2017 is the 75th anniversary of Ohio State's first national championship season. To honor the achievement, this series will post articles from the Columbus Citizen Journal on the day they ran in 1942.

Coach Paul Brown sounded a note of inspiration last night as the Ohio State football team started preparations for the game with the Pitt Panthers in Ohio Stadium Saturday.

"Any team that can come back after a defeat such as we suffered last Saturday and which can win its games in November when the going gets tough, is a good one." Brown averred, "and that's just what we'll be trying to do."

If my memory serves correct, Jim Tressel used say something to the effect that what you do in November is what people remember. Back to Brown and the ramifications of the Wisconsin game.

"We played a good game at Wisconsin last week, kept step with the Badgers in most of the statistics. Just because we lost the game, we won't be shifting our whole plan of attack and changing our personnel frantically to find a winning combination. This week we'll just be out there to make what we have even better than it ever was before."

Not In Uniform

Although the squad didn't even don its uniforms last night it started its work for the Panthers with a long look at pictures of the game against the Badgers and followed with a skull drill designed to correct the mistakes made in that game.

As a whole, the team came out of the Badger fracas with little injury. Gene Fekete has a bad leg, Tommy James was bumped up, but aside from Bill Sedor all the squad members were hurt only slightly and will be ready for the Panthers this week.

Sedor carries on the tradition that has at least one of the top three left ends on the bench for any given week. He has a knee injury somewhat similar to the one from which Dante Lavelli is just recovering and may be out of the game for a couple of weeks.

On the whole, it appears the Buckeyes should be ready, personnel wise, for the Panthers. Speaking of, Hawk addresses Pitt and its players.

A starting halfback for the invading Pitt Panthers against Ohio State at Buckeye Stadium here Saturday will be Tony Dimatteo, whose knack for kicking has helped Pitt out of several holes so far this season.

The main hope of the Panthers this year is "Wild Bill" Dutton, a triple threat man who works from the tailback post in the Pitt offense. Dutton weighs only 178 pounds, but he is a ball of fire when he gets under way. He is an unusually hard runner, a clever passer, and a consistent punter.

Along with Dutton, Coach Charley Bowser will bring the basic material for a good line to Ohio State this week. Jack Durishan is a hard-hitting tackler while Joe Salvucci comes up with the experience with last season's reserves to hold those two spots. George Allshouse is rated as a fit successor for the mighty Pitt centers who worked under Jock Sutherland while Bill Dillon and Vince Antonelli are better than average guards. On the flanks, Sotak and Kyle are a pair of capable performers.

Yet despite all this material, Pitt has not been able to get started to any great extent this season. In six games (t)he Panthers have won only two, beating Southern Methodist and Carnegie Tech. True, the Pitt team did lose a tough one to Great Lakes Sailors, 7-6, and did gain a lot of yardage against Minnesota, but they haven't been capitalizing on their good play very much. Indiana and Duke both defeated Bowser's team decisively.

Buck coaches are in a quandary as to why the Pitt team hasn't won more games and are afraid of the traditional surprise by which the Panthers upset at least one highly favored opponent annually. 

From Hawk's preview, one would believe that Pittsburgh is a talented team that is primed for an upset. So what has been holding the Panthers back?

Many Injuries

Much of the lack of power for Pitt may be attributable to the injuries which have plagued the team all season. Against Duke, for instance, five men were out of the game from among the 11 regular starters with injuries of one sort or another.

Pitts will be fresh from an easy victory over Carnegie Tech this week but will meet an Ohio State team that will be out to wipe away the sting of defeat by the Badgers last week.

"We lacked that little spark of real inspiration that makes a good team great," Brown said yesterday, "but from now on we'll be out to smash every team we meet. Maybe we'll have something of the advantage in this respect that the Badgers enjoyed last week.  

An injury plagued Pitt team is coming to Columbus to play Paul Brown and his angry Buckeyes. This appears to be the perfect recipe for a blowout.

Frankie Sinkwich and company have been demanding recognition all season for Georgia as the No. 1 football in the nation. This week the Georgia Bulldogs rule the roost in that coveted position after their All-American last quarter performance to turn in a 21-to-10 victory over Alabama, the Williamson System's top team for the past three weeks.

What's more, Georgia Tech is No. 2 in the nation. That's what the cold figures say. Never before in the history of football ratings have two team from the same state held the top two positions for any one week.

Georgia was the center of the college football world in 1942. However, the Bulldogs relied on Sinkwich (an Ohioan) to lead their team. Paul Williamson now turns his attention to Wisconsin and Ohio State.

No. 4 comes Wisconsin. The cry already has gone out that Wisconsin's 17-to-7 victory over Ohio State was the biggest upset of the past week. It was no upset for the Williamson System, which very definitely picked Coach Stuhldreher's Wisconsin Badgers over Coach Paul Brown's Buckeyes of Ohio State.

