In 1966, #2 Michigan State and #1 Notre Dame met to determine who was the best college football team in the nation. Fifty years later, we still don’t know.
Maybe it would have been different if Nick Eddy hadn’t fallen off the train. Okay, he didn’t exactly fall off the train. The Notre Dame running back slipped on the snow and slammed his shoulder into a handrail when he disembarked in East Lansing. Still, he was injured enough to sit out that famous game with Michigan State in 1966, which might have factored into his coach’s decision that Saturday.
Irish quarterback Terry Hanratty, who would go on to back up Terry Bradshaw in Pittsburgh and play in Super Bowl X, was knocked out of the game in the first quarter by Michigan State’s Bubba Smith. Hanratty later recalled, “When I got to the sideline, (his coach) said, ‘Why in the hell did you run the quarterback draw?’ I told him, ‘Because you called it!’ He said he’d called a running back draw.” Two plays later center George Goeddeke, who would be drafted by the Denver Broncos in the 1967 NFL Draft, sprained his ankle. Both Hanratty and Goeddeke sat on the bench with Eddy for the rest of the game. Perhaps missing three of his most important offensive players was just too much for the coach to take the risk.
Notre Dame’s Tom Schoen muffed a punt with about a minute and a half left in the fourth quarter. While the Irish did recover the ball, maybe that muff unnerved Notre Dame’s coach enough to do what he did, and what fifty years of admirers and detractors have speculated about.
Dan Jenkins, writer for Sports Illustrated at the time, said this past June that “He never got enough credit for the fact that he lost his quarterback early in the game and Nick Eddy fell off the train, didn’t even play.” That didn’t stop Jenkins from making fun of Ara Parseghian in his article. He wrote that Parseghian had “tied one for the Gipper.”
Parseghian, now 93, told the Chicago Tribune recently: “We didn’t go for a tie, the game ended in a tie. Christ, somebody ought to wake up to that.”
Notre Dame never traveled to another game by train.
Ara Parseghian wasn’t like other Notre Dame coaches. He wasn’t a Notre Dame graduate, nor was he Catholic. He played his college ball at Miami University in Ohio and was part of the 1948 and 1949 Cleveland Browns AAFC championship teams as a halfback and defensive back.
Parseghian followed Woody Hayes as the coach of Miami of Ohio from 1951 to 1955 before building Northwestern into a Big Ten power back when there were actually ten. One of his assistants at Northwestern in 1956 and 1957 was another Miami alum named Bo Schembechler.
Parseghian was a different kind of guy. He played mind games. A Sports Illustrated profile on him from 1959 claims that he “was credited by some writers as being the greatest psychologist in football since Knute Rockne.” Parseghian said, “psychology in football is more important than anyone believes, including the coaches.”
When coaching at Miami in 1954, he intentionally dressed his players in ragged uniforms for a practice the day before a road game against Indiana. His players were said to have “looked like a bunch of urchins, sandlot ragamuffins of such shoddy caliber that even Indiana could grow overconfident.” The next day, Miami won 6-0. He did the same thing when his Miami team played Northwestern the next season, and they won 25-16. Northwestern hired him the next year.
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He had a disarming charisma—his players referred to him by his first name—and he was every bit as youthful and athletic as some of his players. He would sometimes join them in practice or coordinate a massive game of tag instead of making his team run sprints. While he was at Miami he hauled a heavy fire hose into place by himself when the home of a friend of his caught fire. One of his players at Notre Dame called him “a charismatic, all-seeing god on the high tower at practice.”
Parseghian came to a Notre Dame program in turmoil when he arrived in 1964. The Irish had finished 2-7 in 1963, Frank Leahy had been gone for a decade and the team hadn’t won a national championship since 1949. In his first year, Parseghian’s Irish went 9-1 and finished third in the AP Poll, with only a loss to Southern California in the last game of the season separating them from a national championship. Quarterback John Huarte won the 1964 Heisman Trophy. Notre Dame students would chant during the winter for their new coach to “stop the snow.” To which Parseghian allegedly responded by turned to his assistants and asking, “could I?”
“We all caught the fever with the first words Coach Parseghian said to the squad,” said linebacker and captain Jim Carroll, “He said, ‘We will win.’ And the way he is—intense, enthusiastic, confident—you sort of felt he wouldn’t allow anything else to happen.”
With one notable exception.
