The 1940 Chicago Bears’ 8-3 regular season wasn’t spectacular,
but their championship game was: they beat the Washington
Redskins 73-0, the widest margin in NFL history.
The Bears led the NFL in rushing offense with 1,818 yards, and
in rushing TDs, with 16.
Chicago Bears owner and couch George Hallas (with hat).
On December 6, 1961, Syracuse running back Ernie Davis
became the first African American player to win the
Heisman Trophy, college football’s top individual award,
beating Ohio State fullback Bob Ferguson. Earlier in day,
Davis met with President John Kennedy at the Waldorf-
Astoria Hotel in New York. "I never thought I’d ever be
shaking the hand of the President of the United States,"
he says.
As a senior in 1961, Davis rushed for 823 yards and scored
14 touchdowns. The previous season, he rushed for 877
yards.
Davis was the first pick in the 1962 NFL draft, by Washington,
which traded him to the Cleveland Browns. But he never
played in the NFL. Davis was diagnosed with leukemia later
in 1962, and died on May 18, 1963. He was only 23.
On November 30, 1876, Yale defeated Princeton, 2-0, in
Hoboken, New Jersey in the first collegiate football game
played on Thanksgiving. Nearly 1,000 fans attend the
game, played in cold, rainy weather.
The football was oval and made of leather, the New York
Times noted, "similar to those used in Rugby Union rules."
The game resembled rugby more than a present-day football
game.
First Yale team playing under American intercollegiate
football rules. This team beat Harvard in the fall of ’76.”
On November 6, 1869, Rutgers beat Princeton, 6-4, in the first
college football game. The game, played with a soccer ball
before roughly 100 fans in New Brunswick, New Jersey,
resembled rugby instead of today’s football.
Nicole Brown Simpson, famous football player O.J. Simpson’s
ex-wife, and her friend Ron Goldman were brutally stabbed to
death outside Nicole’s home in Brentwood, California, in what
quickly became one of the most highly publicized trials of the
century.
With overwhelming evidence against him, including a prior
record of domestic violence towards Brown, O.J. Simpson
became the chief suspect.
Although he had agreed to turn himself in, Simpson escaped
with friend A.C. Cowlings in his white Ford Bronco on June 17.
He was carrying his passport, a disguise, and $8,750 in cash.
