When we left off at halftime of the 1900 Michigan-Chicago game, a lone U-M player was running off with a rooster named Iphigenia in an attempt to prevent a ritualistic halftime sacrifice by prospective members of a Chicago student club. The Wolverines led, 6-5. If you don’t read part one, this is going to make less sense than it already does.
Let’s continue.
SCHRÖDINGER’S SACRIFICE
While our feathered protagonist’s fate hangs in the balance, let’s answer the question at the forefront of everyone’s mind: why would a rooster be named Iphigenia?
As the Chicago Tribune noted, Iphigenia was “a yearling rooster with a classic feminine name,” which is likely why the Three-Quarter Club candidates called him “Pete.” Indeed, in ancient Greek mythology, Iphigenia is the daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra.
The Mycenaean princess Iphigenia either met an untimely end or was narrowly saved from one, depending upon the storyteller. No matter the source, most of the myth is the same. Agamemnon needed to get his fleet to Troy for the big war but he had angered the goddess Artemis, who changed the winds to blow his ships off course. To appease Artemis, the king chose to sacrifice Iphigenia.
Agamemnon, a savvy man, had a sneaking suspicion his wife wouldn’t be on board. He devised a plan. No, not to save his daughter, silly, but to trick Clytemnestra into handing her over [emphasis mine]:
He sent Odysseus and Diomedes to his wife, Clytemnestra (who happened to be Helen’s sister), to tell her that he had arranged a marriage between their daughter, Iphigenia, and the hero Achilles, and that Achilles wished to marry her before he went off to fight. Agamemnon told this lie because he suspected that if he told his wife the real reason why he wanted Iphigenia to come to Aulis, Clytemnestra would not go along with the plan. But Clytemnestra suspected nothing; she prepared her daughter for marriage and sent her off to Aulis. Once there, Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter (though some sources contend that Artemis replaced her with a deer at the last second and whisked the girl off to live as her priestess among the Taurians). This action earned Agamemnon the undying hatred of his wife.
Iphigenia either died or didn’t, depending on your preferred version. I assume Clytemnestra’s undying hatred of Agamemnon burned bright in both renditions.
Regardless, the rooster’s name now makes a lot of sense. Would he be rescued at the midfield altar?
In a word, no.
THE DEATH OF IPHIGENIA
Our anonymous Michigan substitute ran with Iphigenia tucked under his arm until “the fowl went the length of its string and then stopped with a squawk.” With the bird incapacitated, the end was inevitable:
The Michigan man was downed, but the rooster’s wing had been broken. It was killed, and as the blood flowed on the ground the candidates danced and the second half was called.
“CHICAGO VICTORY; PERKINS A HERO,” Chicago Tribune, 30 Nov. 1900, archived.
Visceral!
The Wolverines ascribed the events of the second half to Iphigenia’s sacrifice. Given what unfolded, a rooster sacrifice determined the last 120 years of U-M football.
JUST “PERKINS”
Chicago kicked off the second half from midfield. As the teams traded scoreless possessions, Michigan couldn’t run or punt the ball out of their end of the field.
After the second Maroons drive of the half faltered inside the U-M five-yard line, the Wolverines made a common play of the time — punting on first down to avoid a dreaded safety and improve field position. Unfortunately, Everett Sweeley’s boot didn’t travel 20 yards before crossing out of bounds, a rare miscue for the kicking wiz.
This is when fill-in fullback Ernest E. Perkins, who’d already scored Chicago’s lone first-half touchdown, earned mononym status. Sporting a “bulky nose protector,” Perkins “hammered and dragged his way over the gridiron, and wherever he went the pigskin went with him, and all Chicago came behind him.”
Playing only because the presumed starting fullback missed the contest with a “sore ear,” Perkins capitalized on the short field with his second rushing touchdown. The Maroons again missed the extra point, leaving the score at 10-6, Chicago.
The chicken’s ghost was playing with the maroons.
chicago tribune, 30 nov. 1900
The Wolverines couldn’t muster any offense. It took Chicago one exchange of possessions to flip the field and one more to get into scoring territory. The Maroons battered and bloodied the Michigan defense until Perkins plunged in for his third TD of the day:
Reddner [sic] was hurt and was led to the side lines, tears streaming from his eyes. Begle took his place, and the slaughter went on. There was more sledge-hammer work, and Chicago took another touchdown, the score standing 15 to 6.
“CHICAGO VICTORY; PERKINS A HERO,” Chicago Tribune, 30 Nov. 1900, archived.
