Larry Hubbard was born on July 1, 1959. Not much is known about his early life, other than he played basketball for Hardaway High School in Columbus, Georgia.

Despite being 6’9”, he didn’t have any good offers out of high school. So he enrolled at Chipola Junior College. In part thanks to Hubbard, this year they won their conference, and Larry looked great in the process. One year after he went pretty much entirely unnoticed in high school, he’s drawing Division I interest.

New Mexico spent almost the better part of the 20^th century as a bottom feeder. During this time, they had zero program stability and switched head coaches every couple of years. In 1962, they landed on Iowa assistant Bob King, who out of nowhere immediately turned New Mexico’s fortunes all the way around.

In 1964 as they stormed to the NIT final, the program’s first postseason appearance.

At the time, the AP poll only ranked around 10 teams. New Mexico were poll regulars. They were thought of as one of the very best teams in the country most years. Bob King had national respect. What he didn’t have was internal respect.

In 1972, he resigned as New Mexico’s basketball coach in hopes of becoming their athletic director. Unfortunately, he was passed up, and Bob King instead went to Indiana State, where he would later recruit Larry Bird. Replacing Bob King at New Mexico was his longtime assistant Norm Ellenberger.

Ellenberger’s top assistant was Manny Goldstein, who was famous for finding great JUCO players, and that continued in. JUCO transfers made up the majority of the Lobo roster some years, which at the time was unheard of, but it was getting them results. New Mexico marches back to the NCAA tournament in both 1974 and 1978. This is the radar that Larry Hubbard lands on in 1979 as Ellenberger and Goldstein scoop him up to be one of their next reclamation projects. After one year at Chipola, Larry Hubbard heads west.

We don’t even have to fast forward to the beginning of next season. It all started falling apart in the summer of 1979 when multiple recent New Mexico basketballers had run-ins with the law

Within one five-month stretch, one was convicted of misappropriation, another got booked for credit card fraud, and yet another had been charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault. As the program is then implicated in organized crime allegations, they get the attention of the FBI, which investigates the program’s possible involvement in illegal gambling activities.

Looking for an admission of guilt, they tap the phones of some New Mexico administrators and important people, including Ellenberger and Goldstein. In a tapped phone conversation between the two coaches on November 17^th, Goldstein describes in excruciating detail the measures he took to forge the junior college transcript of guard Craig Gilbert (in addition to breaking all sorts of NCAA rules on player eligibility, the method by which Goldstein secured said eligibility sets him up for federal felony charges of bribery and mail fraud.)

The FBI does a little more digging to confirm they have enough to charge Goldstein, then releases the transcript of the phone call on November 30th, one day before the Lobo season opener at Colorado.

Gilbert, Ellenberger, and Goldstein are all suspended. This development surprises the NCAA, who’ve evidently been investigating New Mexico on and off for years. They’ve been suspicious of the program’s JUCO pipeline, and this incident gives them more than enough to resume their investigation.

On December 6th, the NCAA releases their findings, sparking a scandal that will soon be dubbed Lobogate. They find that six players, including Larry Hubbard, have been involved in a scheme that is probably best described as a combination of fake classes and transcript forgery.

The six players were enrolled in a three-credit summer class called “Current Problems and Principles in Coaching Athletics.” This was a real class, but it wasn’t offered by the University of New Mexico. It was delivered in a suburban Los Angeles garage by a professor at Los Angeles Valley College. But the class wasn’t offered by Los Angeles Valley College either. It was administered through an extension program run by Ottawa University, a private school in Kansas.

If this all sounds convoluted, that’s on purpose.

The credits Hubbard and friends earned from this class satisfy NCAA eligibility rules. However, none of the players actually took the class. Someone from the university, likely Norm Ellenberger or Manny Goldstein, enlisted six random men to take the class in place of the players and had to pay the tuition for it out of pocket since this class wasn’t covered by the university’s athletic scholarship.

Almost certainly, none of the players involved knew about this at the time. Only one of them, Jerome Henderson, claims he took the class in an attempt to retain his eligibility, even though he admits to not even knowing where the class was held. He’s from Los Angeles, so he figures he has some plausible deniability. (Stupidly enough, this works, all he gets is a short suspension. He’ll even manage to make it to the NBA.)

The other five players covered aren’t nearly as lucky. They’re all declared academically ineligible, and none of them will ever suit up for the Lobos again.

