(exciting music) The 1899 University of South football team has to be the most amazing story in college football history.

The '99 Sewanee team will be unrivaled.

No team ever in the history of college football will ever be able to do what they did.

I'd like for every player to be able to read that story of Sewanee.

It's unbelievable.

They've got a record nobody will ever top.

There's so many extraordinary layers on this story.

You peel one back and you see another one.

It's unthinkable to imagine what they went through, what their bodies went through, and how they managed to survive it, and to be as good as they were.

One of the founding myths of the University of the South is that we had this remarkable team that did remarkable things.

They are one of the most extraordinary teams in the history of college football and everyone who cares about college football should know their story.

-(upbeat folksy music) -(crowd cheering) (momentous music) [Narrator] There is, and always will be, spirited debate as to who is the greatest college football team of all time.

Many teams and storied programs can lay claim to that honor.

There is one achievement, however, that is beyond debate, which team had the most extraordinary single season in college football history, a season which will never be equaled, much less surpassed.

To answer that question, we have to go back to the year 1899 and a small Episcopal college in Tennessee on the Cumberland plateau, the University of the South, colloquially known as Sewanee.

In the early 1890s, football caught on in the South, because it was not only exciting, but also carried with it vestiges of war and manhood.

In the 1890s, the Civil War generation is beginning to pass from the scene.

The participant generation is very concerned about transmitting to the successor generation, to the rising generation, some sense of the challenges they faced, of the obstacles they overcame, of the sacrifices that they made, and how best to inculcate that in these young people, these whipper snappers who might not otherwise have understand how tough we had it and how beneficial that experience was for us.

Well, what comes closer to the experience of combat than football?

Football became a kind of proxy experience for battlefield glory and you are supposed to fight and be willing even to die and even willing to kill for your team, for your university.

The first college game was played in 1869, Rutgers and Princeton.

Now you fast forward basically 30 years, and the game went through a lot of changes.

Football at the time was really more like an English scrum rugby match.

It was very little resemblance to what we call now football.

The rules were virtually non-existent.

There were no practice regulations or guidelines.

There were no requirements as to roster size.

There were no rules against punching, biting, kicking.

It was a overall brutal game.

There was a lot of blood.

There were a lot of teeth.

A lot of broken noses, was a bit of a blood bath, especially in the trenches.

Football was just a really a rough, tough game.

One particular year at the turn of the century, I think there were 18 or 19 deaths, that's how bad it was.

It was to the point where it was even rumored that Congress might take some action and make it illegal to play.

The rules of the game changed because people were dying.

It was an interesting time in our country, and one area you would not have to question the gentleman who played football in that era was their toughness, and I think it has a lot to do with their life and what they had been through and what their parents had been through at that time in our country.

[Narrator] By the 1890s, college football's popularity was growing nationally.

The rules and look of the game, however, were quite different from modern football.

"Spalding's Official Football Guide of 1899" provided the rules for college football games.

By the 1890s now you actually have downs and distances, but you only need to get five yards for a first down.

You don't need to get 10, but you only had three plays to do it.

[Narrator] Teams had 11 players who played both offense and defense, and there was no forward passing.

These guys never came out of the game.

You had to play both ways.

If you came out, you did not get the opportunity to come back in.

There were no substitutions.

So the players were expected that unless they were crippled or killed on the field of play, they were to stay in because it was unmanly, it was cowardly to leave.

They would have to drag you from the field.

[Narrator] In 1944, Ralph Black, a substitute on the 1899 team, told the "Atlanta Constitution."

[Ralph] "In my day, if you were taken out of the game, you were considered yellow or that you just couldn't play well, unless of course you got something broken.

It was quite humiliating to be taken out of a game."

[Narrator] John Heisman, the trophy's namesake, was the Auburn University coach in 1899.

Coach Heisman campaigned for the legalization of the pass.

He believed passing would make the game more exciting and less brutal.

Heisman had never forgotten a day when his Oberlin team arrived at the train station after a rough game.

His players were mistaken as victims of a train wreck and were offered ambulances.

If you can get up, if you can pull yourself together, even if you're staggering, and there are accounts at the time of players staying in games, even as they're stumbling and staggering around the field, you don't want to leave.

You protest leaving, but of course, players could be incapacitated, hauled off.

Another comes in.

