Rockne created a whole system of football. His players were trained so well that many of them went on to become coaches at prep schools across the country. Once they had those jobs, they’d send their best players to Notre Dame. This was before other colleges had started recruiting nationally; back then most of the players at Harvard or Yale would be from New England, but we’d have kids from all over. We were also the only team that played all over the country. That gave us national media coverage. And playing the strongest teams from every conference gave us an edge when it came to winning national championships.
Rockne’s smarts showed up every week. My last season we played a game at Northwestern and our fullback broke his ankle. We didn’t have a backup player. The next Saturday was our last game of the year, against Southern Cal, which was undefeated and had beaten all the other teams by what seemed like 1,000 points. It took us three days by train to get from Chicago to Los Angeles, and Rockne decided to convert Bucky O’Connor, our halfback, to fullback. On the train he took the team back to a freight car, where we ran plays to teach Bucky the new position. He ran all the way across the country on that freight car. When we stopped in Arizona to practice, Rockne had Bucky switch jerseys with another guy, so the Southern Cal scouts couldn’t tell who the new fullback was. Southern Cal had set up their whole defense thinking our fullback would be a right-handed guy from Butte, Mont., instead of Bucky, a lefty. During the game, Bucky played fullback and scored on two long runs. We won the game 27-0, to stay undefeated.
