Georgia Tech's Destruction of Cumberland College in 1916 Wasn't Exactly As It Seemed

By Mark Schipper

To this day it lives in infamy. And each year, on October 7, the national memory is refreshed of Georgia Tech's 222-0 obliteration of Cumberland College on a hot afternoon at historic Grant Field in Atlanta. The beating was administered with malice aforethought by a Golden Tornado program led by the notoriously cutthroat John Heisman, who had all but called Cumberland to the floor to take its thrashing.

The famous photograph of the wooden scoreboard stares out from the past like a nightmarish hallucination. The hand-painted numbers are slotted into their grooves, quarter by ghastly quarter, like some kind of occultic code. Because the engineer and carpenter had not anticipated a three-figure final score, Georgia Tech's final "2" hangs crookedly off the far edge with nearly half the tile beyond the board.

After one quarter the score was 63-0. It was 126-0 at the half but Heisman was nowhere near finished with Cumberland. "You're doing alright," he told his players, "but you just can't tell what those Cumberland players have up their sleeves"

Following the third period the Yellow Jackets had stretched the lead to 180. As the final gun cracked-off into the sweltering downtown sky, the game went final: 222 to 0. The roundness of the numbers seemed to imply the infinite. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution the 42 point final quarter, in the wake of the 63, 63, and 54 points in the three that preceded it, was the consequence of a flagging effort. The young scribe sent to cover the game—a smug, heartless know-it-all schooled in the finest traditions of sportswriting—wrote that “Tech had tired out a good deal towards the close of the game. Otherwise, the score would have been larger than it was.”

The Yellow Jackets physically exhausted themselves clobbering an opponent that went catatonic shortly after the opening kickoff. It is something to consider what the lads on the other side must have felt like. One of coach Heisman’s own players, Noye Nesbit, later scrawled “Tech’s Disgrace” over a photograph of the scoreboard in his scrapbook.

The statistics magnify the infamy. The Yellow Jackets did not so much as attempt a forward pass, despite the fact Heisman was a great passing proponent and innovator. There had been no need and, even when you are ahead 180-0, why risk it? An interception or fumble could have marred an otherwise successful demonstration. It could be persuasively argued that Woody Hayes's later style was born on this day.

Cumberland lost its starting quarterback on the opening kickoff when, (for reasons we might reasonably question), he was sent out as a blocking back and got himself trampled. Cumberland’s longest run went for three yards on the game's first carry. The Bulldogs' longest pass, a robust ten-yard completion, was executed on fourth and twenty-two.

The Bulldogs turned the ball over 15 times, including nine lost fumbles and six interceptions. They finished the day with negative twenty-eight yards offense. Georgia Tech's numbers were vastly more preposterous. It is a testament to to the sheer grit of Cumberland's traveling party that the Yellow Jackets' 978 rushing yards and 32 touchdowns did not cause them to quit the field and start walking back to Tennessee.

But while this bludgeoning appeared to be a straight forward thing—and in some ways it was—it also was something else, and that’s part of the story that's rarely told. This was a game scheduled out of malice, and played, at John Heisman's end, for blood . . . .

Coach Heisman had a prickly personality. During the off-seasons he acted professionally, including well-received turns as a Shakespearean player, to supplement his salary. He brought that booming stage voice and flair for the dramatic to football practice, where he bellowed at his players through a megaphone until they performed to his satisfaction. He could be a nasty dictator with a cruel streak that people remembered long after leaving his presence. In 1919, after Heisman had divorced his wife, he was ordered to leave the city of Atlanta as part of the settlement. During his days at Auburn in the 1890s he was so loathed for coaching what many regarded as dirty football that fans of opposing programs showed up to taunt him, hoping to goad him into a screaming rage on the sideline. He satisfied them often enough that they kept showing up.

Heisman was known for running up the score on crippled opponents and dressing down referees with foul-mouthed, grandiose monologues that dragged on for minutes. Heisman went to war against local newspapers over unfavorable coverage and never hesitated to confront someone he felt had spoken out of turn. When things broke bad with Heisman it was serious business. He left most of the places he had lived and coached with bitter feelings both directions.

In Cumberland's case the spite had been engendered in 1915 when the Bulldogs' baseball team clobbered Georgia Tech, 22-0. Heisman, who also coached the baseball nine, was convinced Cumberland had played with professional ringers, cheating the Yellow Jackets out of a fair game. Like every serious coach in those days, Heisman had charge over the schedule and persuaded Cumberland to let Georgia Tech have a shot on the gridiron. Everything was set for a revenge match when Cumberland dropped football the following spring.

Administrators informed Heisman of the changed circumstances but, much to their surprise, were informed it meant nothing so far as their game was concerned. Heisman made clear if Cumberland broke its contract he would take a pound of flesh in the courts. From Heisman's perspective, dropping the sport was no excuse for breaking a contract and it would cost less to come south and take the drubbing, anyway. The spirit of collegiality was not .

Heisman, with megaphone.

So Cumberland re-agreed to the game, but this time without the requisite football team to make good. According to the known history of what happened next, a student captain was put in charge of wrangling a squad from the general population. He posted Help Wanted hand bills and wandered campus, eye-balling specimens and promising a free weekend in Atlanta in exchange for a few hours service on the gridiron. The Kappa Sigma fraternity contributed more than its share and something resembling a traveling squad was cobbled together.

The train stopped at Nashville on the way south. The Cumberland crew hoped to poach a few current or recently graduated players from Vanderbilt University, which had a powerful program at the time, to aid the cause. Instead, a day after docking, the train departed light three players after a wild night turned into a lost weekend. Cumberland clacked into Atlanta with 15 volunteer gladiators on an unofficial roster. The Yellow Jackets, on the other hand, were good enough to compete for a national championship.

The only decent thing Heisman did all afternoon was allow a shell-shocked Cumberland player to hide out on Georgia Tech’s bench. Heisman noticed the youth wandering along the sideline with what was likely some kind of head injury. When he informed the player he was on the wrong sideline the player said he was aware of the issue, but if Heisman pitched him back into the fray he might never see home again. Heisman gave the kid a sideline jacket and let him ride out the assault in peace.

Beyond the boiling desire to exact vengeance, Heisman had one substantial reason for obliterating Cumberland, though it could be argued there were more sportsmanlike options available. For several seasons Heisman raged over what he believed was the stupidity of newspaper rankings and the way sportswriters evaluated football teams. What Heisman hated, he wrote in several of his meandering columns for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—for which he was paid by the word—was how raw point totals were compared for rankings purposes.

It was all these hired geeks cared about, Heisman said, who wanted an enlightened press rating teams based on how they played, not on season-long point differentials. A reliable transitive property did not exist and the points scored or surrendered meant little without crucial game context. The polls were a sham operated by a pack of incompetents, so said Heisman.

"Useless," Heisman wrote in one piece. "But finding folks are determined to take the crazy thing into consideration, we at Tech determined this year to show them that it was no very difficult thing to run up a score in one easy game, from which it might perhaps be seen that it could be done in other easy games as well."

In Cumberland College Heisman found a potent blend of malice and opportunity to make his point. It was too bad his team ran out of steam before they could make it properly.