[Narrator] Scoring was different in 1899.

Both touchdowns and field goals were worth five points.

When you scored the goal, you just didn't cross a line.

Officially, you had to go and take the ball and touch it onto the ground.

So that was the term touchdown.

[Narrator] The football was also rounder and frequently changed shapes during the game.

It was a much thicker, rounder ball because you didn't need a streamlined ball to pass, 'cause nobody was passing and it was easier to kick, and the earliest formation was the T formation.

So the quarterback would be a quarter of the way back, your halfback was halfway back, and your fullback was all the way back.

You didn't have a guy under center taking the snap.

You know, he'd sit back and had the center to him and all he did was butt heads.

The quarterback took the snap, tossed it or handed it off, but he was not allowed to run the ball.

He was not a ball carrier.

He was more effective as a kind of field general, and then as a blocker.

This quarterback would be a bit offset and he would be way down in a crouched position and they would hike the ball between the legs to his hands, and then they would go into this whirling dervish of an offense.

What mattered then was to mass force, to set bodies in motion and then put the ball in their midst and to plow forward.

Five of them could get a head running start, build up that momentum, put the ball carrier behind it, and then blast down like a bulldozer, and then of course the resistance against it.

You go after people's legs, elbows, knees, feet were principal weapons of attack and defense in football at that time.

Use your elbow, use your knee, kick someone.

It did not behoove them to run the risk of running wide.

So they developed a flying wedge where they lock arms and they just go for the weakest spot on the opposing line, just mauling them.

They even had a thing called a flying wedge belt.

People would rivet suitcase handles onto each other and they would hold onto each other to keep the formation tight as they went down the field and trampled over people.

One of the ways that they were able to break the flying wedge is that they attach two strings on the outside, and when they came up to the line and the flying wedge came down like this, they were able to lift him over the top of the wedge and get the ball carrier on the other side.

My father went to the University of Alabama in 1893.

His senior year, he weighed 117 pounds.

He had straps on his uniform and on short yardage, the tackles would throw him over the line of scrimmage and he would frequently show people the scar he got during that maneuver.

They outlawed throwing people in 1913.

This massing players, of sending players into motion in the backfield and then putting the runner behind them, that continued to be the mainstay of football offense through the 1890s, so that's smaller than a flying wedge, but not all that much smaller.

We think of football as being something that is in the blood of Southerners.

I'm from Alabama.

I've been thinking about football since probably in utero.

So we think of football as being something that is genetically Southern.

It isn't.

It has become that way.

This is 30 years before radio, clearly before movies.

So you would've had theatrics, moonshine, and football, probably not in that order.

There's a football mania in the Southern states that I think is unmatched in the rest of the country, and Sewanee was an early part of that.

[Narrator] The University of the South, which was founded in 1858, was a small school in a town of around 1,300 people on a forested domain.

The student body was all male and consisted of 326 students divided into 122 undergraduates, 26 theology students, 17 law students, and 161 medical students.

Sewanee is a fabulous combination of ecclesiastic tradition, Southern tradition, literary tradition, liquid tradition.

You put all those together and it's amazing that there's anything factually based.

This was a poor area of the country coming out of defeat.

Anything like football of that era that people could do and do really, really well, and they did in a coordinated way especially, I think probably had magnified significance for folks, and then given the Scotch-Irish temperament of parts of the South, if it had a little violence in it, well that was even better.

The South, because of the way they lost that war, they put everything into football.

There was a recovery period for the South after the Civil War, but one thing we could do is we could beat 'em in football.

[Narrator] Sewanee's first game was on November seventh, 1891 against Vanderbilt.

It was played at Hardee Field and Vandy won 22-0.

Sewanee's next game was against Tennessee on November 21st in Chattanooga, and it resulted in Sewanee's first football victory, when they prevailed 26-0.

This was Tennessee's first ever football game.

In 1895, Sewanee joined the newly formed Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association, who stated mission was "for the development and purification "of college athletics throughout the South."

Football soon became something that brought together the entire Sewanee community, town and gown, black and white, male and female, young and old.

As the 1900 cap and gown yearbook noted, everybody goes to see the games.

The VC attends with the same regularity with which he goes to chapel and the grayed and small rub elbows along the sidelines.

The entire community turned out.

The college people, the town people, white, but also African Americans who lived in town.