Norm Ellenberger is officially fired on December 17th, and over the next few months, he and nearly everyone on his staff will be hit with dozens of counts of mail fraud and filing false public vouchers. The NCAA’s own investigation into the scandal found 34 violations of recruiting rules, and the Lobo program was placed on probation and banned from post-season appearances for three years. New Mexico will sputter to 7 and 21 this season, which ends up going in the books as 6 and 22 because they have to forfeit their win over West Texas State, the one Larry Hubbard played in. They’ll feel the effects of this scandal for years. As for Hubbard, he’ll quietly return to the juco scene and play out the rest of his college days at Frank Phillips College in Borger, Texas. And that’s where the story should end.

Keyword: Should.

Fast forward five years to 1984. The Bears of Morgan State, a historically black university in Baltimore, are making the jump from Division II to Division I. In preparation for the jump to D1, Athletic Director Tom Dean wants this transition to go as well as possible, so he fires head coach Billy Newton and installs a man he trusts more than anyone else in the world: himself. He has no head coaching experience to speak of, but surely he can do better than Newton, who went to a combined 20-63 in 3 years.

Now, all he needs is a roster, and he finds a 6’10” player out of Flint, Michigan who is just what he is looking for

Dean immediately adds Hubbard to the Morgan State roster, which is not good. First, Larry has already been sanctioned by the NCAA in the past, and he’d be a very obvious target. Second, and more importantly, even if everything he does is above board, Larry Hubbard is 100% out of eligibility.

A player has five calendar years to complete four seasons of NCAA eligibility beginning as soon as they enroll full-time at any college. Hubbard first enrolled full-time at Chipola Junior College in the fall of 1978. So his eligibility expired after spring of 1983. We are a full season after his time has run out, and Larry Hubbard is on a Division I roster.

You might think Tom Dean is insane for trying to pull this off.

Here’s the thing, though.

Tom Dean doesn’t know about any of this.

Larry Hubbard has been lying about his identity.

He told Dean he’s a recent high school dropout who earned his GED and is enrolling at Morgan State as a freshman.

He’s 25.

He listed his high school not as Hardaway High School in Columbus, Georgia, but Hardway High School in Flint, Michigan.

This isn’t a real school.

Dean doesn’t know that either because he never bothered to check Hubbard’s transcript since he claimed he didn’t graduate.

How much is Tom really to blame here though?

It’s the mid-80s. He couldn’t just Google the guy.

It’s not reasonable to expect him to remember every detail of a scandal that occurred across the country five years ago. If it was almost any other coach, you could argue that he might have connections in the coaching ranks who would recognize him, but Tom Dean has zero coaching experience.

If this season goes anything like the last one for Morgan State, there’s a chance Larry can get away with this for a while.

The Bears play in the MEAC.

In non-conference play the previous year, the farthest west Morgan St. traveled was Jefferson City, Missouri, still over 800 miles from Albuquerque.

As long as they keep that up and stay away from anyone who might recognize Hubbard, he might just pull this off.

In 1985, Morgan State opens their season @ New Mexico.

Larry, for some reason, decides to make the trip to Albuquerque.

He is recognized immediately.

Who would’ve seen that coming?

The Bears are thrashed by the Lobos, losing by 32 points and setting their star center up to be kicked off the team after just one game.

…except this is Tom Dean we’re talking about.

Hubbard denied he and the other Larry Hubbard were the same guy. Then before their second game in Madison, WI, Dean received a call from a reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune with additional facts about Hubbard. Hubbard denies it again.

Despite all this, Tom actually allows Larry Hubbard to play in the Bears’ second game of the season at Wisconsin.

Before Morgan State’s third game at South Alabama, the mounting pressure becomes too much for Tom to handle, and he finally throws Larry off the team. (In the aftermath, Tom reveals that he was unable to confirm that Larry ever even enrolled at Morgan State. Jesus Christ dude.)

The Bears will go on to lose their next three games by 52, 60, and 48 before Earl Richardson removes Tom Dean as head coach. His final record is 0-5, with his average margin of defeat being 41.4 points.

No one seems to know what happened to Larry Hubbard after this.

When Tom Dean asks him why he did all this. all he said was, and this is a real quote, “Coach, I just love to play basketball.”

So, i’m about 5 years late to the party on this one.

In 2020-2021, the so called “Iceberg Charts” or the “Iceberg Meme” was all the rage in communities all over the internet. Basically the idea is that it’s a chart that, like an iceberg, starts at the top with more surface level stuff and as you keep going down the iceberg, the topics of discussion become increasingly more obscure and complex. It’s also pretty conventional that as you go down the iceberg the topics tend to get more weird and disturbing. So, as my favorite pastime is looking up interesting college football facts and stories, I thought I would try to tackle the curiosity I had of what a College Football iceberg would be.

