Woody Hayes Would Have Loved This One

First of all, are you sitting down?

Maybe, you better take a good stiff shot of brandy.

You might want to look out the window and see if the sun is rising in the west. See if you notice any canaries chasing cats down the street or get reports of zebras laying in the bushes waiting for a herd of lions, cows charging at rhinos.

The Big Ten won in the Rose Bowl! Cross my heart. Would I lie about a thing like that?

I know it’s hard to believe. You all know the Big Ten, that funny little conference which comes out here playing leather-helmet, moleskin-pants football and they stand around and watch passes going overhead like aborigines looking up at their first airplane.

Their patron saint is the late Woody Hayes, who had more faith in the ground game than a sewer contractor on whose blueprint he constructed his own game plan. Woody thought the forward pass was invented by some interior decorator or the same people who invented quiche. Real men didn’t throw the ball, they ran it down your throat.

Woody Hayes would have loved Friday’s Rose Bowl game. He wouldn’t have needed to see the score. He could have told you the outcome from the stats. They showed that USC threw the football 42 times--to 7 for Michigan State. You could almost hear the ghostly lecture from the old coach: “Any time you put the ball in the air, three things happen--and two of them are bad.” And: “Any time you have to put the ball in the air 40 or more times, you have just lost.”

Forty-two passes would have suggested to the old four-star coach and master of the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust attack the rankest kind of desperation, a defeated army making noises to fool an invader into not knowing they’re out of ammunition, a hysterical housewife banking pots when she hears a footstep in the cellar.

But USC may not have had a choice Friday. For almost the first time in the memory of the oldest citizen, USC went into a Rose Bowl game without anything resembling a running attack.

USC without a tailback is like Rembrandt without a brush, a troubadour without a song, a Hemingway without a plot.

USC knew it was playing on short money before the game started. The coach, Larry Smith, hit upon the ruse of giving the ball to the fullback to cover up the bankruptcy of his attack. It didn’t work. Opponents know that when fullbacks get the ball at USC, somebody is trying to cover up shortages. At USC, fullbacks block.

So, Michigan State turned the clock back--not quite to the Flying Wedge and Walter Camp but to a day when the air wasn’t full of footballs and the infantry was still queen of battle, even on third-and-long.

USC’s Rodney Peete is a brilliant and exciting player who is more fun to watch than a drunk on a high ledge. Rodney’s style of play is right out of the Saturday afternoon serials. He plays a cliffhanger kind of game whose stock-in-trade is the last-minute escape. Even his mistakes are world-class and he makes more mistakes than a guy who takes his secretary to a convention.

The Perils of Peete were Pearl White grade. Rodney put the ball in the air on 41 of those 42 Trojan pass plays. He completed 25 of them, 22 to friendlies and 3 to the bad guys.

There were times when the ground forces of Michigan State dared him to pass. They mounted a seven-man rush more designed to stop Rodney the Runner than Peete the Passer.

Meanwhile, back in the cave, Michigan State had a bona fide tailback of its own, of the sort USC, the university of the Heismans, used to jump up by the gross. Lorenzo White packed the ball 35 times and was as hard to stop as a woman’s tears.

He gave Michigan State the dimension it needed, the edge USC lacked.

The Michigan State quarterback, a scatter-armed young speedster named Bobby McAllister, spent his passes like a country banker passing out loans. He threw a miserly seven of them. The ought-seven Yales probably threw more than that, Knute Rockne caught more than that in one half in 1913, but Bobby Mac’s were quality investments. He only let go of the ball when there was a 70% chance of success, like a guy who knows he has the only trumps left in the deal.

In the middle of the second quarter, with the game still up for grabs, Michigan State in the lead, 7-3, McAllister caught USC in a Keystone Kop pass rush and lofted a 55-yard rainbow to his favorite target, a gifted little split end named Andre Rison, and when the ball came down, State was on the USC seven-yard line and about to apply the crushing touchdown and take a 14-3 lead into the halftime locker room.

In the fourth quarter, with the game tied, McAllister, on third and long and 7:31 left to play, rolled right, waved his receiver downfield, jumped and threw the 35-yard completion that was to give Michigan State the winning field goal.

It was hardly a decisive win for State. It needed a Peete fumble in the final 1:37 to stop a USC scoring thrust on its own 23.

But that’s just the subplot. The main moral to be drawn from this episode is that the Big Ten does not come to the game as what the fight game calls “strictly an opponent,” a slow old pug whose reflexes have atrophied and whose techniques are archaic and as outdated as the biplane. They live with the notion they are like the team that shows up to stooge for the Globetrotters and their barnstorming shticks.

They played old-fashioned, head-knocking football--McAllister put the ball in the air only seven times. To some, it was like a four-masted schooner tying up a nuclear sub, but to others it was proof Woody Hayes football is not as archaic as the deadline poets would have us believe.

Who knows? Maybe even the dinosaurs will make a comeback. The moral of the story may be that the forward pass, like prayer, works best when used sparingly and when you have Lorenzo White to back it up.