Now, the spectators would've been segregated.

You would not have the mingling, either of the classes or the races, but these were events that brought the whole town together.

We also know from photographs that African American boys unable to afford the 25 cent admission price would climb trees just outside the fenced off area, and then watch the game from those perches aloft.

A game becomes a kind of allegory for a culture striving.

Football, as a sport of elegant violence, has become something of a secular religion, certainly in the American South.

I'm not sure that I would say that football became a religion at Sewanee because it seems that football for the students, at least, those who played as well as those who watched, was more important than religion.

Religion was daily chapel requirement, maybe attendance on Sunday, but football was what you talked about, what you bet on, what you read about, what became a part of your everyday life.

[Narrator] In 1899, Sewanee's football team consisted of 21 players, a new young coach, a student manager, and one or more African American trainers.

There were also several other players known as scrubs who practiced with the team, but did not play in games.

The average weight of the players was about 169 pounds.

The players were all students who played for the love of the game and without any type of athletic scholarships.

Vice Chancellor Wiggins insisted that the student athletes maintain respectable grades.

That was a risky thing to do for a place that was as small as Sewanee to insist on academic excellence for athletes.

It was an academic school, and then secondly a football school.

Sewanee followed the rules, but there were no rules that said people in the seminary and in the med school couldn't play football.

So the football team ranged in age from sort of upper teens to lower twenties.

You could go beyond four years of eligibility.

If you played undergraduate at one school and now you're in law school, you could still play college football.

So it was very common for people to play six, seven years of college football.

[Narrator] The 1899 season almost ended before it ever got started.

When scheduling a game, teams would negotiate a split of the gate receipts with tickets typically costing 25 cents.

Sewanee student manager Luke Lea could not agree with its biggest rival, Vanderbilt, on the gate receipt for that year's game.

People who cared about football in the South regarded the annual contest between Sewanee and Vanderbilt as the premiere athletic event in the collegiate season.

Every Thanksgiving, the Commodores and the Mountain Tigers would play in Nashville.

This was a huge event.

It brought many thousands of people to Nashville, and it was also Sewanee's biggest payday.

Sewanee usually took home half the gate receipts, which funded its entire athletic budget, but Lea could not negotiate a game with Vanderbilt.

There was tension probably having to do with money and gate receipts, what proportion Sewanee would receive.

Lea had to look everywhere and elsewhere for revenue that year.

[Narrator] The solution Luke Lea developed would forever cement Sewanee's place in the history of football.

He was a 20 year old student and he put together a plan that just turned out to be a triumph.

One of the most colorful characters in the whole band of it was Luke Lea, who was a promoter.

I think he was a promoter when he was still wearing diapers.

Luke Lea is one of the most fascinating characters I have run across in covering college football for 42 years.

He's one of those people who not only have a vision, but have the skill set and the determination and the persistence to pull it off.

Luke Lea has left a thumbprint not only on Tennessee, but on the fiction of Tennessee.

If you invented him, you'd probably edit some of the parts out 'cause it would seem improbable.

Lea received his collegiate degree, his Bachelor of Arts, in 1898.

So he had already graduated from what was effectively the college at that time, but he continued as Sewanee in 1899 as a graduate student, and he did that not because he wished to pursue additional studies.

He did that because he wanted to do something with the football team.

He was not a player.

He was the athletic director because there was no such position there.

The manager at figure at that time was really the critical figure in collegiate football.

They were the ones who organized the schedules.

They were the ones who arranged for the finances of these teams because colleges themselves did not contribute any money directly to football programs.

The fact that we didn't play Vanderbilt led Luke Lea to be creative in how he was gonna make up the receipts that we were gonna lose by not playing a rival.

[Narrator] Lea's vision and ambition are evident in the extraordinary, indeed, some would say preposterous schedule he crafted in 1899.

His efforts resulted in a grueling schedule of 12 games in a six week period, which not only was an unusually high number of games in the South at that time, but for the first time required a team to travel all over the South.

As part of the schedule, Lea arranged for the team to play five games in six days on the road and travel 2,500 miles by train.

(sobering music) In 1898, Sewanee had beaten Texas 5-0 in Austin.

Texas asked for a rematch.

The great problem that the University of Texas had was finding teams to play it because it was so far off that nobody could afford to go there.