That being said, as we progress down the iceberg it does start to get pretty bleak, so reader discretion is advised

Level 1

Big Red

So, Big Red is the name of the mascot for the WKU Hilltoppers, who represents Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He is a big, red, and furry blob.

He was created before the start of the 1979 college basketball season by WKU student Ralph Carey. WKU fans were known for waving red towels in the stands, and Carey wanted to play off of that.

Originally he sketched a bear Mascot that was wearing a sweater with the letter W, however, later on he decided not to use a known animal.

According to WKU’s branding guide, Big Red is neither male nor female.

Each year at graduation, any WKU student who portrays big red is allowed to wear the Big Red gloves on graduation day to let people know they were a WKU mascot.

Big Red was inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame in 2007.

Arthur Evans

Arthur “Art” Evans was an artist that was well known for creating logos for college athletics programs. He worked at the Angelus Pacific Company from 1932 to 1977 and it’s estimated that he was responsible for close to 90% of all mascot designs between 1933 and 1977. If you ever seen a mascot with a sailors hat on (off the top of my head the most famous ones would probably be Baylor, Oregon State, Missouri, LSU, Cal, Miami, and North Carolina State) chance are that it was created by Art.

The reasoning behind this is that licensing back then didn’t really exist in the way we think of it now, so Art and his team could go to a bunch of different colleges and as along as their mascot was the same, pitch the exact same design, but change the color and the wording on it. That’s why the old Timey logo for LSU Missouri, Auburn, Pacific, etc.. all look exactly the same.

Surrender Cobra

Surrender Cobra is a meme that came out of the 2015 game in the Michigan-Michigan State rivalry but it refers to the position that many sports fans go into when they see something they don’t like on the field, stood still with both hands on their head which sort of looks like the outline of the hood of a king cobra, hence the name.

The guy in the original photo is University of Michigan state football fan Chris Baldwin. He was interviewed by The Detroit News, and mentioned that he was still stopped all the time by people who recognize him from his moment of fame. Baldwin said “It’s been fun overall, but it’s not necessarily fun being associated with that in particular,” he said. “I’m famous for being a UM student and a football fan. I don’t seek out highlights of the game or seek out the game. I’m used to seeing it now and don’t have much reaction. It’s kind of funny now that I am removed from the moment.”

Headless Mascots

Losing your head is the absolute cardinal sin of being a mascot. This is obviously because a lot of young children look up to the mascot and don’t necessarily know it’s just a guy in there. When you put on the costume, you become the mascot.

Nevertheless, every year there seems to be at least one incident of a mascot, losing their head, and then scurry off the field as fast as they can because mascots are trained to protect the illusion at all costs.

This year it was the Oregon Duck that fell victim to this

South Carolina vs Navy

In 1984, in the middle of November, South Carolina looked like one of the best teams in the entire country and one of the front runners to contest for the National Championship in two months time. In fact, the Orange Bowl had already contacted the program regarding the opportunity to play Nebraska or Oklahoma in the national title. The Gamecocks were 9-0 and had just come off a big win at home versus #11 Florida State. They were coached by Joe Morrison, who would win 1984 Walter Camp Coach of the Year at the end of the season.

Navy was struggling. They had beaten a mediocre North Carolina team, but they’re only other wins were to Lehigh and Princeton, and sported a record of 3-5-1 when South Carolina came to town. Its best player, future NFL running back Napoleon McCallum, was out with a broken leg, and five other starters also missed the game.

Navy absolutely thrashed, South Carolina, 38-21, and before 2007 there was an argument to be made that it was the greatest upset in College Football history

Level 2

First Game in Mexico

In 1896, the Missouri football team left Columbia on December 10th to play the University of Texas. After the game, Texas HC Harry Orman Robinson proposed to Mizzou HC Frank Patterson that their respective squads go on an exhibition tour to Mexico City, and without university approval, the team voted unanimously in favor of the idea.

After shutting out the Longhorns, the Tigers boarded a train, along with the Longhorns, and crossed the border.

The first stop was Monterrey, where the teams, fatigued from travel and sightseeing, played an uninspired Christmas Day game, which Missouri won. Then it was on to Mexico City where, along with playing two mixed-squad games, the players enjoyed the city and its people. Mexican newspapers were highly critical of American football, likening it to bullfighting, though the latter seemed entirely proper to the press. Second, the lack of familiarity with American football resulted in the local police attempting to break up one of the games, thinking the Americans in odd clothing were fighting one another. Third, the local oddsmakers saw the opportunity to make a few bucks, so the teams avoided potential temptations by arranging for the second game in Mexico City to end in a tie.

