"On Sept. 28, 1918, Riley Shue played in his first college football game. Eleven days later, the Miami (Ohio) guard died of the flu.
A starter at Texas also died of influenza that fall. So did a player at West Virginia, and Ohio State’s team captain from the year before. That’s just a few we know about. It isn’t clear how many college football players died of the flu in fall 1918.
The 1918-19 flu scourge was more lethal than the current coronavirus pandemic, killing 675,000 in the U.S., and was especially fatal in 20- to 40-year-olds. Covid-19 infections have killed more than 180,000 this year, and the U.S. has more than three times the population it did a century ago.
Why would universities in 1918 forge ahead with football while a virus decimated the ranks of young, healthy men? The answer is something arguably even bigger than a global pandemic: a global war.
But the overlay of World War I made 1918 unique, and gave grim weight to the metaphor of football as a battle.
The U.S. War Department warned in September 1918 that college football could be canceled because it would distract from military training.
A couple of weeks later, the government pivoted like an All-American receiver. The game could help build the aggressiveness to fight and the grit to endure grinding days in the trenches of France, it reasoned. “It would be difficult to overestimate the value of football experience as a part of a soldier’s training,” President Woodrow Wilson later wrote.
But military leadership at the time included giants like former Yale coach Walter Camp, who was advising the Navy on athletic activities. Wilson himself had coached football while teaching at Wesleyan University.
Military boot camps across the country had formed teams after the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, many made up of former college stars. In 1918, the mighty team at the Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago boasted three players later enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: George Halas, Jimmy Conzelman and John “Paddy” Driscoll.
On college campuses, football teams were depleted of students who’d left for the war, so many called upon freshmen to play. Teams also got help from the ranks of the Student Army Training Corps, on-campus boot camps set up nationwide. Some colleges played games against military teams.
The 1918 flu first surfaced in the U.S. among military personnel in spring 1918, but the resurgence caught campuses by surprise. ll practice time and restricted travel from university campuses in October to Saturday afternoons. Overnight road trips were out.
Some teams, like Alabama and LSU, were so depleted by the war effort that they’d already canceled their seasons. Others scrambled to remake their schedules, some booking games days or hours before kickoff.
Meanwhile the virus spread, prompting regional health authorities to ban fans from games or prohibit large gatherings. At one point all games scheduled in Illinois and Iowa were called off.
By the third week in October Michigan’s team, packed with Army training corps members, was playing with masks. “Until further orders they will practice with the piece of gauze fastened about their mouths,” read a story in the Daily Pennsylvanian.
At one point, 673 members of Pitt’s Army training corps contingent were hospitalized. Of those whose cases developed into pneumonia, 99 died, according to the story.
Yet on Nov. 9 the highly touted Panthers, led by coach Pop Warner, managed to start their season. They outscored their opponents 140-16 over five games, losing only to a Cleveland Naval Reserve team led by a rugged former Auburn standout named Moon Ducote. Pitt and 5-0 Michigan both claim national titles for that season, decades before a championship game existed.
Still, death hung over 1918. U.S. average life expectancy plummeted 12 years from the year before, mostly due to the flu. A December story in the Pittsburgh Press listed dozens of notable athletes who’d died that year: A former Dartmouth quarterback killed in a German raid. The 1917 Ohio State captain, Harold Courtney, dead of pneumonia—the cause often given for people who contracted the flu.
The 1918 and 2020 college football seasons carry a few striking parallels.
Yet even in 1918, financial forces prodded college football: A late October 1918 story in the Pittsburgh Press expressed hope that West Virginia could mount a few games to raise money toward a $170 million fund for the Red Cross and other war charities.
"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1918-pandemic-was-deadlier-but-college-football-continued-heres-why-11599048011?mod=hp_major_pos1#cxrecs_s
A starter at Texas also died of influenza that fall. So did a player at West Virginia, and Ohio State’s team captain from the year before. That’s just a few we know about. It isn’t clear how many college football players died of the flu in fall 1918.
The 1918-19 flu scourge was more lethal than the current coronavirus pandemic, killing 675,000 in the U.S., and was especially fatal in 20- to 40-year-olds. Covid-19 infections have killed more than 180,000 this year, and the U.S. has more than three times the population it did a century ago.
Why would universities in 1918 forge ahead with football while a virus decimated the ranks of young, healthy men? The answer is something arguably even bigger than a global pandemic: a global war.
But the overlay of World War I made 1918 unique, and gave grim weight to the metaphor of football as a battle.
The U.S. War Department warned in September 1918 that college football could be canceled because it would distract from military training.
A couple of weeks later, the government pivoted like an All-American receiver. The game could help build the aggressiveness to fight and the grit to endure grinding days in the trenches of France, it reasoned. “It would be difficult to overestimate the value of football experience as a part of a soldier’s training,” President Woodrow Wilson later wrote.
But military leadership at the time included giants like former Yale coach Walter Camp, who was advising the Navy on athletic activities. Wilson himself had coached football while teaching at Wesleyan University.
Military boot camps across the country had formed teams after the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, many made up of former college stars. In 1918, the mighty team at the Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago boasted three players later enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: George Halas, Jimmy Conzelman and John “Paddy” Driscoll.
On college campuses, football teams were depleted of students who’d left for the war, so many called upon freshmen to play. Teams also got help from the ranks of the Student Army Training Corps, on-campus boot camps set up nationwide. Some colleges played games against military teams.
The 1918 flu first surfaced in the U.S. among military personnel in spring 1918, but the resurgence caught campuses by surprise. ll practice time and restricted travel from university campuses in October to Saturday afternoons. Overnight road trips were out.
Some teams, like Alabama and LSU, were so depleted by the war effort that they’d already canceled their seasons. Others scrambled to remake their schedules, some booking games days or hours before kickoff.
Meanwhile the virus spread, prompting regional health authorities to ban fans from games or prohibit large gatherings. At one point all games scheduled in Illinois and Iowa were called off.
By the third week in October Michigan’s team, packed with Army training corps members, was playing with masks. “Until further orders they will practice with the piece of gauze fastened about their mouths,” read a story in the Daily Pennsylvanian.
At one point, 673 members of Pitt’s Army training corps contingent were hospitalized. Of those whose cases developed into pneumonia, 99 died, according to the story.
Yet on Nov. 9 the highly touted Panthers, led by coach Pop Warner, managed to start their season. They outscored their opponents 140-16 over five games, losing only to a Cleveland Naval Reserve team led by a rugged former Auburn standout named Moon Ducote. Pitt and 5-0 Michigan both claim national titles for that season, decades before a championship game existed.
Still, death hung over 1918. U.S. average life expectancy plummeted 12 years from the year before, mostly due to the flu. A December story in the Pittsburgh Press listed dozens of notable athletes who’d died that year: A former Dartmouth quarterback killed in a German raid. The 1917 Ohio State captain, Harold Courtney, dead of pneumonia—the cause often given for people who contracted the flu.
The 1918 and 2020 college football seasons carry a few striking parallels.
Yet even in 1918, financial forces prodded college football: A late October 1918 story in the Pittsburgh Press expressed hope that West Virginia could mount a few games to raise money toward a $170 million fund for the Red Cross and other war charities.
"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1918-pandemic-was-deadlier-but-college-football-continued-heres-why-11599048011?mod=hp_major_pos1#cxrecs_s