By John Reagan
July 31, 2016

On September 20, 2014, more than 200 former Georgetown football players assembled on campus to mark the 50th anniversary of what is referred to as the "modern era" of the sport at the University. Among them: nearly 30 members of the 1964 team whose 28-6 win over New York University helped turned a decade of dreams into reality on as cold November afternoon. But the story of how it even got this far is as much Georgetown lore as the game itself.

For, to its benefit, if there was any way not to shut down a football program, chances are that's what happened to Georgetown.


A previous installment in the series set the table for the end of major college football at the Hilltop in March 1951. Rising costs, declining attendance, and administrative power-grabs were all contributing factors. But in the fall of 1951, the absence was as noticeable as the former program itself. Players were still on campus, many of the former assistants were still in or around the athletic department, and the artifacts of football--helmets, jerseys, practice gear, etc.--were still housed in Ryan Gymnasium, its erstwhile home. The all-male, nearly all-Catholic student body wasn't happy of a campus without football, so the administration proposed the next best thing, so to speak. 

"Georgetown, having ceased intercollegiate football, was faced with what appeared to be a serious gap in the fall sports schedule," wrote the 1952 College yearbook, the Ye Domesday Booke. Indeed, for a program with only eight teams, there was no spectator sports left in the fall, absent those interested in watching a cross country meet or two.

"In order to fill this gap, it was decided to institute an extensive intramural football league in which all four classes would participate," it continued. Under the supervision of [former assistant] George Murtagh and with able coaching assistance from several athletes of Georgetown's ex-football team, the league progressed rapidly and was marked with intense enthusiasm. The stands on the [Kehoe] athletic field were packed for each of the six games with many, unable to find seats, bunched along both sidelines and behind the end zones."

The fall of 1951 began nearly 15 years of so-called "class football", which consisted of four teams, one for each undergraduate class. A five game, six week schedule, played on Fridays and Saturdays, comprised the season. Each team suited up in the old varsity jerseys of the past, one in white, one in blue; one wearing the blue hard plastic helmet shells of the late 1940's, while early photos suggest their class opponents sported the leather helmets of a decade earlier. (The leather helmets were wisely retired a few years later.) Far from a touch football exercise, Georgetown maintained a rarity among colleges--a full fledged tackle football program.

But every few years, students let it be known that they sought something better. "More great games and seasons are predicted for the coming classes," wrote the yearbook in 1955. "Someday in the future, if the football spirit is maintained as it was this past year, perhaps there will be big time football back at Georgetown."

If football was gone from Georgetown during the 1950's, it was not forgotten. Periodic articles in The HOYA reminded new students of the school's former football glory. Periodic attempts to revive the sport at Georgetown during the 1950's were routinely dismissed by the University administration. A 1957 poll commissioned by the Georgetown Alumni Club of Metropolitan Washington D.C. found 84 percent of alumni wanted football resumed, and of those who supported a return, 73 percent favored a program similar to that of Ivy League schools.

The poll was ignored by the University, relegating it to a corner of the University Archives. In 1959, the National Football Foundation invited Georgetown's president, Rev. Edmund Bunn S.J., to discuss opportunities for Georgetown, Fordham, NYU, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and MIT to schedule extramural football contests between the schools, but Bunn declined the invitation outright. Fr. Bunn knew the 11th Commandment of the Jesuits--never contradict your predecessor.


Class football was beginning to fade by the early 1960's. The class games were under the auspices of the Student Athletic Commission (SAC), which existed from 1958 through the early 1970's and in a roundabout way, helped Bill Clinton receive a Rhodes Scholarship, but that's for another story. In the fall of 1962, interest grew in a wholly unlikely proposition--is it time to bring intercollegiate football back to Georgetown?

The commission faced both an opportunity as well as a considerable hurdle to do so. A return to intercollegiate football had growing support among students, but there was no blueprint on how to actually accomplish this. Almost every university that dropped football over the past quarter century had never returned. The same problems of a decade ago, primarily on cost, had not changed, and Georgetown's local fan base had atrophied since its days in Griffith Stadium.

The most pressing hurdle was from within. The Jesuit administration was fighting deficit spending throughout the 1960's and a growing sense that Georgetown was falling behind its Catholic peers. A 1962 Time magazine article claimed that in the view of many Catholics, Fordham and Holy Cross academically superior to Georgetown, while a 1966 Newsweek commentary would label Georgetown and fellow Washington universities as "second rate", dubbing them not the Ivy League, but the "Pony League". Under pressure to raise standards as well as invest in new facilities, particularly with the library and at the Law Center, the idea that the Bunn administration would take on the expansion of athletics to return to the glory of major college football was dead on arrival.

What followed was not an argument for so-called "big time" football but a clever pivot by the students. Georgetown's administration would squash any attempt to resuscitate a team to play agsinst Penn State or Maryland, so why not reshape the argument?

Instead, they made the case for a program the administration could at least tolerate, if not begrudgingly support.