When they returned to Columbia Jan. 4, the Missourians had traveled 6,000 miles. That’s the last trip Patterson took as Mizzou’s head coach. He was fired, and the team captain and manager were suspended from school.

Stormy Weather

So, because Iowa State is the Cyclones, and because especially at the turn of the 20th century people would’ve found it difficult to find a mascot that would well represent a weather phenomena, the athletics teams at Iowa State have had multiple different mascots before the Cy the Cardinal mascot came about in 1954.

In the mid 1930s, Iowa State did have a mascot named Cy, but as a live dog who stayed near the cheerleaders on the sidelines of football games.

There was also Stormy Weather in 1933. Stormy Weather, who was almost certainly named after the jazz song that had just came out that year, was a goat that was owned by Iowa State cheerleader Kenneth Ruggles. Stormy Weather was given to Ruggles’ older brother by a relative, and Kenneth brought Stormy Weather to all the home football games. After the season though, Stormy Weather became sort of a nuisance at the farm. The sheep didn’t like him very much and he chewed up rope buckets and hay fork handles in the hog barn.

When he tried to eat through the side of the barn Leon Ruggles, Kenneth’s older brother, had had enough and Stormy Weather’s career came to an end under the butcher’s knife.

Slab of Bacon

Most of you may know The Axe as the trophy of the Minnesota-Wisconsin rivalry, but before then they battled for the Slab of Bacon, a piece of black walnut wood with a football at the center bearing a letter that becomes “M” or “W” depending on which way the trophy is hung.

The trophy’s tenure ended, however, when Minnesota’s 1943 victory in Minnesota led to the fans rushing the field. Wisconsin student Peg Watrous was to bring the trophy to a Minnesota representative after the game, but the representative could not find her in the commotion, and subsequently lost track of the “bacon”. Reportedly, the trophy was sent to Minnesota’s locker room, but coach George Hauser refused it, suggesting such traditions be held off until after World War II. It was subsequently lost for many years, and so a new trophy, “Paul Bunyan’s Axe”, was introduced in 1948.

In 1994, Wisconsin intern Will Roleson found it in a storage closet at Camp Randall Stadium. It had evidently been maintained for some time, as game scores through 1970 were painted on the back. It is now displayed at the Camp Randall Stadium football offices.

Rice Owls steal back their mascot

Reddit user u/Owlcatraz has an incredibly well written writeup of this whole ordeal that I would absolutely recommend you give a read.

But a summary while you’re here. On January 16, 1917, Texas A&M beat Rice in basketball. After the game, Aggie students noticed that Rice had left behind their mascot, a 200-pound, man-sized stuffed owl. They carried him out of the auditorium, and then questioned by security, the Aggies said they were returning the mascot to Rice. Instead, they packed him up and shipped him to College Station via train.

Rice, embarrassed, denied the owl had been stolen and quickly created an identical copy. The Aggies weren’t having it. They vowed to bring the real mascot back to Houston in the fall parade before the A&M–Rice football game. This resulted in seventeen students raiding the US Armory at College Station in order to retrieve him and in response Texas A&M launched an 800 person manhunt and took over multiple towns in the surrounding area in order to apprehend them.

It’s one of the wildest sport adjacent stories i’ve ever read and I would suggest you do the same

Joel Ron McKelvey

Ron Weaver was a football player who played for a JUCO and then at Sacramento State for a couple of years in the late 1980s.

After college, Weaver went to work at his family’s liquor store. Two years later, he was asked to serve as an unpaid assistant coach to the defensive backs. The experience coaching led him to believe he could still play football. After he met a 20-year-old at both the liquor store and lifting weights named Joel McKelvey, he had an idea. Weaver enrolled at Los Angeles Pierce College under an assumed name and a different date of birth, using the name and Social Security number of McKelvey while claiming to be a high school graduate of 1990.

Changing positions to cornerback, he played two seasons at Pierce before transferring to Texas, where he was recruited by the defensive backs coach. He claimed his age was 23 instead of 30. Weaver also joined the team after photos had already been taken for the team media guide. He eventually received a full scholarship. He recorded one return for nine yards.