Michigan State had claimed the Megaphone in 11 of 12 matchups with Notre Dame since Leahy’s departure after the 1949 season and won the national championship in 1952. In Parseghian’s first year in South Bend, the Irish trounced the Spartans 34-7. The Spartans won the return match in 1965, 12-7, conceding only 12 yards to the Irish.
In 1966, the Spartans were coming off a 10-1 season which included a Big Ten championship and a Rose Bowl appearance. They rolled over nearly all of their opponents with ease as the AP Poll went back and forth on whether or not they were the number-one or number-two team in the nation. The Irish were even more dominant, leading the nation in scoring, shutting out five opponents and conceding only 28 points the entire season before their visit to East Lansing.
The teams were filled with a bevy of stars, including ten first-round draft picks, 25 All-Americans and 31 future pros. “If you look at the talent on those two rosters, I don’t know that it will be ever be duplicated,” Notre Dame quarterback Terry Hanratty said. “It was amazing. In that era, those were the two greatest teams to play each other.”
The Big Ten had a rule at the time that prevented a team from going to the Rose Bowl in consecutive years, so this would be the final game of their season for Michigan State. The Irish had not participated in postseason play since the days of Rockne but had their own kind of Rose Bowl coming up: a date in Pasadena with Southern California the next week.
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There was a third team that was trying to crash the national championship part in 1966. Returning national champion Alabama had been ranked number-one by the AP before the season but had slipped to third despite running the table, perhaps due to the fact that the team was all-white, which was controversial in the era of the Civil Rights Movement.
Michigan State, on the other hand, was a bastion of diversity. 17 players, including 12 of the team’s 22 starters, were black, including starting quarterback Jimmy Raye and four of the top eight picks in the 1967 NFL Draft: Bubba Smith, Clinton Jones, George Webster and Gene Washington. The Irish, by contrast, had only one African-American player on their roster: future NFL MVP defensive tackle Alan Page.
The Spartans had a history of integration in the football program. As early as 1913, Gideon Smith had become one of college football’s first black players. In 1950, the aptly-named Willie Thrower became the first black quarterback in the Big Ten and quarterbacked the Spartans to a national championship in 1952.
Michigan State head coach Duffy Daughterty was intentional about bringing in African-American players, especially from the south. Fullback Bob Apisa said, “Duffy did not see color or creed, he saw players. He saw talent.”
“Everything was completely segregated in Texas, how we lived and how we played,” running back Gene Washington said. “All of a sudden, I’m in a friendly atmosphere. I had no problems. It was just a great, great welcoming.”
However, Michigan State’s relatively inclusive atmosphere came with a perceived cost in national polls. As the clock began to wind down on the season that Saturday, Spartan All-American defensive lineman Bubba Smith desperately called out, “Do you think we’re going to win the national championship even if they run the clock out? We got too many n****rs on this team to win the national championship. We have to find a way.”
The hype was unprecedented. 33 million people watched the game, also referred to as the “Poll Bowl,” on television. The game was going to be aired on regional television only, but eventually succumbed to popular demand and aired the game across the nation on tape delay, the first nationally televised college football game. The game was broadcast to American soldiers fighting in Vietnam and out-performed Super Bowl I in the ratings. Over 80,000 people made up the record-setting Spartan Stadium crowd.
Roger Valdiserri, Notre Dame’s sports information director at the time, recalled, “We had press conferences every day. There was so much interest in that game.” More than 600 media credential requests were made of Michigan State. Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated called it “the biggest collegiate spectacle in 20 years.”
On campus, the fervor was palpable. Notre Dame students painted a block “ND” at the foot of Michigan State’s “Sparty” statue. South Bend was literally bombarded with leaflets dropped from airplanes that read: “YOUR LEADERS HAVE LIED TO YOU. WHY DO YOU STRUGGLE AGAINST US? THEY HAVE LED YOU TO BELIEVE THAT YOU CAN WIN. THEY HAVE GIVEN YOU FALSE HOPE. WE WARN YOU–STAY IN YOUR OWN VILLAGES. TRY TO PERSUADE YOUR LEADERS NOT TO SEND THE FLOWER OF YOUR YOUTH TO BE CUT DOWN IN A HOPELESS BATTLE. THE INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC BUBBA IS REAL. IT CAN DESTROY YOU.” Notre Dame students replied with an air raid of their own, known as the “Ara Force Counterattack,” but the pilot’s pamphlet drop missed its target and ended up west of Michigan State’s campus.