While the Tribune‘s game story says time was called before the extra point could be kicked, their own diagram of the game shows the two teams trading punts near midfield before UC ran the clock out.
The Tribune‘s front page declared Perkins a “hero”:
The man with the nose protector was Perkins—just Perkins. Until yesterday he was known simply as “Ernest E. Perkins, class of 1902, played on the ‘scrub team.’” Hereafter his name will be written just “Perkins” in every true heart at the University of Chicago, and history out on the Midway will chronicle him as the full back who brought victory in the big game of 1900. He will wear the magic letter “C” on his sweater, too, for, aside from making a Chicago victory, Perkins made the “varsity.” He is a “scrub” no longer.
Perkins remained on the varsity team, sporting the maroon “C” through the 1902 season.
Michigan reportedly had a different explanation for the outcome than the rise of a new star fullback: “The chicken’s ghost was playing with the maroons.”
THE ANVIL CHORUS
The victorious Maroons couldn’t walk off the field because it was packed with “too many men who wanted to carry them.” A.A. Stagg announced plans to buy his team a celebratory turkey (pre-slaughtered, presumably).
The Wolverines returned to Ann Arbor as a team in turmoil. They’d opened the season with six underwhelming wins against the dregs of the schedule before finishing 1-2-1, getting outscored 43-18 over those final four games.
The next edition of the Michigan Daily declared “DISASTER FOR MICHIGAN” in the headline:
In unhappy contrast, the anvil chorus is out in full force at Michigan, and the knock-knock of hammers, great and small, is heard all over the campus, and will continue until a winning team can get back the fickle sympathies of her “student body.”
“DISASTER FOR MICHIGAN,” Michigan Daily, 04 Dec. 1900, archived.
That’s a beautiful way to say someone’s ass is about to get fired.
LEA LEAVES
Langdon Lea evidently decided to get it over with himself. The December 2nd edition of the Detroit Free Press refers to Lea’s “announced retirement,” though I cannot find the announcement itself or any reporting on it. The Daily observed a Thanksgiving break and didn’t publish their postgame edition until Dec. 4th.
Regardless, the retirement didn’t last the offseason. Lea coached Princeton, his alma mater, to a 9-1-1 record in 1901 before leaving the sport. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1964.
By December 18th, the Daily was running an editorial asking for a new approach when hiring Michigan’s next coach:
Michigan has never had a well defined system of coaching which extended over any great length of time. Year after year we have found the football season opening up with a new coach to handle our men and interests. … Primarily, then, we need a quasi-permanent head to our proposed new coaching system, who shall be chief of the staff of coaches.
Michigan Daily, 18 Dec. 1900, archived.
Meanwhile, establishing a time-honored tradition at Michigan, prominent former players made sure their voices were heard. At the “request of certain Chicago alumni,” the university organized what the Daily headline called a “COUNCIL OF MICHIGAN MEN” to help get the program back on track:
All the old varsity captains and 10 or 12 other leading alumni from Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Detroit, Grand Rapids and New York, who have shown interest in Michigan’s athletics besides the present captain, trainer and coaches, making a party of 25 or 30, have been asked to meet in conference with the Board of Control to discuss the causes of Michigan’s weakness in football and to suggest, if possible, remedies for strengthening the team. Mr. H.G. Prettyman has invited the party to a dinner he gives in honor of the old varsity men who will be present.
“COUNCIL OF MICHIGAN MEN,” Michigan Daily, 15 Dec. 1900, archived.
Horace G. Prettyman, of course, starred on some of the earliest U-M squads, playing from 1882 to 1890 (with a one-year hiatus in 1887) and earning team captaincy three times.
While this conference, which included athletic director Charles Baird, 1900 team captain Neil Snow and 1901 captain-elect Hugh White, produced no official resolutions, the gathered parties agreed on their most pressing matter. Michigan needed a full-time coach.
THE ALTERNATE TIMELINE
While the hammers knocked, Baird began talking to — and fielding interest from — prospective coaches. Given Baird’s intention to look coast to coast and the speed of both communication and travel, local papers had plenty of time to rumormonger during the search.
Baird shot down a particularly juicy rumor that emerged from Ohio State’s student newspaper, The Lantern, stating Michigan had offered OSU coach John B. Eckstorm a $2,500 contract:
When seen by a Daily reporter this morning Manager Baird said “No, I did not offer Mr. Ekstorm [sic] or any one else such amount. In fact we have been deluged with applications from coaches who want positions here next year. Among their number was one from Mr. Ekstorm [sic]. We have accepted none of them as yet.[“]
“First “Coach” Story for the Season,” Michigan Daily, 12 Jan. 1901, archived.
