Goog news: A long gone player is back

Journey back to Sewanee, a founding SEC member with no regrets.

“You’ll win many a bar bet if you can name the three former SEC charter members. They will guess Tulane and Georgia Tech. And only if they’re extremely knowledgeable will they guess Sewanee. – John McCardell, Sewanee Chancellor Emeritus

Sewanee, Tennessee — Leonidas Polk was a difficult man whose schemes had a tendency to backfire. He had the notion to start a school that would aspirationally be known as the University of the South, and he set the cornerstone in 1858 during a ceremony attended by fellow school founders. Polk never saw the school open because he joined the Confederate Army and was hit by a Union cannonball.

Despite this, a small and secluded school formed on a Tennessee mountain. Bobby Bowden, a football player from a visiting school, once remarked that Sewanee was the first place he seen snow. Even now, the campus appears nearly locked in time, with stone buildings and no chain restaurants in sight.

The football field is a short walk away. The gate is open and anyone can enter. The home side’s stone bleachers, erected in the nineteenth century, are so little that trees behind the stadium dangle over them. The “press box” is a single room.

And yet, here, on the oldest football field in the South, was an SEC program. Here lived possibly the greatest squad in college football history. Here was a team that still had winning records over Auburn, Georgia, and LSU, as well as the record for the most points scored in regulation against Alabama.

This is Sewanee, a little Episcopal institution that helped form the SEC, then departed and never looked back.

The journey to the SEC and the significance of ‘1899’
When the Sewanee athletic director position opened up in the 1990s, Vanderbilt administrator Mark Webb was persuaded by his old boss, Roy Kramer, to apply. Webb received the position, and a few years later, during the week of 9/11, he heard from his supervisor.

“These (SEC) presidents said they’re not going to play this weekend,” Kramer went on to say. “I need to come see a football game.”

Many Division III schools, including Sewanee, were playing that week. So, as Sewanee defeated Emory & Henry, the SEC commissioner — the visionary credited with establishing the SEC’s current domination — watched from the stands.

The SEC got its start in Tennessee, where its members had previously competed in the Southern Conference. Several colleges, including Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Tulane, Vanderbilt, and Sewanee, left the league due to its size.

It was a heritage pick at the time, with evidence of Sewanee’s decline in football glory dating back a decade before the SEC was created. But the Sewanee legacy was pretty persuasive.

A cathedral in the center of campus has stained-glass windows that tell the university’s story: The first image depicts Polk writing a letter to fellow Episcopal bishops proposing the establishment of the university. Then, in the following windows, among scholars and soldiers, are two football players carrying a football marked “1899.”

College football began in the Northeast, primarily in the Ivy League, and subsequently spread to the South; Sewanee hosted its first game in 1891. By the end of the decade, the Tigers had one of the region’s top programs, and in the final year of the century, they fielded a team that one historian credits with popularizing football in the South.

Sewanee opened the 1899 season with a 12-0 victory at Georgia. It concluded the season with victories over Auburn (coached by John Heisman) and North Carolina, with a late defensive stand securing a 5-0 victory, which current Sewanee coach Travis Rundle still utilizes to urge his defense.

But it was what happened over six days in November that went down in college football history. To gain money as the visiting team through gate receipts, team manager Luke Lea organized five games over six days: Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU, and Ole Miss. This was at a time when Sewanee only had 13 players, the forward pass was not permitted, leather helmets were still being introduced, and players who left the game could not return.

“Our guys don’t even practice five straight days,” said Rundle, Sewanee’s head coach since 2017. “What was it, a couple years ago (then-Tennessee head coach) Butch Jones complained about having three games in 18 days or whatever it was? We responded to him briefly on social media. He claimed that was unheard of. “No, it is not.”

That marked the culmination of a long spell of football domination. Sewanee’s record in the 11 seasons after 1899 was 65-15-7, with no more than two losses in a season. In 1909, it defeated LSU in New Orleans in a game attended by President Taft. For the first few decades of the twentieth century, the rivalry between Sewanee and Vanderbilt was the most intense in

Sewanee defeated Alabama 54-4 during the 1907 season, and that is the last time the Crimson Tide conceded so many points in regulation. Rundle was messaging with athletic director Mark Webb a few years ago, hoping they’d be able to retain their record as Alabama and Ole Miss battled it out. They did.

So, why didn’t Sewanee capitalize on all of this? The basic truth is that football grew, as did the state and big-city-based schools, but Sewanee did not.

Misery and departure from the SEC.
Sewanee is around 45 minutes west of Chattanooga, with one exit sign on the highway that Georgia fans may pass on their route to Nashville or Knoxville. Take a left and proceed approximately 5

“We’re in the middle of nowhere on top of a mountain that’s 2,000 feet atop sea level,” said McCardell. “So, for many years, this was a close-knit community by necessity. And this is not for everyone. So some students have been here over the years and decided, “No, this is too remote a community for me.”

For the first half-century of its existence, being remote was not a disadvantage. However, as trains gave way to cars and planes, and enrollments in public and urban schools increased, Sewanee lacked the numbers and resources to compete in a rapidly expanding environment.

“When the SEC was formed, Sewanee got in on its name,” said Woody Register, a professor of history at Sewanee. “But

Register links the development of southern football – Alabama’s Rose Bowl victory against Washington on January 1, 1926 — to the fall of what he calls “the golden era of Sewanee football.” That year, the University of the South team finished 2-6 and 0-5 in the Southern Conference. It was shut out in all five conference games. However, there were enough glimmers of optimism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as back-to-back victories over LSU and Ole Miss in 1931, that when the SEC was founded, Sewanee consented to join.