Archive For The “Tom Keady” Category
“A special feature of Saturday’s game will be the press service for a special wire from the sidelines to the press box with will provide good service to newspaper men covering the game,” The Brown and White said in regards to the 50th meeting between Lehigh and Lafayette that was to take place on Saturday, November 25th, 1916.
“With the co-operation of the Western Union Company, this scheme has been worked out: The details of various plays will be given to an operator who will send them from a table placed on the sidelines over the wire to the press box. The operator in the stand will receive them and they will be called to the press representative through a megaphone. One Lafayette and one Lehigh man will give the plays to the field operator – the man who carries the ball, the man who makes the tackle, fumbles, penalties, and every detail of the game will go over the wire. All of this will be done so quickly that the press will have every play complete before the next play is begun.”
“This service is not surpassed on any field in the country,” The Lafayette also noted. “As far as is known, only one other, Franklin Field, uses this system. By far the majority let the newspaper men do the best they can by themselves.”
In the 50th game of The Rivalry, technology was then a big part of the story. The reporters in the press box, including both student newspapers, would be one of the rare few that would get a play-by-play call of a college football game.
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It didn’t initially seem conceivable that war in Europe would affect the daily lives of American boys and men playing college football in Pennsylvania.
Before World War I broke out, or the Great War as it was then called, President Woodrow Wilson pursued a strict policy of neutrality in regards to the trench battles in Belgium and France, echoing popular opinion.
But when World War became inevitable, it naturally affected the campuses of Lafayette and Lehigh in the seasons of 1917 and 1918.
Through the seriousness of war, the Rivalry continued where other college football seasons were halted, complete with much of the same pageantry.
In tough times, the Rivalry provided a much-needed escape though the seriousness of the times.
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Going into the 1912 season, the Rivalry was at a point when Lafayette was a dominant force over the Brown and White.
In an era where Princeton, Yale, and the Carlisle Indian School all competed for the top, Lafayette was right there alongside the top teams in the nation.
And soon, Lehigh would be in the conversation once again as well.
In 1911, Lehigh announced their seriousness to vault back into contention by signing four key transfers, including a future Brown and White hall-of-fame quarterback, QB Pat Pazzetti, from Wesleyan.
“The Pennsylvania college is pulling strongly for a record-breaking football team this year – hoping to put one on their old rival, Lafayette – and is doing all in its power to get the athletes in the institution,” The Lafayette reported.
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“At last Lafayette approaches the real climax of her football season,” the Leopard paper of the time, The Lafayette, stated on November 22nd, 1912. “The football world always watches this contest with the closest interest for it is the greatest of the annual struggles between small college teams.
“To the ardent supporters of these two colleges, even the Yale-Harvard game is but a minor incident in comparison to the deciding of this championship. No matter how many games Lehigh may lose during the season, she always tackles Lafayette with a sturdy confidence and hope of victory.
“No matter how many great games Lafayette wins in the season she always enters this struggle ready to fight, knowing that upon the outcome depends the real success or failure of the season and knowing that her opponents will be worthy of every possible effort.”
After an era of near-complete dominance by Lafayette in “The Rivalry”, in 1912 the roles of the Brown and White and the Maroon and White were suddenly reversed, and the student writer at The Lafayette knew it.
“Sweeping victories for the past three years have caused Lafayette to assume a rather superior feeling toward Lehigh,” the reporter said. “Not so this year. Lehigh has the best team that has represented that institution in the past ten years.”
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