• U.S.

Sport: Football, Jan. 4, 1932

2 minute read
TIME

Three years ago in the Rose Bowl at Pasadena occurred the most famous blunder of modern football. Roy Riegels, California centre, picked up a Georgia Tech fumble, ran it 73 yd. the wrong way. Two yards from his own goal-line a teammate stopped him. but two Georgia Tech tacklers knocked him across the line. The referee gave the ball to California two inches in front of the goalline. On the next play, Georgia Tech scored a safety, which won the game and the “national championship” for that year, 8 to 7. Last week, on a cool windy clay in Atlanta, Georgia Tech and California played again, a post-season game for charity. Neither was in the running for a championship this year but both had first-rate teams, sectionally representative in a season which established the superiority of Western football. As soon as California got the ball, a quick kick put it on Tech’s 9-yd. line and Stone broke through to block Tech’s kick, fall on the ball for a touchdown. After that Tech’s light line managed to hold California’s heavier one until just before the end of the half when Rusty Gill and Hank Schaldach pounded Tech back to its own 12-yd. line. In the next quarter, California kicks kept Tech backed up against its own end-zone. In the last half a dozen quick plays ending with a long pass, Flowers to Galloway, scored a touchdown for Tech, made “the score Tech 6, California 7. A safety for Tech would have won by the score of the 1928 game, but this time no one ran the wrong way. Irritated into action, the California offense swung down the field twice in the last quarter. Schaldach scored one of the touchdowns, Gill the other. Final score: California 19, Georgia Tech 6. At their annual meeting in Manhattan last week, the Eastern Association of College Football Officials made two suggestions for safer football which will be carefully weighed when the Rules Committee meets in February: 1) that the kickoff tee be restored, the kickoff moved back from the 40-to the 30-yd. line; 2) that, whenever a ball carrier loses his footing, the referee shall blow his whistle immediately instead of waiting for opponents to seize or fall on the carrier.

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