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Glory Days

Seventy autumns later, the 1939 football squad still lives in legend

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Andrew Dickson White loathed football, calling it “a vestige of barbarity.” In 1874, Cornell’s first president would not let the Big Red play in Cleveland, famously declaring, “I refuse to let forty of our boys travel 400 miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.” Considering this inauspicious start, Cornell’s early feats loom large, with all five of its national titles won before 1940.

The last was in 1939—at the end of the Great Depression, just before America entered World War II, when Cornell’s last live mascot (a bear named Touchdown IV) mingled with the crowds that packed Schoellkopf Stadium. Though few teammates from that era remain, those who do will tell you that they played—in the words of Noah Dorius ’39—for “the greatest football team in the nation.”

It was supposed to be a rebuilding year. The team had graduated much of its starting lineup from 1938, when Cornell’s unique passing offense under eventual-Hall of Fame coach Carl Snavely led the Big Red to a 5-1-1 record. “What was left, Snavely took and molded into a team,” says Louis Conti ’41, who played right “running” guard and, after wartime service in the Marines, returned as a line coach from 1949 to 1956. Though Cornell won the first three games of the season, defeating Penn State 47-0, they approached their first contest against powerhouse Ohio State as the underdog—so much so that the OSU coach skipped the pre-game press conference to go duck hunting. “We were gonna get killed,” says center Frank “Bud” Finneran ’41. “They were the Big Ten champions; we were a little Ivy League team.”

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Gridiron glory: Big Red end James Schmuck ’41 carries the pigskin in Cornell’s 1939 game against Ohio State. When the players returned to Ithaca, fans held a late-night victory parade at the train station.

With the Buckeyes up 14-0, Snavely subbed in 158-pound Walter “Pop” Scholl ’41; on his first carry, Scholl ran for a 79-yard touchdown. Cornell took control, and All-American tackle Nick Drahos ’41, MS ’50, kicked a late fourth quarter field goal to seal one of the Big Red’s biggest victories: Cornell 23, Ohio State 14. The momentum carried the team to an undefeated season, the last in University history. The team’s perfect 8-0 record earned them the Lambert Trophy, today awarded to the top Division 1 team in the East. They also got a bid to the Rose Bowl. “We, the players, certainly wanted to go,” says Conti. “But the administration said, ‘No bowl games,’ and that was the end of it.” No Ivy team has been invited since.

The victories of 1939 were part of an eighteen-game unbeaten streak that began the year before and ended in a loss as famous as the win over Ohio State: the “Fifth-Down Game” of 1940. That was the game where Cornell defeated Dartmouth 7-3 by scoring on a mistaken extra down, and Snavely and President Edmund Ezra Day (himself a Dartmouth man) conceded the victory via wire. Day insisted that Dartmouth would reply with a polite refusal to accept the concession. “Sixty-nine years later,” Finneran says, “we’re still waiting for that telegram.” 

—Molly O’Toole ’09

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