Weaver was not caught until he told a reporter that he planned to write a book about his scheme. He was not exposed until the day before the December 1995 Sugar Bowl, when The Salinas Californian, acting on an anonymous tip, revealed his real name and age. A promise to produce a birth certificate came to nothing, and he disappeared shortly before the game.

The Longhorns lost to Virginia Tech; several players later said they were badly shaken by the discovery that one of their teammates was an imposter.

Weaver ultimately pleaded guilty in a California federal court to misusing a Social Security number; he did not serve any jail time.

The Original Fifth Down Game

These days if you say “The Fifth Down Game”, people will almost certainly think of the 1990 game between Colorado and Missouri, but actually there was also one 50 years before that.

The 1940 game between Cornell and Dartmouth wasn’t supposed to be a contest. Cornell entered the contest with 18 straight victories over a two-year period. However, Dartmouth would manage to hold off Cornell’s offense for nearly the entire low-scoring game. Dartmouth scored first, with a field goal in the fourth quarter.ith less than a minute left in the game, Cornell got the ball on Dartmouth’s six-yard line. On its first down, fullback Mort Landsberg gained three yards. On its second down, Cornell halfback Walt Scholl managed to run the ball to the one-yard line. On the third down, Landsberg tried to run up the middle but did not gain more than a few inches.

On the fourth down, Cornell was penalized for delay of game, and referee Red Friesell spotted the ball just over the 5-yard line in order to replay the fourth down. With nine seconds left on the clock, quarterback “Pop” Scholl threw an incomplete pass into the end zone.Following the fourth down, linesman Joe McKenney had signaled that it was first down and that the ball should go to Dartmouth at the 20 yard line. Referee Friesell, erroneously believing it was now fourth down, placed the ball on the six-yard line, granting Cornell a “fifth” down.

Making the most of the unexpected opportunity, quarterback Scholl threw a touchdown pass to William Murphy, and following the extra-point kick, Cornell won the game 7–3.

Officials discovered their error after reviewing the game films. Cornell’s players, coach Carl Snavely, acting athletic director Bob Kane, and President Edmund Ezra Day, a Dartmouth alumnus, agreed that Cornell should send a telegram to Dartmouth offering to forfeit the game, which Dartmouth accepted.

Level 3

George O’Leary

George O’Leary was the head football coach of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets from 1994 to 2001. In 2001, O’Leary left Georgia Tech to take over as the head coach for the University of Notre Dame.

However, a few days after he was hired, inaccuracies were discovered in his published biographical sketch. The biography, which had remained more or less unchanged for two decades, stated that O’Leary had earned three letters in football at the University of New Hampshire, but when The New Hampshire Union Leader called The University of New Hampshire to research a feature story on him, the school informed the paper he had not even played in one game.

When this came to light, O’Leary offered his immediate resignation, which Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White turned down, but then asked if there were any other inaccuracies. He then admitted that he had not earned a master’s degree from “NYU-Stony Brook University”: this was a non-existent institution named after two separate schools over 50 miles apart. He had taken only two courses at Stony Brook, and never graduated. When this inaccuracy came to light, Notre Dame promptly forced O’Leary to resign.

SMU Death Penalty

Southern Methodist University (SMU), located in suburban Dallas, was the second-smallest school in the Southwest Conference (SWC) and one of the smallest in Division I-A, with a total enrollment of just over 9,000 students in 1986. Because of this, the team had found it difficult to compete against SWC schools that were double its size or more. As the 1980 season began, SMU had had twenty-one losing seasons in the previous thirty, including the last five in a row.

As they increased their efforts to keep up with the bigger schools, SMU’s coaches and athletic staff began using unethical methods of recruiting and retaining players. Schools in the NCAA were prohibited from paying a player to join or play for their team, and all players were required to remain bona fide students of the school they played for. Much of the cheating took place with the full knowledge of school administrators.

SMU’s violations were considered to be particularly egregious, including the maintenance of a large slush fund for payments to recruits and players from the early 1970s onward. In early 1987, the NCAA investigated SMU’s football program for these and other violations, and imposed what is referred to as the “death penalty”, banning a team from competition for a year or more. The severity of the sanctions the NCAA imposed in this case, while based on the number and seriousness of SMU’s infractions, especially took into account the school’s blatant disregard for previous efforts at enforcement; the university had been on probation five times between 1974 and 1985, and seven times overall, more than any other school.

As a result, the NCAA canceled SMU’s 1987 season, the first time it had canceled a member’s entire football season. The university opted to sit out the 1988 season as well due to concerns it would be unable to field a competitive team. The two-year hiatus had long-term effects on the program and heavily contributed to the dissolution of the Southwest Conference, relegating the program to being a Group of Five program up until they joined the ACC in 2024.