[Narrator] To entice Sewanee to travel all the way to Austin again, the University of Texas guaranteed Sewanee $750, $22,000 plus in today's dollars.

And that was a lot of money, and really that was enough to pay for much of the season.

So that's why Lea wanted to get to Texas, but it's terribly expensive to go all the way to Austin.

He had to offset the cost of travel by playing other games and generating gate receipts at those other stops on the way back.

So that's why he arranged for the gangs with Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU, and Mississippi on the way back, so that that whole $750 wouldn't be eaten up by the cost of going and returning, and the team would end up in the black.

It's wonderfully complex and adds yet another layer to the story that Lea was trying to fund the athletic budget by taking everybody west.

I would've loved to have been in that room when he brought up the idea.

Hey, here's a great idea that's gonna help generate some revenue.

We're gonna travel around throughout the South in six days and play five games.

I mean, it's unheard of.

Everything he did in his life was a bit of an adventure, and I think this football team was a massive undertaking.

He's not thinking about the history books.

He's thinking about maintaining the program at Sewanee.

He knew what kind of team Sewanee had.

He knew what kind of togetherness they had, because obviously he wasn't gonna be the one out on that field.

Those other guys were gonna be out there.

Mr. Lea made absolutely every arrangement.

He made the arrangement for lodging and eating and any other logistic that had to be taken care of.

He did it all.

Just think of the logistics of how they're gonna make it work.

They had to eat, they had to sleep.

They had to make sure the train was on time.

They had to get to the games on time.

You'll be hiring 40 people to do that nowadays.

People who want to make a mark, people who want to bend events in the direction that they think they should go in change history.

Luke Lea did that.

Great figures throughout history large and small have altered the reality around them.

To some extent that's the definition of power and ambition.

[Narrator] Anyone looking at Sewanee's 1899 schedule, given the grueling nature of football at the time, would have concluded that this season bordered on the impossible, if not the ridiculous.

A 12 game schedule in 1899 in the South was highly unusual.

There's a college every 10 miles in the Northeast.

A team like Princeton or Yale, their travel expenses were not that great, and they could play two and sometimes three games a week and run up a schedule of 15 or 16 games a year, which was routine.

In the South, however, there wasn't a team remotely close to Sewanee or to Chapel Hill or to Athens, Georgia.

The travel costs were excessive.

So playing four games was expensive to play.

As many as they played in 1899 was very expensive.

Teams now will play their season, say a 12 game season, in three months.

Sewanee played their 12 game season in a month and a half, and they played nine games on the road.

Luke Lea didn't just put this thing together to go out and play teams he knew it could beat.

He went out to play the big boys.

They were going to play Texas.

They were going to play Texas A&M.

Tulane was a power back then.

I mean, they were playing the big schools of the day.

His real goal was to play a schedule that encompassed teams from Texas to North Carolina, so that he could then claim that Sewanee was the champion of the South, 'cause they played all across the region.

[Narrator] Lea had set the stage for the most challenging schedule in college football history, but now it was up to the players, coach, and trainers to execute.

Just who were the men that Lea thought could achieve the impossible?

The coach of the Sewanee team in 1899 was Herman Milton Billy Suter, a young man who had played football at Washington and Jefferson, Penn State, and Princeton.

Suter was smart and brought a number of ideas from Princeton to Sewanee.

The football club had many applicants for that coaching position and Suter was recommended, of course, as a fine man and a fine athlete.

He took what was already a very good team in 1898 with many of them returning the following year and made them even better by teaching them new tactics, new ways of organizing and running the program.

[Narrator] According to sportswriter Grantland Rice, "Coach Suter was a natural leader, yet he was one of "the strictest disciplinarians I have ever known."

A substitute on the 1899 team, Dan Hull told Arthur B. Chitty in 1954.

[Dan] Herman Suter was a great man for strategy, the best I've seen then or since.

[Narrator] One man, who as a 14 year old saw the 1899 team play, later wrote, "Spunky little Herman Suter.

"The word quit was not in his lexicon."

[Narrator] The 11 starters on the team were the following.

Henry G Ditty Seibels.

Henry Seibels was from Montgomery, Alabama and played half back.

He was called by his childhood nickname, Ditty.

My grandfather was a smash player.

In other words, he hit anything that was in front of him and tried to run him over, never quitting 'cause he could not be defeated.