The latter undoubtedly is a fine team, but at no time this season has the Williamson System been stampeded by the general concensus that the Buckeyes rated the No. 1 spot of the nation---or even, consistently rated among the first 10. That immunity from the public clamor is just another of the Williamson System's many demonstrations for impartiality and consistency.

Williamson is throwing some shade at the Buckeyes. I need to do some more digging and see if anybody had the formula for the Williamson System.

My master plan is to resurrect the system and make some serious cabbage for the remainder of the 2017 football season. It's time for my FIRE (financially independent, retired early) plan to ignite so my wife and I can spend our remaining 40+ years on this earth max relaxed on a Caribbean beach.

The Buckeyes were ranked 10th last week, where will they be after the loss to Wisconsin? 

That loss dropped Ohio State nine spots, but was only weighted enough for Wisconsin to climb one place. The Badgers only went up because Alabama lost to Georgia. It will be interesting to see where the Buckeyes finish the season in the Williamson System.

 

 

 

 

When your correspondent returned from Madison, Wis., yesterday he found two letters and a postcard from loyal Ohio State fans taking him to task for a couple of blurbs in this column recently in which he said that rating Ohio State as No. 1 team in the nation for three consecutive weeks was a mistake.

Of course all three were written before Saturday's Ohio State-Wisconsin game at Madison.

In the same mail was a letter written Saturday night chiding the prediction which said: "I'm picking Ohio State by one touchdown because I believe Massillon's Paul Brown is about that much better than Massillon's Harry Stuhldreher."

Rating football teams and picking probable football winners is about the most thankless task a sports writer bumps against.

If you're right some folks are mad because you are. If you're wrong some folks are mad because they followed your prediction and lost a bet.

If you pick Ohio State you antagonize followers of Ohio State's prospective opponents, on one hand, because you seem to be low-rating their idols and, on the other hand, you antagonize some followers of Ohio State who claim that picking the Bucks to win is liable to make them overconfident.

All of which is one reason I'm glad the football season is so short.

A sports writer can be wrong on a baseball prediction and no one tries to ride him out of town on a rail. The boys who make the race selections are constantly being wrong and no one seems to think much of that. But when you make football predictions it's hell if you're right and hell if you're wrong.

The safe way, I guess, is to word it like this:

"Ohio State figures, on past performances, to be better than Pitt in next Saturday's game. However, if the Buckeyes are even more off their peak form than they were last Saturday against Wisconsin and Pitt happens to rise to the heights as Pitt did last year against Fordham and Pitt gets the breaks and Ohio State doesn't Pitt may win."

Then to be absolutely safe you'd better add:

"On the other hand it might be a tie."

It appears our friend Lew Byrer had a visit from an upset Tommy Two Thumbs, who took his advice and wagered on Ohio State to win by 7 last week. Mr. Byrer might want to hook up with Paul Williamson before making any future predictions.  

Reactions Too Varied

One reason why predicting football results is dangerous is that you can never figure, accurately, just how a bunch of boys of college are going to react to physical and psychological conditions surrounding any one football game.

Take 1942's outstanding upset to date.

Notre Dame had been tied by Wisconsin 7-to-7 and defeated by Georgia Tech, 13-to-6, and had won only from Stanford, 27-to-0. Frank Leahy, Notre Dame's coach, was seriously ill at the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minn.

Bernie Bierman's Iowa Pre-Flight Seahawks had won from Northwestern, Minnesota and Michigan on consecutive Saturdays.

You had to be a Houdini to even figure Notre Dame had a chance. 

Final score: Notre Dame 28, Iowa Seahawks 0.

Inspired by a chance to redeem what had been a disappointing season, fired by the fact that they were against a team figured to be the best in the nation and spurred on by the fact that they wanted to do something for their sick coach the Irish went out and played better ball than anyone though them capable of playing.

[...]

That's what makes football so tough to figure and drives football prognosticators even crazier than they were when they first started prognosticating.

Tommy Two Thumbs must have done a number on Byrer as he devoted a lot of ink to his frustrations with predicting winners.

He closes his piece with this uplifting piece.

Rounding Up Sport

Chicago taxi drivers are supposed to be tough guys, but after I'd caught a cab in a rush at Chicago's Union Station Saturday night, one asked me: "If you don't mind, I'd like to pick up three soldiers, too. Cabs are hard to get and a lot of them are looking for a ride over to the LaSaelle station. I'll take you around that way and won't charge them anything or you anything extra."

More of us ought to be doing more things like that.

Despite Pitt's poor showing so far this year, a crowd of 40,000 is expected for Saturday's game...Ohio State's cross-country team, which defeated Wisconsin, 24 to 31 Saturday morning, has elected Tom White captain.

Paul B. Williamson, Citizen football rating expert, was one of the few to pick Wisconsin over Ohio State Saturday.

Today's Old Time Ad

Adam Hats took out an ad to remind people to support the war: