2024, only three were players who began their career elsewhere.

Wide receiver Adonai Mitchell (picked in the 2nd round at #52 overall) played for one season at Texas after transferring from Georgia.
Running back and special teams contributor Keilan Robinson (5th round, #167 overall) played for three seasons at Texas after spending his freshman year at Alabama.
And safety Ryan Watts (6th round, #195 overall) played two seasons with the Longhorns after playing his first two college seasons at Ohio State.

There could be a slightly higher number of former transfer portal additions who are drafted from Texas this week, depending on whether or not Isaiah Bond is drafted. Bond (Alabama), Quinn Ewers (Ohio State), Matthew Golden (Houston), and Andrew Mukuba (Clemson) all transferred to Texas after beginning their career with other programs. Wide receiver/kick returner Silas Bolden, who could sneak into the 7th round and will, at worst, be a priority undrafted free agent target, transferred in from Oregon State.

But even in a scenario where Texas has 14 or 15 players drafted, the majority of them will be homegrown products and not former transfers. In the long history of Longhorns being drafted by the NFL, it’s an extreme rarity for them to not have played their entire college career at Texas. I could easily be forgetting or overlooking someone, but based on a quick look-over of UT’s all-time draftees, I believe that —aside from players who transferred to UT from the junior college ranks — the last time before 2024 that a player was drafted out of Texas after transferring there was in 1987.

In that year, former Longhorn wide receiver Laron Brown was picked in the 11th round with the #304 overall selection. Brown was a sprinter and football star from Dayton, Ohio who began his career at Tennessee in 1982. He won a letter in football at Tennessee in 1983, and was twice a letterman in track & field and competed in the 400 meters at the 1984 Olympic Trials. He moved to Austin in 1985 along with his then-wife and fellow sprinter Benita Fitzgerald, who had won the gold medal in the women’s 100-meter hurdles at the 1984 Summer Olympics and intended to train with Terry Crawford, then the UT women’s track coach. Brown enrolled at Texas and walked on with the football team, and after becoming eligible he was a member of the 1986 Longhorn squad.

The tumultuous 1940s provide a few more examples of players being drafted by the NFL after transferring to Texas, though during World War II players were often transferred from one college to another not completely of their own accord but due to their service in the reserves of one military branch or another, or their participation in one of the Navy’s officer training programs.

One of these days I’ll write a piece on the 1943 Longhorns, the team that stands in program history as the one most affected by transfers. Three student-athletes who transferred to Texas in that year were picked in the 1944 NFL Draft.

West Texas native Jim Callahan, a star running back who had been elected co-captain of Texas Tech’s 1943 team, was transferred by the Navy to Texas, which hosted a V-5 officer training program on its campus. He joined the Longhorn football team, made the All-SWC first team that season, and was picked in the 2nd round (13th overall) of the 1944 NFL Draft.

California native Marcel Gres, who was part of the Navy’s V-12 officer training program, was transferred to Texas from Santa Clara University. He was UT’s starting left tackle in 1943, was named to the AP’s All-SWC second team and honorable mention All-America team, and was picked in the 18th round (#180 overall) in the 1944 draft.

Edward “Buck” Gillenwater, a native of Memphis, Texas, was also transferred by the Navy from Texas Tech to Texas that year. He evidently did not play for the Longhorns after his transfer, but he was drafted in the 23rd round (#232 overall) in 1944, and officially was a UT draft pick.

There are a few other examples from the post-WWII years, but on the whole the number of Longhorns drafted into the NFL after beginning their college careers elsewhere is a tiny figure. Unless changes are made to the NCAA’s transfer rules that once again require transfers to sit out for a year after changing schools, I’d expect future NFL Drafts to feature more picks from Texas who didn’t start out there (but got there as quick as they could!).

The NFL Draft kicks off tonight at 7:00 Central time, and considering that we’re only three years removed from Texas having zero draft picks in 2022, it should make for great viewing and a clear indication of how far the program and its culture has come since Steve Sarkisian’s hiring as head coach in 2021.

Hook ‘em!

In this post, I’ll profile another forgotten Texas football letterman, a notable mid-1890s student-athlete named John O’Keefe. Unlike Arthur Griggs, O’Keefe actually was listed as a Texas football letterman for many years, but his name was removed shortly after the turn of the 21st century and remains missing on the current list.