Wasn't a big man.

I mean, I think he was about 5'10", but he was determined.

[Frances] Everybody called him a bulldog.

I mean, what he wanted to do, he wanted to do in business, in football and everything, and I think he just drove that team to victory by his determination.

I don't think he ever thought there was anything he couldn't do.

He returned kickoffs.

He returned punts.

He was absolutely fearless.

[Narrator] An example of his determination came in a prior season.

He had scored a touchdown on a kickoff return.

It was called back due to a penalty on one of the other players, and as it was being called back, supposedly Papa said, don't worry, we'll just do it again, and on the ensuing kickoff, he ran it back again for a touchdown.

[Narrator] Ormond Simkins was from Texas and was class valedictorian.

He was a punter, field goal kicker, and running back for the team.

He was also known as a bruising tackler on defense.

He sometimes wore leg braces after the game, which were often injured due to the punishment of such brutal sport.

Ormond Simkins as the fullback was the one who was sent on these buck plays straight ahead through the line using his own force and the force of his blockers.

He hoped to break through the initial resistance and then to scamper on for a touchdown, which he frequently did.

Simkins was a great football player and was known for playing through pain.

[Narrator] Billy Suter later said.

[Billy] "Simkins was one of the greatest football players I ever saw, a fine kicker, a fine ball carrier, and the most terrific tackle and blocker I've ever seen.

After 45 years, I still haven't seen a better all around back than Simkins.

I've seen no one who tackled as fiercely."

Simkins was more of a power runner.

Seibels probably had more speed.

They were both leaders.

If you go by eras, they would have to be one of the great backfield tandems in the history of college football.

[Narrator] William Blackburn Warbler Wilson.

[Larry] Quarterback Warbler Wilson was just as outstanding, made big plays, and was a team captain the next year.

He had gone to South Carolina and had played football there, and he was studying law in his father's law office.

Luke Lea talked him into coming to Sewanee to go to school and to play for them.

[Narrator] Ringland Rex Kilpatrick from Bridgeport, Alabama.

Years later, a member of the 1899 team wrote.

[Herbert] "R.F.

Kilpatrick was one of the greatest halfbacks of the times in which he played and did much to earn the great name of the 1899 team."

[Larry] In my opinion, you could say that Sewanee's backfield in 1899 was the South's equivalent of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.

[Narrator] William Wild Bill Claiborne, right guard from Virginia.

The pictures of the 1899 team, if you look, I think on the third or fourth row back, you'll see Wild Bill Claiborne, and he's got a pretty wild look about him.

Claiborne did have a bad eye that might have happened in a game, but we don't, apparently we don't know.

He's famous for lining up and flipping up the eye patch and goggling his eye around and saying, this is what happened to me in the last game, flipping it back down and letting his opponent worry about that.

[Narrator] One story about Claiborne was that he was a rough player who didn't hesitate to employ tactics designed to frighten or to distress his opponents.

He had one custom of reaching across the line as the two teams were lining up and with his left hand pinching the opposing center as he stooped to get over the ball.

When Claiborne was questioned as to whether he considered such tactics fair, he had a standard reply.

"Hell, this is no parlor game!"

John W Deacon Jones, left tackle.

Deacon Jones was from Marshall, Texas and earned a BA degree from Roanoke College in Virginia before enrolling as a theological student at Sewanee.

He played left tackle and was known for his swearing ability.

Henry Sheridan Keyes, left guard from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hugh Miller Thompson Bunny Pearce, right end.

Pearce, from Jackson, Mississippi, was around 5'3" and weighed about 125 pounds.

Nevertheless, it was said of him, "I have seen games all over America, but never have I seen "a player with the guts of Bunny Pearce, "the atom who's all courage."

In 1944, Grantland Rice interviewed Coach Suter about the 1899 team.

Suter told him.

[Billy] "Bunny Pierce was a fine end.

He weighed 114 pounds and 108 pounds of that weight is brains and heart.

What else counts?"

[Narrator] William Henry Poole, center from Glendon, Maryland.

Ditty Seibels later wrote that Poole was.

[Ditty] The best center among the Southern football teams.

[Narrator] Bartlett et Ultimus The Caboose Sims, left end and sometimes kicked extra points, from Bryan, Texas.

