Princeton-Penn 1946

Remember last week when TigerBlog wrote about Apollo 11 and Apollo 12? 

Of course you do. He mentioned that Pete Conrad was the third man on the moon, as the commander of Apollo 12. Conrad was a member of the Princeton Class of 1953.

When TB went back to the Daily Princetonian archives to see if there was anything about the Apollo 11 mission on the first issue of the new academic year, he found no mention of the moon. As he wrote last week, he saw a lot of coverage of the first women at Princeton (women's athletics in September 1969 was still a little more than a year away, and Merrily Dean Baker was in her one year at Franklin & Marshall before coming to Princeton).

That issue of the Prince did have something very interesting though, and TB is glad he stumbled on it. 

As you might know, 1969 was the celebration of the 100th anniversary of college football, which began with a game between Princeton and Rutgers on Nov. 6, 1869. Princeton celebrated the 150th anniversary in 2019, including its game at Yankee Stadium against Dartmouth.

Beginning with that Sept. 8 issue, the Prince ran a series on the five best Princeton football game in the first 100 years. For the first issue, the 1922 "Team of Destiny" win over Chicago was featured.

The next day, the game featured was a 1966 win over Harvard that then-coach Dick Colman called the most thrilling game in his time with the Tigers. 

The other three games on the list were the 1933 Columbia game, the 1951 game against Cornell that essentially sealed the Heisman Trophy for Dick Kazmaier and the 1946 win over a Penn team that was a four-touchdown favorite. 

Of course, the game that TB named as Princeton's best of the 20th century hadn't been played yet. In 1969, it was still 20 years until Princeton ended its 14-game losing streak to Yale with a 35-31 win on a Bob Holly touchdown on the final play, after he threw for 501 yards and four other TDs.

Of the five games that the Prince mentioned, the one that TB knew the least about was the 1946 game against Penn. The story in the Prince was pretty in-depth and really gave a good feel of what was going on in Princeton football and also in the immediate year after World War II on campus in general:

In 1946 the post-World War II boom hit Princeton. The polo field was used to house married students. Athletic teams resembled more the Fighting 69th than the graduates of Exeter. The Class of 1950 defied once precious tradition and demanded an end to wearing the "freshman dink and black tie." The traditional enforcers, the sophomore class of 1949, found itself outnumbered two-to-one, and the frosh had their way.

As TB said, the Quakers were huge favorites. It started with the fact that Penn on average had a 25-pound edge on Princeton on line, and that was when 25 pounds was a huge amount. 

Again, quoting the story: "Never," wrote one partisan writer for the Princeton Alumni Weekly, "had the cards been stacked so heavily against us.'' 

The 1946 season was the first for Charles Caldwell as the Princeton head coach. Caldwell, a 1925 graduate, had played on that 1922 Team of Destiny. He was strictly devoted to his single-wing offense, even as most teams started to move to a T-formation with a quarterback under center. 

In 1946, Princeton was still 23 years away from doing so. 

Penn came into the 1946 game at 4-0 and ranked third nationally after having crushed Lafayette, Dartmouth, Virginia and Navy. Princeton was 2-2, with wins over Brown and Rutgers and losses to Harvard and Cornell.

From a more contemporary story:

A near-capacity crowd of 72,000, including a large portion of Princeton undergraduates who later became mixed up in a post-game scramble involving Tigers, Quakers and Philadelphia foot and mounted gendarmerie, witnessed the contest. Bewildered and amazed by a light and green Princeton team that managed, with the help of a couple of "lucky breaks" to hold Perm to a 14-14 score at the half, the crowd as well as the Red and Blue eleven, was completely taken aback when the Tigers rose to unprecedented heights in the second half to literally run roughshod over a much heavier, and supposedly much stronger Quaker team.

The winning points came in the final minute, when Ken Keuffel kicked a short field goal. Keuffel would go on to be a longtime high school football coach, including at Lawrenceville School, who used the single-wing as well. 

As for the riot, well, two Princeton students and one Penn student were arrested afterwards, when a skirmish arose after Princeton fans tried tearing down the goal posts. The Prince referred to it as "The Fifth Quarter."

Hey, the current Fifth Quarter at Princeton football is much more family friendly.