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John Arthur Patrick O’Keefe was born in 1873 to Irish immigrant parents. Records are inconsistent as to his birthplace; his death certificate said it was Lamar County, Texas, while census records indicated that he was born in Missouri. What is not in dispute is that he lived for most of his life in Fannin County (which is in northeast Texas and borders the state of Oklahoma) and grew up in the town of Honey Grove. “He was educated in the best schools of the east”, according to his hometown’s newspaper, the Honey Grove Signal, though he actually attended schools in Kansas in the years prior to his enrollment at the University of Texas.1

His family was Roman Catholic, and he received his preparatory education at a Jesuit-run boarding and day school in Osage Mission, Kansas called St. Francis College.2 This school, which was also referred to as the St. Francis Institution for Boys, opened in the early 1870s and had boarding students from Kansas and several surrounding states. John O’Keefe was the valedictorian of St. Francis College’s graduating class of 1890, and at the commencement ceremony he gave a valedictory speech that the Neosho County Journal reported was “delivered in a masterly manner, speaking volumns for the young valedictorian.”3 The 1890 class would be the penultimate one at St. Francis College before it closed in 1891.

After his graduation from St. Francis, John O’Keefe enrolled at St. Mary’s College in St. Marys, Kansas, another Jesuit-run institution. He appears to have participated in athletics at St. Mary’s to the extent that he had opportunity to do so. At the college’s Field Day on June 3, 1891, he reportedly won the “hop, step, and jump” competition with a leap of 44 feet, 2 inches, and was also the winner of what was called the “standing jump” (likely the standing broad jump), recording a distance of 10 feet, 6 inches.4 He also appears to have played on the St. Mary’s baseball team during his time there.

O’Keefe graduated from St. Mary’s College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1894, and later that year he enrolled at the University of Texas as a law student. He suited up for UT’s varsity football team that fall and played in at least two of its seven games in the 1894 season. Texas had organized its very first varsity football squad only a year earlier in 1893, and at the beginning of the 1894 season about half of the starters were returning players from the original UT football roster.

It is not clear how much football experience O’Keefe brought to the team, but in a look at some of the players on the 1894 varsity, the Austin Daily Statesman reported, “O’Keefe is spoken of as the ‘hot stuff’ when it comes to hiding the oval. It would be well to keep your eye on this young Frenchman.”5 Most local fans got their first look at him in a practice game between two teams of UT students held on October 13.

O’Keefe was the starter at left halfback in UT’s first game of the 1894 season on October 20, which was not only the nascent program’s first game against the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (aka Texas A&M), but its first game against any collegiate foe after having played all four of the games in its inaugural season against “town teams”. At just 140 pounds, O’Keefe was among the lightest members of the team, though still heavier than the starting fullback, 130-pound Jacob Michalson. A&M lost the ball to Texas after receiving the kickoff, and right halfback Dave Furman had quick success with a 40-yard run. O’Keefe scored a touchdown soon afterward but the ensuing goal kick was unsuccessful, and Texas led 4-0. Touchdowns at this time were worth four points, while a made goal kick after a touchdown was worth two points.

O’Keefe reportedly “made a great run around the right end” on UT’s next possession, which ended with Michalson scoring the team’s second touchdown. Later in the first half, he “was tackled foul”, and the officials gave five yards to Texas. O’Keefe had another ten-yard run before he withdrew from the game late in the first half, and he did not re-enter in the second half. Texas led 20-0 at halftime, and would continue pounding A&M in the second half before winning 38-0.6

The Statesman reported the following week that O’Keefe “was disabled at last Saturday’s game, but is all right now and in fine working order.” He was moved from left halfback to quarterback for the team’s October 27 game against Tulane, replacing Billy McLean, who had been the regular QB on UT’s original team. O’Keefe had one “splendid” 18-yard run around the left end in the first half, but the Statesman’s recap of the game stated that most of his other carries resulted in lost yardage due to Tulane’s defense breaking UT’s line. Texas scored a touchdown in each half while keeping Tulane away from their goal line, and won the game 12-0.

O’Keefe was not mentioned in the published recaps of the last five games that the Texas varsity played in 1894, and the 1895 Cactus yearbook did not name him as either a starter or substitute in its section on the 1894 football squad. As far as I can tell, he has never been credited as a letterman for the 1894 football season. Under the UT Athletic Council guidelines which pertained for several years in the early part of the 20th century, a football man could earn a varsity letter by playing in one half (or two quarters, once games were split into quarters) of at least half of the games on the team’s schedule, or in two quarters of the game against Texas A&M. At this early stage in the UT football team’s history, such standards were probably some years away from being established, otherwise O’Keefe — who scored UT’s first-ever touchdown against Texas A&M and played most of the first half in the first game in that rivalry — would have won a letter that year.