Richard Elliot Bolling, right tackle from Edna, Texas.

Bolling played football as a teammate of Douglas McArthur on an undefeated 1896 team at West Texas Military Academy.

Ditty Seibels said Pat Bolling was.

[Ditty] "A tough Texan and a fierce tackler, a good defensive player."

The substitutes that year were Ralph P. Black.

He was mostly in on the right side of the line.

He subbed for Bunny Pearce.

It was in the Auburn game where he went in to start the second half, and then the final game, the North Carolina game, he started that game.

Preston Smith Brooks Jr. Harris G. Cope, Albert T. Davidson, Andrew C. Evins, Charles Quintard Quint Gray, Daniel B.

Hull, Joseph Lee Kirby-Smith, Landon R. Mason, and Floy H. Parker.

There are one or more individuals who are not shown in the team photo and who had as much to do with the success of the team as anyone.

They were the unsung heroes who played an integral role on the team.

The 1899 team had a rub down man.

This was an African American by the name of Cal Burrows, and as the players had aches and pains, literally Cal would rub them down.

Two or more African American men did the heavy lifting for the team.

They'd gathered and moved the equipment.

They did all of the work that enabled the players themselves to be players.

[Narrator] Virtually nothing is known about either of them, and only one photograph of them has been found.

The second African American trainer's name has vanished from history.

[Woody] We know a lot about virtually every play that the Sewanee team executed throughout the season, but we don't know much about these rubbers except that they were there and that the players regarded their services as vital.

They did really the hard labor that enabled these players to be the iron men that they were.

[Narrator] When Suter arrived on campus in 1899, he provided several comments to the student newspaper.

[Billy] Some of the men who have reported for practice do not understand the game, never seen a football in fact, but I'm here for the purpose of instructing those men and all the rudiments of the game, provided they show a willingness to learn and a promptness in reporting to these practices, which are of great importance.

Coaches were not on the sidelines during the game.

They had to be in the stands.

It gives you an idea of how well prepared these teams had to be to be able to execute anything and how much the coaches relied on the leaders of those teams to be able to get the right play called.

The game also moved very fast.

The captain of the team would use numbered codes for plays.

The minute the ball's down, take formation.

The code's announced, the next play.

So it's boom, boom, boom, boom at a very fast pace.

You didn't have huddles.

Everything was sort of a continuous exhaustion game.

It was a hurry up, no huddle back in 1899.

So they're back at the line of scrimmage, and of course they're gouging each other for this five yard mark in three plays.

So it was like a short yardage goal line situation almost every snap, and then by the way, when you turn the ball over on downs, now you're on the other side of the ball playing defense.

I can't even fathom what the mental challenge would've been in terms of trying to play both sides of the ball with no break.

[Narrator] A scrub on the 1899 team, Herbert Smith, later recalled.

[Herbert] Speed was very important, and giving the signals while the team was lining up made the play much faster than it is today.

Our aim was to run 13 plays a minute in signal practice, and the 1899 team could do that.

It took good wind to go that fast.

It really wasn't a game for large people.

It was a game for smaller, quicker athletic guys who could run and take advantage of the speed and who could stand up under the hot weather.

Sewanee had a secret advantage.

School started in the spring and let out in the fall.

That team was able to practice for a number of weeks in the summer before other schools were convening.

Luke Lea had to have been up there in May and June and July and recognize that this was a special group of people that they can absolutely take on this undertaking and not only survive it, but thrive in it.

You had this group of young men who were very loyal to each other.

They were up here in isolation.

Each understood what the other was going to do.

That was their opportunity to do something as a group where they love to play and compete and try to be the best that they could be.

This Sewanee team, I think is a great testament and example of the culture and the attitude that that era kind of represented.

[Narrator] Sewanee began their season on the road in Atlanta, against Georgia on Saturday, October 21st, defeating the Bulldogs 12-0.

This photograph shows Ormond Simkins kicking a field goal after he had himself scored a touchdown.

Note the player lying on the ground, who would've been holding the ball for Simkins to kick.

In football, there's three phases.

There's offense, there's defense, and there's kicking.

The kicking game is everything.

The strategy of the game at that time was field position.

The scoring was much, much lower, and so if you were scored upon you had the option to give the ball back to the other team, and that was very, very common because you wanted to pin the other team deep in its own end, force them to punt and be able to take advantage of good field position.