Cincinnati Bearcat Snowballs

On December 4, 2010, the Cincinnati Bearcats took on the Pittsburgh Panthers and their last game of the season. By all accounts, it was not a very good season, but it was the first season of their new head coach Butch Jones, who I’m sure will turn out to be a good coach.

It was heavily snowing during the game, and at the end of the first quarter, Pitt RB Dion Lewis made a 15 yard run to the end zone for his second touchdown of the quarter. However, when he reached the end zone, he started getting pelted with snowballs that were being thrown from the stands.

But not just anyone from the stands. It was the Cincinnati Bearcat mascot, who was standing on top of a platform and encouraging others to throw snowballs as well.

He eventually is asked to come down and get physical with the security guard, which gets him tackled to the ground handcuffed, arrested, and ultimately cited for disorderly conduct.

Pop Warner Iowa State

Pop Warner was an incredibly influential coach in the history of college football. He played when he was at Cornell in the 1890s, and then immediately after he started his coaching career at Georgia.

Despite already being the coach at Georgia, in 1895 he was offered $25 per week to come to Iowa State, whose season started in mid-August while Georgia’s started a month later, as well as to provide weekly advice during the rest of the season. One of his first games is against the Butte Athletic Club of Butte, Montana. The game is initially set for Sunday, which is an issue because Warner knows Iowa State is not going to sanction a Sunday game. So, he lies and tells them the administration he scheduled the game on Saturday instead.

While traveling up to Butte, their train was briefly stranded by a freak blizzard forcing the players to forage for food. However, they finally make it to Butte Saturday morning. Arriving in Butte, Warner bets his entire Iowa State salary on the game ($175).

Sunday morning they make it down to the “field”, the game is played on a dirt field because ore smelters killed all the grass in town.

Biased officiating against Iowa State causes Warner’s team to threaten a forfeit, but local officials warn that Iowa State will not get its guarantee unless they play the whole game. The Butte Daily Post derisively labeled Warner “The Fat Boy”. A month later, the Standard dubbed him “the big bootsy dub of a football player who played here with the Iowa Agricultural eleven and played the baby act in order to save the bets he had made that the Iowans would win if the game was played out.”

The officials, in part, are intimidated by miners who shoot their guns in the air when a call goes against Butte.

The team returns to Ames after a 12-10 loss, Warner tells the faculty that the game had to be moved because of the weather and if Iowa State didn’t play on Sunday, they would not have gotten their expenses paid.

The Rugby Switch

Football even in the modern day is considered somewhat dangerous to play. However, in 1905 when it was a lot more rugby adjacent in that huge scrums to get possession of the ball and move it forward were common place, and padding was primitive (if not nonexistent), there was a lot more danger to playing football, so much so that 18 players died in 1905 alone.

On the last day of the 1905 football season in fact a Yale player punched Harvard’s Francis Burr in the face, breaking his nose and another kicked him unconscious

Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1895 had no problem with football, just a decade later, changed his tune. He summoned delegates from the football programs of Harvard Yale in Princeton to the Whіtе Hоusе for a summit.

It was because of this that some programs dropped football altogether and started playing rugby in its place. Notably the big game between Stanford and Cal became a rugby contest up until 1917. Some East Coast teams like Army Navy, and Penn State also changed from football the rugby.

By the 1920s though, rule changes had made football a dramatically safer sport, most notably, the introduction of the forward pass, and pretty much everybody had switched back.

1912 Havana Bowl

The 1912 season was the first time the Florida Gators competed as the “Florida Gators” and it was also the first year they would ever compete in a postseason bowl game

That bowl game happened to be the Bacardi Bowl which took place in Havana Cuba (I could probably make a whole other section of this iceberg with weird happenings at Cuban bowl games)

The Gators arrived by steamboat and ended up playing a two game series against two Cuban teams, however, the second game ended abruptly when coach George Pyle noticed that the officials were using the old rules a football to officiate the game. There was also the fact that the head referee was the former coach of the team the Gators were playing.

When the Gators attempted to forfeit, Pyle was arrested because there was a Cuban law at the time prohibiting a game’s suspension after spectators money had been collected.

A trial was scheduled and Pyle was released on bail, at which point he and the rest of the team boarded a steamboat back to Florida.

He was branded a “fugitive from justice” by Cuban authorities, and Florida would never play another game in Cuba again.