In the spring of 1895, John O’Keefe wore one literal and two figurative hats for the UT baseball team. Texas had played baseball as a club sport for several years before that, but the 1895 season was the first in which baseball was an official varsity sport. O’Keefe played catcher, and also served as the 1895 team’s captain and manager. Team managers at that time were essentially business managers who handled the scheduling of games with opponents and made travel arrangements when their team had an away game, or engaged in negotiations with an opponent travelling to Austin to help cover their expenses for the trip.

The Statesman covered the 1895 Texas baseball team only sparingly, but O’Keefe’s skill as a catcher was commended. He also apparently was part of a local conglomeration of a baseball team referred to as the “Picked Nine”, which was organized to play a few exhibition games against the Austin Senators, a professional team that was one of eight franchises playing that year in the short-lived Texas-Southern League.7

Before the spring of 1895 was over, O’Keefe demonstrated that he was one of the best all-around athletes on the Texas campus by scoring the most individual points at UT’s spring Field Day on May 14. He competed in nearly every event held on the day, and was the winner in the standing high jump, sack race, standing broad jump, potato race, three jumps, and the hop, skip and jump (which was evidently a different event than the “three jumps”).8

In addition to playing on the UT football and baseball teams during the 1894-95 academic year and scoring the most points at the 1895 spring Field Day, O’Keefe may have also participated in tennis. The 1895 Cactus yearbook named a “J.A. O’Kief” as a member of the University Tennis Club.9

O’Keefe was again a member of the UT varsity football team in the fall of 1895. The 1896 Cactus named him as the team’s regular left halfback, though he appears to have started only one game at that position.

He started at right halfback in the team’s first game of the 1895 season, which was played in Dallas against the team from the Dallas Athletic Club, an opponent Texas had played twice in its inaugural varsity football season two years earlier. (Texas would play the Dallas Athletic Club ten times in all between 1893 and 1901, before the University’s athletic authorities finally put a stop to scheduling games against “town teams”.) In the 1895 Dallas-UT matchup, none of UT’s starters were over the age of 22, while Dallas’s right halfback George Merewether was 34, and its captain and center Edward Moseley was 24. Merewether and Moseley had both played on the Dallas Athletic Club team that Texas faced in its first-ever varsity football game on Thanksgiving Day in 1893.

Texas officially defeated the Dallas eleven by a final score of 10-0 when they played on November 2, 1895.10 Texas led 6-0 late in the second half and scored a touchdown in the game’s final minutes, but that touchdown was disputed by Dallas, as it occurred after Texas put the ball in play while Dallas’s captain Ed Moseley was having a discussion with the referee. The referee upheld the touchdown, and Moseley pulled his team off the field in protest with Texas leading 10-0.11

O’Keefe reportedly made a few good gains while carrying the ball against Dallas, but he was barely mentioned in news reports from the next three games of that season. He was dealing with a sprain and did not play in a November 16 game against the Austin YMCA, and the Statesman noted that O’Keefe was one of several varsity players who were “on the crippled list”.12 He was not mentioned at all in recaps of UT’s 16-0 win over Tulane on November 23, or its 38-0 domination of a San Antonio team on Thanksgiving Day.

Though the Texas varsity won its four games played in November of 1895 by a combined score of 88-0, the level of enthusiasm from local fans did not match that of the program’s first two seasons. The team had lost money on their November 2 road trip to Dallas, and little money was made on the three home games that month due to poor weather that kept the crowds small and limited the gate receipts. The University’s athletic association was $93 in debt by the presumptive end of the 1895 season. In early December, team captain Ray McLane (who had been a starter on the first UT squad in 1893, and whose brother Paul McLane had been UT’s first football captain) resigned his captaincy and withdrew from the University, and the team elected Wallace Ralston to take his place as captain, with the hope that at least one more game might be played before the 1895 team fully disbanded.

College football games in the current era are usually scheduled years in advance, but in the 1890s it was not unusual for teams to make arrangements for games only weeks or even days ahead of time. Going into the Christmas break in 1895, Texas had no further football games scheduled, but there was some speculation that a game would be played early in 1896 against Dallas or Galveston. A month after Wallace Ralston was elected to replace Ray McLane as the 1895 team’s captain, guard Julius House was elected captain of the 1896 team on January 9, which appeared to all but signal that the 1895 season was over.13 But one additional game was eventually arranged against a team made up of Galveston’s best players.

