The Team That Quit

Time was when college football was devoted to the classic commandment of sport: play to win. From Slippery Rock State Teachers to the semipro squads that are the pride of the country's largest universities, players and coaches alike were devoted to a single statistic, the final score. Few teams made more of a business of winning than the powerful platoons of the Big Ten, and few Big Ten teams had a better reason for trying to win last week than the husky Hawkeyes of Iowa.

Not since 1924 had Iowa beaten Michigan. Having built an undergraduate career by winning games for Michigan, Iowa Coach Forest Evashevski had never yet built a team that could down his alma mater. This time the Hawkeyes had a real chance: they had the beef; they had the brains; and the bruising combination seemed enough to wear the Wolverines down. By the end of the first half they were behind, 21-7, but they had given Michigan an awful mauling.

In the second half they began to move. With impressive ease, Iowa tied the score. Then, with three long minutes left to keep going to victory, the Hawkeyes quit. They simply ran out the clock and settled for a 21-21 tie. His boys seemed to have "run out of gas," as Coach Evashevski saw it. To 90,000 booing spectators at Ann Arbor, it seemed as if Forest Evashevski and his team had broken a commandment.

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