Goddamn. Baird could’ve just said “no.”
Eckstorm, who’d posted a 17-1-2 record in two seasons with OSU, remained in Columbus for 1901. Tragedy would tarnish the season. Two days after being paralyzed in a rugby-style scrum against Western Reserve, OSU nose guard John Segrist passed away.
Overwhelmed with grief, the previously undefeated Buckeyes lost in three of their last four games following Segrist’s death. Ohio State considered canceling the football program entirely. While that didn’t come to pass, Eckstorm resigned in the offseason to coach the team at Ohio Medical University.
THE LELAND STANFORD MAN
Less than a week after the Eckstorm rumor, another report — this time from the Associated Press — had Baird coming to an agreement with an up-and-coming coach who’d spent 1900 at Stanford. Again, a Daily reporter tracked down Baird on campus to collect a tactful denial:
“No, Yost has not been hired by us. The story is another fake, pure and simple. Yost has been in correspondence with Michigan, as have half a dozen other, but you may say that we have come nearer to closing a deal with other men than with him. As yet no man has been selected. We have made Yost no offer.[“]
“Another Pipe Dream,” Michigan Daily, 19 Jan. 1901, archived.
You may say that Baird was obfuscating the truth, in retrospect. Not even two weeks later, he returned from a “long ‘coach’ expedition” — presumably to Palo Alto — bearing the news that he’d agreed to terms with Fielding H. Yost. A special report on Yost’s hiring with a January 31st dateline made it in time for the next day’s Free Press.
The Daily boasted of Yost’s “enviable” record in his prior stops at Ohio Wesleyan, Nebraska, Kansas, and Stanford. He made his hotly anticipated arrival in April, squeezing in “practically just one week of training” before departing again as the school went on spring break. This didn’t seem of great concern. Yost used his brief time on to lay out his plans for the fall:
Coach Yost said: “I will drill the men in the minor points of the game such as catching the ball, falling on the ball, and interference. I will be back next fall very early as a new squad of men need a lot of ‘roughing in.’”
“YOST TAKES CHARGE,” Michigan Daily, 06 April 1901, archived.
Although there were plans to continue using some of the “Yale style” of football that the team already knew, Yost would “try his own style of play.”
Indeed.
THE AFTERMATH
Yost’s Wolverines obliterated their competition from the outset. Michigan outscored their opposition 550 to zero on their way to a perfect 11-0 season in 1901. Their crowning achievement: a 49-0 win over Yost’s former charges, Stanford, in the inaugural Rose Bowl. The contest was so lopsided that Tournament of Roses officials waited 13 years before holding another football game.
Michigan’s famed “Point-a-Minute” teams would go 55-1-1 with a combined score of 2,841 to 42 from 1901-05. The school claims national championships for the first four of those seasons.
Yost would coach until 1923, return to the field from 1925-26, and serve as athletic director from 1921-40. The Wolverines won two more national titles with him as coach and a further two under Harry Kipke in the 1930s. Yost famously envisioned his team playing in front of 100,000 people and made significant contributions to the planning of Michigan Stadium, which opened in 1927.
After a long, painful decline, a 70-year-old A.A. Stagg was forced out of the Chicago job in 1932. He landed at the College of the Pacific, where he won five Far Western Conference titles in 14 seasons before again being pushed out for declining performance and, well, being in his mid-80s.
Rather than retire, Stagg took assistant jobs at Susquehanna (PA) and Stockton (CA) College and coached until he was 96. He remained in Stockton until he died at 102.
Michigan went 14-3 in the series against Chicago from Yost’s arrival through the final game between the rivals in 1939. The Wolverines won that game 85-0 with three touchdowns from Tom Harmon, who’d win the Heisman Trophy the following year. The University of Chicago dropped football after posting a 6-23-2 record from 1936-39.
THE EPILOGUE
As one rivalry passed, another sprung to life. From 1897 to 1927, Michigan ran out to a 19-3-2 series lead against Ohio State. The Buckeyes won seven of the next 10, including four straight shutouts from 1934-37. Addressing pessimism before the 1934 game, first-year OSU head coach Francis Schmidt said of U-M, “they put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.”
From that moment on, whenever Ohio State beat Michigan, every Buckeye received a pair of Gold Pants — a gold charm inscribed with their initials, the date and the score of The Game.
Would any of this have occurred without a group of Chicago student club candidates ritualistically killing a rooster named after a mythological Greek princess? Your author, for one, is glad we don’t know the answer.