Bierman v. Bierman Boys

Undefeated college football teams will be rare this year. Reason: the Navy's four Pre-Flight Training squads. Last week Iowa's Seahawks, most touted of the Navy fledglings, blasted Minnesota's dream of a third undefeated season. And the man who snipped its winning streak was the man who spun it: silver-thatched, 48-year-old Bernie Bierman, lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines.

In ten years at Minnesota, Coach Bierman had built up a football reputation second only to that of Immortal Knute Rockne. His terrifying machines, fashioned of hefty Minnesota homebreds, five times power-pushed their way to the mythical U.S. football championship. For this year's campaign he had mobilized another battalion of heavy tanks. But Pearl Harbor pulled Bernie Bierman back to the Marines, with whom he had served during World War I. He was assigned to the Navy's Pre-Flight Training center at the University of Iowa, to teach football to future aviators.

At Pre-Flight schools football is a minor sport, far less important than swimming, tumbling and hand-to-hand. But the Navy, trying to recruit college boys for naval aviation, arranged to play picked college teams.

When Coach Bierman first viewed the batch of candidates for a team to meet twelve of the toughest outfits in the Midwest, he moaned: "They have less coordination than a third team at Minnesota." But gloomy Bernie soon discovered that his trainees, though variously tutored, had high possibilities. Besides Michigan's Forest Evashevski, Ohio State's Dick Fisher, Iowa's "Bus" Mertes and Northwestern's George Benson, he was blessed with a triple threat named Bill Schatzer, who had hid his brilliance for four years under a bushel named North Central College in Illinois. In the Seahawks' first two games--against Kansas and Northwestern --Fledgling Schatzer made one-third of the cadets' total yardage, scored three of their 18 touchdowns, had a hand in most of the plays that smothered their opponents with scores of 61-to-o and 20-to-12.

Last week Bierman's old pupils at Minnesota, carrying on under Dr. George Hauser, his longtime line coach, knew how to bottle up an upstart like Schatzer. But even without Schatzer, Bierman's Seahawks proved to be tough birds. Though Minnesota made 13 first downs to their nine and gained 278 yards to their 107, the final score was: Seahawks, 7; Minnesota, 6.

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