“It was the most unbelievable week I’ve spent in my life,” Bubba Smith said in 2006, “I lived on the first floor of Wonders Hall and one night there must have been 5,000 students outside my window yelling, ‘Kill, Bubba! Kill!’”
Michigan State’s student government was so worried about potential trouble from visiting Irish fans, that they held what was referred to as a “peace conference” in the week leading up to the game. They decided to host a dance for students from Michigan State and Notre Dame. The student union swelled beyond capacity and the event became known as the “Spartan-Sham-Rock.”
The night before the game, 10,000 people watched the two schools’ freshman teams duke it out. In that game, there was a winner, as Notre Dame kicked a game-winning field goal in the final minute to win 30-27.
“For me, it was the hardest-hitting college or pro game I ever played in,” George Goeddeke would say. Joe Doyle of the South Bend Tribune said, “I’d never seen a game as intense as this was. The hitting was savage.”
In the first quarter, Hanratty was leveled by Smith and left the game for good with a separated shoulder. Two plays later, Goeddeke, the Irish’s starting center, went down with a sprained ankle.
Michigan State made the most of things in the early part of the game, as Regis Cavender scored from five yards out to give the Spartans the early 7-0 lead. Richard Kenney, who hailed from Hawai’i and kicked bare-footed, buried a 47-yard field goal to up the lead to 10-0.
The Irish, now quarterbacked by recently-diagnosed diabetic Coley O’Brien, who required two insulin shots on the sideline to be able to finish the game, scored on a 34-yard pass to Bob Gladieux before the half to cut the Spartan lead.
They tied the game early in the fourth quarter on a 42-yard field goal by Joe Azzaro. That drive that had nearly been stopped when Michigan State recovered a fumble, only to have it overturned on a penalty. Gerald Scott of the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1986, “Duffy Daugherty… said that he was so incensed at that and other controversial calls that he sent the game film to the Big Ten supervisor of officials for review but that nothing ever came of it. The name of the Big Ten supervisor of officials in 1966? Irish Creager.”
Busting Brackets
The way the two teams handled the fourth quarter was a large part of the controversy that followed. In the fourth quarter, trying to lead his team down the field for a game-winning score, Raye was intercepted for the second time in the game by Tom Schoen, who returned the interception to the 18. Dan Jenkins would write in Sports Illustrated that, “unlike the Irish, the Spartans gambled.”
The Spartan defense held, though, and the Irish only went backward on that drive. Azzaro missed a 41-yard field goal and the game remained tied late in the fourth quarter.
Michigan State punted the ball away on fourth down with 1:35 left in the fourth. Notre Dame’s Tom Schoen muffed his attempt at a fair catch, but the Irish recovered at their own 30, less than half a field away from field goal range.
Three plays later, Parseghian faced fourth and one at his own 39 with 30 seconds left. Instead of punting, he decided to go for it. O’Brien got two yards on a run and Michigan State called timeout. The next play, Parseghian called a pass play, but Smith sacked O’Brien and Michigan State called their last timeout with five seconds left.
The absence of starters, a sickly backup quarterback and a lack of good field position were enough to convince Parseghian that the best course of action to preserve his team’s undefeated record, number-one ranking and chance to win a national championship was to simply run the out the final seconds and take the tie.
So he did. The Irish ran a quarterback draw, picking up five yards, and watched the final seconds tick away, ending the game at a 10-10 standstill in the days before overtime.
In a world where coaching decisions are more meticulously scrutinized and mathematically plotted than ever before, Parseghian’s decision remains as controversial as it was 50 years ago.
“We’d fought hard to come back and tie it up,” Parseghian said at the time. “After all that, I didn’t want to risk giving it to them cheap. They get reckless and it could cost them the game. I wasn’t going to do a jackass thing like that at this point.”
Later, he would say, “Strategically, I knew what I was doing in the game. You have to remember Duffy kicked the ball back to me. My starting quarterback, starting center, starting left tackle and all my top guys were over on the bench with me. We hadn’t completed a pass in the last seven or eight attempts.”
Hanratty also defended his coach after the game. “Ara caught a lot of crap for going for the tie, but no one ever talks about Duffy punting the ball back to us…” he said. “He could have easily gone for it, more than we could have from our 20-yard line. If we screwed up from where we were, we would have lost the game.”
