Footballs Most
Lopsided Game in History GEORGIA TECH VS. CUMBERLAND
I
n addition to being a brilliant football tactician who championed the forward pass and ushered in football's modern era, coach John Heisman had a flair for the dramatic. During the off-season — when he was not coaching football and baseball at Georgia Tech — he performed on the Atlanta stage and he spoke in the somewhat flamboyant diction of an actor. Heisman did not like to lose and during his 16 seasons as Tech's football coach, from 1904 to 1919, he never had a losing season. The Yellow Jackets were 102-29-7 under Heisman and his 1917 team was declared national champions. But in the spring of 1916, Heisman's baseball team traveled to Cumberland College, where it was ambushed. The Cumberland squad, loaded with ringers from a Nashville, Term., pro team, humiliated Tech 22-0. The next fall on the flats at Grant Field, Heisman engineered the most dramatic score in football history. On Oct. 7,1916, Tech defeated hapless Cumberland 222-0. In the game, which Heisman agreed to shorten to 45 minutes, Tech scored 32 touchdowns, 30 field goals, carried the ball for 978 yards and never threw a
pass. Neither team made a first down; Tech scored within four downs on every possession. Heisman's comments on the Cumberland game appeared in the 1917 Blueprint.
t has been said over and over by dozens and by hunmined this year, at the start of the season, to show folks dreds that the teamwork of the Tech 11 this fall was the that it was no very difficult thing to run up a score in one best ever seen, not only in the South but in the entire easy game, from which it might perhaps be seen that it country. That is a strong sounding thing for anyone to could also be done in other easy games as well. say; and yet it is, after all, no more singular than it should Accordingly, in the Cumberland game the Jackets be true that the Yellow Jackets led the country in scoring set all their sails to make a record run, and for the first points, which they undoubtedly did do. time in our football career we turned loose all we had in A word about this point scoring before we go the way of scoring stuff, and the result was a world's further: " N record of 222 points rolled up in 45 minutes of play. 5iJf Now, we don't take any particular credit in doing The writer has often contended that this habit on the part of sportswriters of totaling up, from that. If that were all we were after, we could have folweek's end to week's end, the number of points lowed exactly the same line of action and, while each team had amassed in its various not compiling as many points as against games, and comparing them one with Cumberland, we could nevertheless have so another, was a useless thing, for it means heaped 'em up as to have been able, I dare nothing whatever in the way of determining say, to add at least another 100 to our seawhich is the better of an evenly grouped son's grand total of 421. But even this 421 set of college teams. was a record for the entire country for the season, and here we find a lot of people Still the writers persisted, and some and papers all over the country once more at each season's end would still presume making much of it and printing our name in to hang an argument on what they big type at the top of columns of flubdub. claimed it showed. So, finding that folks My, my! But it's easy to fool some folks! are determined to take the crazy thing into consideration, we at Tech deter— John Heisman
Summer2004 'GEORGIATECH 5 5