Sport: Minnesota Miracle

The score was tied, 0-to-0. There were 68 seconds left to play. The biggest crowd that had ever watched an opening home game at Minnesota (54,000) was praying for a miracle that might still enable their team to better the best football record in the country. The miracle, at this unlikely point in Minneapolis last week, occurred.

Nebraska kicked. Minnesota quarterback Bud Wilkinson caught the ball on his 25-yd. line, ran forward. Then, with the whole Nebraska team massed on the left side of the field to tackle him, he flipped the ball backward to left halfback Andy Uram. Uram streaked down the right side of the field. Before Nebraska had recovered from its surprise, he had scored the touchdown that won for Minnesota its 19th game in succession, 7-to-0.*

Like most apparent miracles, football’s most dramatic moment of last, week was really no miracle at all. In piling up a record which, with a victory over Michigan this week, will equal Notre Dame’s record string of 20 in a row, Minnesota has become famed as a team that does not reach maximum efficiency until the second half of its games. A decade ago Minnesota teams were feared solely for the Norse power supplied to them by the huge muscular Swedes with which they were amply staffed. The current increase in Minnesota’s football prestige (the team was unofficially ranked as national champion in 1934 and 1935, is considered likely to repeat this year) is the result of the addition of brains to its football teams. The knack which recent Minnesota teams have developed of producing touchdown plays at the proper moment, seems supernatural only because it is supremely utilitarian. Uram’s 75-yd. run last week was actually the ultimate refinement of a well-stated and thoroughly rehearsed process which became the pattern of Minnesota football when Coach Bernard William Bierman took it in hand four years ago.

Bernie Bierman, voted by 4,000,000 newspaper-readers the ablest exponent of his profession in the U. S. last summer (TIME, Sept. 14), graduated in 1916 from the University of Minnesota, where he won letters in basketball, football, and track. He graduated from high-school and minor-league college football coaching in 1927, when he became head coach at Tulane. At Tulane, as at Minnesota, his teams were noted for efficiency in the second half, effective scoring plays, tight goal-line defense. Recalled to work for his alma mater, Bierman had as assistants George Hauser and Albert Baston. They had played with him on the 1915 team which won Minnesota’s last Big Ten title until 1934.

The backbone of football practice at almost every college in the U. S. is practice scrimmage. At Minnesota, scrimmages stop when football starts. Instead of scrimmaging — which Bierman considers boring, dangerous, and useless :for college players old errough to know the game — -Minnesota’s first-string players concentrate on kicking, running off plays, working on individual weaknesses, harassing a Bierman-invented dummy. Reversing, the normal order of training any football team was merely Coach Bierman’s beginning at Minnesota. Next he revised all Minnesota’s individual peculiarities. Concentrating on brains instead of power, he built teams around smart quarterbacks. He had the quarterbacks build their plays around strategies more complex than those used by any other team in the U. S.

In general, Minnesota’s football policy under Bierman has been to let opponents wear themselves out in the first half, produce touchdowns in the second. Each touchdown is supposed to come not from one play but a series of plays, in which the last is a carefully arranged climax. The series, which may consist of as many as six plays, is supposed to contain six times as much deceptiveness as can be put into one play. If one series of touchdown plays does not work, a Minnesota quarter back is supposed to have at his mental fingertips half a dozen more which will. When all the series are exhausted, there remain individual flights of invention, like last week’s.

Like most of his coaching colleagues, Bierman is timid, diligent, a pessimist. He differs from them in being more pessimistic, working harder and exhibiting a shyness which sometimes produces an effect of megalomania. Last week, when Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Minneapolis, a civic group suggested that Bierman and the President be photographed together. Bierman refused on the grounds that foot ball and politics do not mix. He said he would not object if the President came to see him. Almost speechless in the presence of reporters, luncheon clubs and radio interviewers, he often sits up till 3 a. m. working out plays. When Bierman iscreating, his wife and two sons creep quietly about the house. At practice, Bierman stands almost still, speaks in a low voice, nervously twirls a whistle attached to a black cord. He rarely blows the whistle but the cord wears out every ten days. His appearance is extraordinary. He has green eyes, a cleft chin and snow-white hair. He earns about $15,000 a year, drives a Chevrolet.

Minnesota has been picked by experts to win the national championship again this year. Minnesota football addicts, however, are already calling attention to prospects for 1937, because they feel thepresent team is not up to average. It lacks an iron man, like famed Herbert Joesting or Pug Lund, in the backfield.

On a really first-rate Bierman product, each man concentrates solely on his job with complete confidence that the other ten will accomplish theirs to perfection. This year’s team sometimes betrays its greenness when the interference looks back to see if the man with the ball is still on his way. It contains only three or four All-America prospects. Wilkinson, who played guard last year, is one. Julius Alfonse, who did not play last year, and his co-captain, Tackle Ed Widseth, are others. Minnesota’s likeliest halfbacks this year are a pair who, because they played together with phenomenal success at a Minneapolis high school, are now called the “touchdown twins.” One is 158-Ib. Rudy Gmitro, who averaged a gain of 15 yd. per play in eight plays last year. The other is Uram, who has been preparing to play on the Minnesota varsity since he was 10. For Uram, last-minute touchdowns, far from miraculous, appear to be habitual. Three weeks ago, in Minnesota’s opening game against the University of Washington, the score was 7-to-7 in the last part of the last period. At the conclusion of a characteristic Minnesota series of plays, he threw the pass that won, 14-to-7.

Minnesota is usually stronger in the second half of a season as well as of a game. Stimulated by last week’s scare, it is now, according to most experts, an even-money bet to get through its fourth successive undefeated season. To do so, after Michigan, Minnesota must beat Purdue, Northwestern, Iowa, Texas and Wisconsin.

*Other major football scores last week: Alabama 7, Mississippi State 0; Army 27, Columbia 16; California 7, Oregon State 0; Fordham 7, Southern Methodist 0; Michigan State 7, Carnegie Tech 0; Navy 35, Virginia 14; Oregon 7, Stanford 7; Pitt 6, Ohio State 0; Purdue 35, Wisconsin 14; Southern California 24, Illinois 6; Yale 7, Penn 0; Holy Cross 7, Dartmouth 0.