“I simply wasn’t going to give away cheaply the tie our crippled team fought so hard to obtain,” Parseghian said after the game, “If we had been in the middle of the field, it might have been different. But with the ball on our 35, I wasn’t going to risk a pass interception because of the great kicking ability of Michigan State’s Dick Kenney. After all, the Spartans almost lost the game that way a few plays earlier when we intercepted and were in field goal position.”
Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated wrote that Notre Dame “took the easy way out.”
“I think I gave Ara credit at the time for running out the clock because he felt arrogantly sure that Notre Dame could win the polls with a tie, not just over Michigan State but also over an undefeated and untied Alabama,” Jenkins told ESPN years later, “but I still think it was chickens***, and I stand by my position that he tied one for the Gipper.”
Notre Dame would remain first in the AP Poll after the game, although UPI gave the Spartans the number-one nod. The Irish removed all doubt from any pollsters’ minds the next week, though, when they trounced #10 Southern California 51-0 and claimed the number-one spot in all the polls that mattered.
The debate over whether or not Parseghian was justified in his decision still rages across the Midwest, as does the argument over which team was better on that season and that Saturday. The week after the game, Notre Dame and Michigan State’s debate teams met at the University of Detroit to officially argue about which team was better. Notre Dame won the debate, 2-1. Of course, that debate didn’t really solve anything, as it continues to play out today, even among the two generations of fans that never saw the game.
Michigan State apologists argue that the Spartans had out-gained the Irish 284-219 and gained 13 first downs to Notre Dame’s 10. The Irish claim that they had a more difficult schedule, playing four ranked teams while Michigan State played only two, and that they were more dominant in their victories, winning most of their games in shutouts.
Bubba Smith more or less came to terms with the result. “As it was happening I was yelling, ‘you’re playing for a tie,'” he later said, “but I’ve since apologized to (Parseghian) for the anguish that game has caused him. I later realized it was a brilliant move because Notre Dame had one more game to showcase their team, and we didn’t because back then you could not go to the Rose Bowl in consecutive years.”
At the time, of course, he was not happy. “I don’t think any other school would have won the championship if they had done that,” he said. “All the sportswriters are Catholic.”
There are plenty of questions one can ask about the Michigan State-Notre Dame game of 1966. Did an underlying culture of racism play into the Spartans getting the short end of the stick in the polls? Maybe.
Would Michigan State have won if overtime was not still 30 years off in college football? It’s possible.
Did Notre Dame simply overwhelm the pollsters by blowing out a top-ten Southern California team a week later? Probably.
Was Asa Parseghian justified in his decision to run out the clock to end the “Game of the Century” in an ultimately unsatisfying draw? Absolutely.
If the object of the game is to win, Parseghian fulfilled his duty to the game, as his decision ensured that the Irish would retain their chance to win a national title, which they did. As frustrating as the result was for Michigan State, Parseghian broke no rules and cheated no opponent by making the decision he did.
Parseghian would eventually get to coach in bowl games, as Notre Dame opted to participate beginning in 1969. He won three of them and another national championship in 1973. Still, his most enduring legacy outside of South Bend is making a tactical decision which eventually won him a national championship.
93-year old Parseghian has watched college football change quite a bit since his days. Overtime breaks ties. There’s a playoff now which decides, perhaps more fairly, who the national champion is.
“I championed a playoff,” he says. “I was one of the few coaches who was hollering for a playoff. The bowl games dominated in those days, and you had to come up with some logical reasoning to drop them. Now they’ve got a format and a good foothold on a champion at the end of the seasons. I would love to be a part of that.”
He still watches Notre Dame football, although he admits he can’t jump up and down anymore, and spends most of his time raising awareness and seeking a cure for Niemann-Pick disease, which three of his grandchildren lost their lives to.
“Neither Duffy Daugherty nor I expected a tie or wanted a tie,” Parseghian has said. “The game ended in a tie in one of the historic games.”
For 59 minutes and 55 seconds, the two teams battled. Parseghian even risked it all by going for it on fourth and one in his own territory with 30 seconds left, something many forget.
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One Spartan player wrote a poem about the game, titled “The Never Ending Game.” It sounds nice, but it’s not true. The game is over, has been for 50 years, and ultimately old Notre Dame won over all.