Michigan came into the game with only two players ( Angus Goetz and Abe Cohn) who had ever played for Michigan previously. Michigan opened its season on October 7, 1918, with a home game against the Case Scientific School (now Case Western Reserve University) from Cleveland. Halfback Abe Cohn was "an eye opener" against Case, requiring "two or three men" to stop him. If they were to train an army of football players and throw them into the lines, the last weeks of October, with Coach Yost to address them just before the battle, we would score a touchdown the first half, and before Thanksgiving we would have pushed the Germans under their own goal posts and eat dinner in Berlin." He, too, has mentioned the feeling of football in the air. Ralph Henning, of Bay City, is here, and though we come from different parts of Michigan and attended different schools, he being the captain of the Michigan Aggies' football team in 1916, we quite frequently talk over the old scenes with which we are both familiar. It seems to bring back the old feeling which is experienced where the smell of football is in the air, the first cold days of autumn and it makes me homesick, though only slightly. The days are getting shorter and there is a chill in the air. Cross, recalling memories of football in Ann Arbor: The Michigan Alumnus published a letter from another Michigan athlete, Cecil F. To this must be added the shriek of shells, the whistle of fragments, the automatic hammer effect of the machine gun, the rattle of the rifle fire, the rockets and star shells out over No Man's land-all combined to make the night weird, hideous, fascinating, sublime." The blackness of the night became a series of dots and dashes, until the world resembled a vast radio station, spelling hell, hell, and hell again. At night, when the infantry launched its raids, or the enemy his, or the infantry became nervous and called for help, the guns stamped like stallions and snorted their breaths of fire. "And so it went from day to day, but oftimes the nights were very bad. In April 1918, newspapers published a letter from Redden to a friend back home describing his unit's "baptism of fire": One of the casualties was Curtis Redden, star end of Fielding Yost's "Point-a-Minute" teams. Three former Michigan football players were killed in the war. Center Ernie Vick, and left tackle Angus Goetz were both selected as first-team All-Big Ten players.Ĭurtis Redden's letter from the front was published before the start of the 1918 season. The Wolverines played their home games at Ferry Field.įullback Frank Steketee was selected by Walter Camp as a first-team All-American and was one of the top kickers in the game during the 1918 season. Although no formal mechanism existed in 1918 to select a national champion, the 1918 Michigan team was retroactively selected as the national champion by the Billingsley Report and a co-national champion with Pittsburgh by the National Championship Foundation. They shared the Big Ten Conference championship with Illinois and finished with a perfect record of 5–0, outscoring opponents 96 to 6. The 1918 team played in a season shortened by World War I travel restrictions and the 1918 flu pandemic. Yost in his 18th season with the program. The team's head football coach was Fielding H. The 1918 Michigan Wolverines football team represented the University of Michigan in the 1918 Big Ten Conference football season.
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