The game was played on February 22, 1896 in Galveston, which was then one of Texas’s largest cities and had a population that was essentially twice that of Austin.14 The UT football team played that game without a coach. Frank Crawford, who had been the team’s coach for the 1895 season, left Austin and returned to Nebraska (where he had previously coached) after the Thanksgiving Day win over San Antonio. Julius House, the captain-elect for the 1896 season, was reported by Galveston newspapers to be the varsity captain for the Galveston game, while the Houston Post identified (probably erroneously) fullback John Stanley Ford as UT’s captain when it published the expected lineup for the game a few days earlier.15 Ford was the physical director of the Austin Y.M.C.A. and may not have been an active UT student at the time, though he was a double graduate of the University and had received a Master of Arts degree in June of 1895.

The weather was not any better for the game in Galveston than it had been in UT’s three November home games, and rain fell throughout the contest. Despite the weather, about 700 spectators were in attendance, some 200 of whom were students of the UT medical school in Galveston and were cheering on the visitors.16 John O’Keefe started at left halfback against Galveston and made several good gains while carrying the ball. Late in the first half he made a 12-yard run behind the left tackle before being brought down at the one-yard line, and Texas’s right halfback James Caperton scored a touchdown on the next play. Texas did not make the goal kick after the touchdown, and took a 4-0 lead into halftime.

O’Keefe gained five yards on a carry early in the second half, and right end James “Snaky” Jones scored on a 30-yard run later in that possession to give Texas an 8-0 lead. At that time, teams needed to gain five yards within three plays to get a first down, rather than the ten yards within four plays that is the rule today. The recap in the Galveston Daily News did not mention O’Keefe as doing anything of note after his five-yard carry in the second half. Texas would win the game by an 8-0 score, and this brought the 1895 football season to a belated end.

O’Keefe moved from the gridiron to the diamond in the spring of 1896 and once again suited up for the UT baseball team. After playing catcher for the 1895 team, he was the shortstop for the 1896 team and also served as its manager.

He graduated from Texas with a Bachelor of Laws degree in June of 1896. He practiced law for some time after his graduation, and lived in his native Fannin County for most of his remaining years. In the 1910 census his occupation was listed as “bookkeeper”, and ten years later his death certificate identified him as a lawyer. He made his home for several years in Bonham, the seat of Fannin County, but returned to his hometown of Honey Grove in the last year of his life.

John O’Keefe was 46 years old when he finally got married in October of 1919. His bride, Jessie Mae Watkins, was about a month shy of her 19th birthday. Their marriage was tragically cut short only five and a half months later when John died on March 30, 1920. A local report stated that the cause of his death was believed to be food poisoning, more specifically ptomaine poisoning “from having eaten some canned goods”, while his death certificate identified it as “acute indigestion”.

His passing was mourned in the pages of the Honey Grove Signal on April 2.

We have not known a man of more polished manners or affable bearing. He never displayed the storm-clouds of temper or the ugly spirit of intolerance, but was always mild, gentle and tolerant. These qualities won him friends, made him companionable, and lighted the faces of his friends with sunnier smiles.

O’Keefe was just 47 at the time of his death, and his wife was pregnant and likely in her second trimester. Their daughter Johnnie Agnes O’Keefe was born just over five months later on September 9. She lived to the age of 81 before her death in 2002.

The University of Texas’s records for the two sports that John O’Keefe played while a student have both given him less than his due for his contributions. The all-time letterwinners list for the Texas Longhorn baseball program only lists him as an 1895 letterman — albeit as a manager — and not for 1896.

For many decades it was traditional for athletic team managers to be awarded a manager’s letter when a season concluded. Managers were very rarely athletes who actually played for the teams they managed, and so when their names were included on all-time lettermen lists for their sport there was usually a “Mgr.” next to their name to indicate this. Despite also being the team captain and starting catcher on UT’s first varsity baseball team, O’Keefe is merely listed as the manager of the 1895 team. He was also the manager and shortstop of the 1896 baseball team, but the baseball lettermen list does not recognize his contributions for the 1896 season.

Though he may have appeared in only 4 or 5 games during his two seasons on the varsity football team, O’Keefe was a recognized UT football letterman for many years. The annual Texas Longhorn football media guides have included all-time lettermen lists since 1969, and if you looked in any of the media guides published between 1969 and 2000 you would find O’Keefe listed as an 1895 letterman. For unknown reasons, his name was removed from the lettermen list when it was updated for the 2001 media guide, and it has not been restored to the list since then, as of this writing. Thus did the man who scored the first touchdown in UT’s first-ever game against Texas A&M become a forgotten Texas Longhorn letterman.17