College Football: The 1973 Season

[EDIT 6/22/2015: Assuring apostrophe uniformity]

[EDIT 11/30/2023: Removing justification and introducing "football" label]

I've laid out a monthly schedule for this blog, but I haven't edited the list of bullet points so it isn't boring. Here's the first installment.

Notre Dame defeats Alabama 24-23 in the Sugar Bowl. The AP declares the 11-0 Fighting Irish champions, but the coaches' poll sticks with the 11-1 Crimson Tide.

Penn State defeats LSU 16-9 in the Orange Bowl. Ohio State wins the Rose Bowl 42-21 against USC.

 

Penn State halfback John Cappelletti wins the Heisman Trophy as well as its less prestigious parallel, the Maxwell Award. The consensus All-American running back has 1,522 yards on 286 rushes and 17 rushing touchdowns.

 

Ohio State offensive tackle John Hicks wins the Outland Trophy and the Lom­bardi Award, both of which are awards for line­men, the former for interior line­men. Hicks is also the runner-up for the Heisman.

 

Alabama's Bear Bryant is named Coach of the Year by the American Football Coaches Association. The FWAA gives Johnny Majors of Pittsburgh that honor, as the Panthers improved from 1-10 in '72 to 6-5-1, including a Fiesta Bowl loss to Arizona State, in '73.

 

Tom Osborne coaches Nebraska for the first of what would prove to be 25 years. The Cornhuskers go 9-2-1, as they had the year before; they went 11-0-1 in 1970 and 13-0-0 in 1971.

 

Barry Switzer begins his 17 years as Oklahoma head coach. Steve Davis begins a three-season, 32-1-1 run as Sooners QB.

 

The consensus All-American quarterback is Dave Jaynes of Kansas with 196 completions for 2,349 yards and 14 touchdowns.

 

Mark Kellar of Northern Illinois is the leading rusher with 1,719 yards in 11 games.

 

The passing leader and total offense leader is Jesse Freitas of San Diego State with 227 completions in 11 games. He throws for 2,293 yards and 21 touchdowns, and his total offense is 2,901 yards.

 

Jay Miller of Brigham Young University gets 22 catches in a game Nov. 3 against New Mexico. This is a record that will stand until 1994. Miller is the receptions leader for the season with 100 in 11 games. He has 1,181 yards and 8 touchdowns.

 

This is the University of Kentucky's first year at Commonwealth Stadium.

 

The first-ever Division II champions are Louisiana Tech. The first-ever Division III champions are Wittenberg University.

 

In the Senior Bowl, a postseason all-star game, Lynn Swann of USC catches the winning touchdown pass. The Pittsburgh Steelers will pick the consensus All-American in the first round of the '74 draft.

LINKS

More on the '73 season from Sports-Reference.com

Week-by-week AP polls

Bowl game results

 

 

NEXT MONTH: The '73 NFL season

Introduction

This project started as a gathering of information about a certain year in sports with a book of essays about that year in mind as one of my many pipe dreams. I ended up printing it out into a mini-book for Christmas 2011. Now that the 40th anniversary of these events (and the last one that's really all that worthy of celebration until the 50th) is coming up, I thought I'd make it a blog. What follows is copied and pasted from the book with a few modifications, which should explain how formal it might be.

So, why 1974? It was a year in which the NFL, NBA, and NHL all had competitors at the same time, all with varying degrees of success. It was a year in which the Yankees played at Shea Sta­dium and the Giants played at the Yale Bowl. The Superdome and the Silverdome were among the facilities under construction. Seattle had an NBA team, but no MLB or NFL teams. You could watch a Capital Bullets/Kansas City-Omaha Kings game in the winter of '74 and the debut season for a Washington or Kansas City NHL team in the fall. The Sears Tower was in its infancy, we were left to hope the situation in South Vietnam would turn out for the best, and there were more game shows on the daytime schedule than ever before or since.

 

Most impor­tantly, it was the year of Muhammad Ali and Hank Aaron in terms of sports, and their moments may have been talked about as much as the developments revolving around Richard Nixon. Sure, the years just before and after had important elements that '74 didn't, but this one's interesting to think about. It must have been a rough one to live through, though. With so many crises and so much stress, the world of sport could make us forget for a while or it could be an unwanted reminder.

What's to come? College football, the NFL, and the WFL. College basketball, the NBA, and the ABA. The NHL and the WHA. Baseball and boxing. The World Cup and Wimbledon. Jack Nicklaus and jockeys.

 

Stay tuned.