It was called "football for fun", a low budget, non-scholarship activity where students would develop a self-sustaining football club that would schedule like-minded schools each fall. The team would be coached by students, while the cost of travel and other gameday expenses would be matched by ticket revenues.

During the 1962-63 academic year the SAC, chaired by HOYA sports editor Rory Quirk (C'65, L'71), prepared the case for football. The cornerstone of the report, whose contents are otherwise lost to history, was a study of 50 small college football programs in the East, each of which were contacted to ascertain their football budget, their organizational structure, and a brief survey of whether they thought a low-cost football club could be successful at a liberal arts university. Of the fifty schools, forty-nine favored the concept.

The Commission's report weighed in at a staggering 110 pages. Included within the report was an effort to identify six schools from which to pursue an annual schedule. By promoting play among small, academically respected liberal arts colleges that eschewed big-time football, the students sought to identify their program as compatible with Georgetown's liberal arts roots. The other benefit was a matter of goodwill--an actual football schedule would seek to welcome back those alumni still embittered over the program's demise in 1951.

Their arguments were not only based on emotion, but economics. Georgetown was already paying for an full-contact intramural football program that involved fixed costs for equipment, uniforms, instructors, and grounds keeping. For what was being spent on the intramural program, they argued, the additional expense of intercollegiate play could be matched by modest gate receipts for three home games each fall.

Even this modest proposal met with serious objections from University officials. Many Jesuits recalled the financial struggles of pre-1950 football, and were not about to encourage similar aspirations. But any hopes that a "football fever" would pass with the graduation of the Class of 1964 was short-sighted, as the majority of the SAC were returning students, and were now getting moral support from some of the football alumni in the lcoal area, among them former Washington Redskins back Jim Castiglia (C'41) and Steve Barabas (C'30), the owner of the popular Georgetown University Shop. Athletic director Jack Hagerty, a former letterman himself and the school's most decorated head coach, kept his distance from the effort so as not to jeopardize his own job, a role grandfathered in when the program was cut a decade ago.

After months of inaction, the Georgetown administration responded in September 1963. A football club was still too much for them. In lieu of a six game schedule, a single game after the conclusion of the intramural season would be allowed, nothing more. No financial support was offered, and the late date meant that none of the six target schools identified in the report could be opponents, since they had already set their schedules. In its place, the students negotiated a one game deal with Frostburg State College, certainly not the kind of high-minded opponent envisioned a year ago but the best available opponent within driving distance of the Hilltop.

 
Frostburg, who started a program just two years earlier when it was elevated from a junior college, appeared to be a reasonable opponent. The Bobcats were 4-4 in 1962, with a schedule which included wins over DC Teachers College, Bridgwater State, Gallaudet, and Potomac State. But even a .500 small college team would be a considerable favorite over an intramural all-star team, which is all Georgetown had to work with that fall.

Complicating matters for the Hoyas was the lack of a coaching staff, to which University staff like Hagerty and Murtagh were not allowed to participate. To arrange a game plan, the SAC turned to Bob Schmidt (L'64), a former quarterback at USC who was enrolled at the Law Center, to lead the team. Schmidt turned to a trio of classmates with prior college football experience (Jim Chapin, Mike Farrell, and Steve Weinress) to join the effort. The "staff" had just one week to arrange a roster from the intramural ranks and get them ready for Frostburg, which had already completed a nine game season by the date of the game. Privately, some were worried that Georgetown would be no match for the more experienced Bobcats.

The intramural season concluded and the school looked forward to the return of intercollegiate football on November 23, 1963. One day earlier, the death of President John F. Kennedy shook the nation, and the game was quickly cancelled.

The Jesuits may have forgotten about "football for fun", but Rory Quirk never did.

Quirk grew up in Philadelphia during the heyday of football in that city: the great Penn teams of the 1950's, Villanova's "Grocery Bowl" games at Municipal Stadium, and the Philadelphia Eagles' march to the 1960 NFL title. Arriving at Georgetown in 1961, he found a tepid intramural program struggling to maintain campus interest, and a number of fellow students who wanted to take a step forward. If the JFK tragedy ended football for the class of 1964, his senior class had one more opportunity to make the best of it.

The 1963 game, even in failure, opened eyes elsewhere.

News of a football club reached students at NYU and Fordham, two of Georgetown's old foes from the glory days and two schools which had also dropped football in the 1950's. They reached out to Quirk to learn more--what was the setup, how would the club be organized, what would it take to break even.

By the fall of 1964, Georgetown was not the only club football team around, and that was good news. The arrival of Fordham and NYU to the club ranks helped accelerate the story at Georgetown in ways that a game with Frostburg State or DC Teachers College never could. Suddenly, Georgetown had the peers it had in the original model--not to settle for games with junior colleges, but the kind of academic heavyweights that would earn the respect of students and alumni...and maybe even the Jesuits. One school couldn't long make it on its own, but with three, there were opportunities for scheduling and for publicity.

