This COVID-19 pandemic has left us dipping into the archives for our sports fix, and Notre Dame football is no exception. Last night, I was flipping through an old book that I assume belonged to my late grandfather, a Notre Dame graduate and thus the reason I’m writing for this blog. It’s called “75 Years of Notre Dame All-Americans”, and one copy recently sold on eBay for $10. Towards the back of the book lists the game-by-game results of every season Notre Dame had played up to that point, and one game in particular had an asterisk next to it and a somewhat lengthy explanation.
The game was played against American College of Medicine and Surgery in Chicago on October 28, 1905, a generation before the university officially adopted the Fighting Irish moniker. Notre Dame will never score the number of points they scored on this day because it’s absurd to think otherwise. Coming off a 5-0 loss to Wabash, the Irish won, 142-0, and missed 20 extra points in a game where they scored 27 touchdowns, which were worth five points in those days. Bill Downs reached the end zone four times.
The craziness doesn’t stop there. A 20-minute second half was to follow the 25-minute first half, but after the break, only eight minutes were played. Why? The visitors, unofficially known as the “Doctors”, needed time to eat before catching a train back to Chicago. It was just as well because the Irish scored 10 touchdowns in eight minutes at one point and ending up averaging 4.3 points a minute.
The following edition of Scholastic, Notre Dame’s long-running student magazine, pulled no punches on the absurdity of this game. It mentioned how the “Doctors” continually lost yardage or fumbled, not even gaining an inch, so the Irish never got to give their defense a proper display. On offense, they only needed two to four plays to score a touchdown. Perhaps the best line from the student account is the following: “The game as a whole was a poor exhibition of football as it was played by only one team, the others simply filled in space.”