While Georgetown made no effort to promote the game among alumni, word of mouth began to spread. Coverage on the Hoyas began to appear in the Washington Post on a periodic basis (conveniently leaked from student sources), and Post sports editor Luther ("Bus") Ham was so taken by the premise that he filed stories in each of the five days prior to the game on the front page of the daily's sports section, alongside news of the Redskins and Terrapins.

Quirk and the SAC went all-in with a subtle phrase added to the game: Homecoming. The school hadn't hosted a Homecoming game in 14 years, and it still meant something to alumni. Activities began to be scheduled to make it every but as memorable as those games of old with Maryland and West Virginia: a pep rally on the steps of the Quadrangle, a parade along O Street, a Homecoming court, an alumni basketball game, and a Homecoming dance that was once the talk of the fall calendar. Suddenly, it seemed that football was back at the Hilltop.

As was said, there were definite opponents to this effort, none more so when Georgetown officials announced to the press that the game was merely an exhibition and was not sanctioned by the school. Perhaps it would keep attendance down, they thought. If only a few hundred show up on a cold November day, maybe this football thing would go the way of the Rat Race and the Glee Club, old Georgetown traditions that faded away, never to return.

On November 19, 1964, the HOYA turned its lead editorial over to Quirk, who passionately made the case for Saturday's game as a referendum:

"It's here and, if we blow it, it will never come again.

The football effort against N.Y.U. is a completely student effort. Students play. Students coach. Students run the weekend. Yet, all these students combined total no more than one hundred people. One hundred people can't sell the argument for small-time inter-collegiate football to University officials. The only selling point the students have is that the overwhelming majority of the student body is in favor, of AND WILL WORK FOR, the perpetuation of inter-collegiate football on ANY scale. Until this point is proven, any vision of future football games is wishful thinking and nothing more.

There are those mystics in the student body who feel that this game is a step back to the big time. They feel it is only a matter of time until Georgetown gets back on a scale with Boston College, Holy Cross and Villanova. They are kidding themselves. Any form of highly subsidized football program is an economic impossibility here at Georgetown. There is big-time football and there is non-scholarship football. There is no in between. George Washington and Holy Cross have tried to steer a middle course and get bathed in red ink every autumn. On admires their perseverance, but questions their background in economics. Georgetown could be a martyr to please the Old Guard as well, but it would be 1950 all over again.

Keeping this in mind, one can see that non-scholarship football is the solution. Without costly grants-in-aid, costs could be minimized. Statistics bear this out. Yet the only considerations are not financial. The obvious question in the minds of our administration (and the administrative officials at Fordham and NYU as well) is, "How will small-college football better the school? Just because it's cheap doesn't mean its advantageous."

The only argument we, as students, have is that nonscholarship football will be a unifying force for students and alumni as well and that the small outlay of money necessary to administer such a program would be well spent because alumni giving will increase and national publicity will be gained.

This argument can only bear any weight if the students turn out in force for the pep rally Friday evening and the game on Saturday. Overwhelming student interest must be manifested. The ticket gate at Kehoe Field might be likened to a ballot box and the NYU game is, in a sense, a student referendum. Every student who attends the game is casting his vote in favor of a continuation of the Georgetown football effort. They stay-at-home, regardless of the reason, are voting against any future football games. If there are compelling reasons for being absent from Kehoe Field this Saturday, those students in question should at least buy a ticket.

The dollar in itself is of no consequence; it will be the intention that counts. There is no guarantee that a large crowd will insure the future of football at Georgetown; but rest assured that a small crowd will ring the death knell for the football movement. It's that simple and the choice is ours."

The result was the stuff of Georgetown legend. 8,004 people were counted at Kehoe Field that day, the largest gathering of any kind in the history of the school. The ticket booth closed in the second half and people still wandered in, even as darkness threatened the late moments of the game. Georgetown's 28-6 win over NYU found its way to the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and even to a film crew from NBC.

"John Drury accounted for three Hoya touchdowns, crashing over from 1 yard twice and 5 yards once. His alternate at fullback, John Quirk, scored the other Georgetown touchdown on a 1-yard run," wrote the Times account. "The first quarter was sloppy. The ball changed hands five times on fumbles and interceptions and neither team could mount a sustained drive."

"The visitors had the pleasure of scoring first. In the second quarter Abe Manela, an N.Y.U. tackle, recovered a fumble by the Hoya quarterback, Tony Lauinger, on the Georgetown 2-yard line. Four plays later Mike Bersin went over from the 1....From there, the [Georgetown] quarterback, Sky MacGuire, engineered a three-play series that culminated in Drury's 5-yard scoring run. Quirk ran for the extra 2 points and Georgetown was ahead to stay."

In the next issue of The HOYA, Rory Quirk proclaimed "This is what the students and alumni want. There is strength in numbers. Eight thousand people can't be wrong."

And the fun was about to begin.