The forward pass didn't exist at that time.

So the most effective way of gaining long yardage, other than bursting through the line with an effective run, was to punt it and hope for a muff, and muffs happened frequently.

Teams often punted on first down in order to send the ball flying down the field, catch your opponent by surprise, and then hope that they would fumble the ball, and then you could land on it and you would have moved the ball 20, 40, 60 yards down the field.

Sewanee had two very talented punters, Ditty Seibels and Ormond Simkins.

Depending on where you scored the touchdown from and what side of the field, they would bring the ball out 10 yards and you would put the ball there and you would have a player who would lay on his stomach, holding the football for a kicker and then on the goal line, the defense would come, and as soon as the kicker made his way towards the ball, then the defense would kinda run and try to block the kick.

Well being 10 yards away, they never did.

There was a thing that's known as drop kicking.

You can actually drop the ball and have it bounce off the turf and then kick it.

[Narrator] Dan Hull recalled.

[Dan] Our coach was the originator of the quick kick.

It had never been used in the South before our team sprung it.

Repeatedly, we surprised our opponents with it.

It was our secret weapon.

(jaunty music) [Narrator] Two days later in Atlanta on Monday, October 23rd, Sewanee handled Georgia Tech 32-0.

Ditty Seibels scored four of the team's six touchdowns, and he had one 75 yard scoring run called back because of a penalty.

The following Saturday, October 28th, Sewanee hosted Tennessee at home and was again victorious 46-0.

A scrub on the team noted.

[Scrub] The Tennessee game was played in a heavy rain.

One play ended in a puddle and a Sewanee tackle's head was forced under the water.

His legs were free and he did a lot of kicking before the players got off of him.

He spit mud for a day or two.

[Narrator] Sewanee remained at home to play Southwestern Presbyterian, now known as Rhodes College.

The game on Friday, November third resulted in a resounding Sewanee victory, 54-0.

Three days later, it was time for the most daunting road trip in college football history.

Lea's schedule called for the team to depart Sewanee on Monday, November sixth, and travel to Austin, Texas for a game on Thursday, November ninth.

Then the team would play four more games in five days, traveling to Houston, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis, with only one day of rest.

(train whistle bellowing) For many years, the train from Sewanee to Cowan was effectively referred to as the Mountain Goat.

It earned its name due to the climb onto the Cumberland plateau from Cowan, which at the time was the steepest slope in the world for any railroad line.

You could think about the wear and tear.

Forget about the game, just the wear and tear of having to ride on a train that many days.

That trip was 2,500 miles.

You ate and stayed on the train.

That's a grueling trip.

The physical nature of getting from point A at point B and then the physical nature, what a person would have to endure, I think is the ultimate in this achievement.

It was done without a great deal of fanfare, and it wasn't like we were looking at it today as being just almost out of the question.

It was just like, well, we're gonna do this.

This will be good for us publicity wise, promotion wise, and financially.

If you read the student newspapers at the time and the correspondence, nobody mentioned anything about it.

What you do read was that faculty were complaining that the students were going to miss so much class.

The football players and Lea all said, no, no, no, this will be good for the players.

They'll go out.

They'll be refreshed, they'll come back.

They'll be more interested in their studies rather than less.

[Narrator] Shortly before the team was set to depart, the student newspaper addressed some of the naysayers.

"Some people of that unsavory class known as croakers "delight in compiling statistics about the number "of recitations the team will miss in telling how disastrous "to all system and organization and classwork "a 10 days' absence from the mountain must be, "in counting up the number of students we will thereby lose "because their dear mamas will not send them to a school "where discipline is so lax and holidays given "for such tripling foolishness as football."

[Woody] They took with them two barrels of water from special springs here at Sewanee.

It's called Tremlett Springs.

It still flows here.

It's one of the natural springs on top of the mountain.

Luke Lea amazes you with his attention to detail.

It sounds like a small thing, but it's not that he would take the local water with them on a trip like this because the sanitation facilities and the ability to get clean water was not a given in 1899 when you went on the road.

[Woody] The Sewanee players regarded themselves as the mountain men and that the mountain itself conveyed to them some kind of special quality and that that water had something to do with it.

[Narrator] The team had an exhilarating sendoff when many of the student body, faculty, and townspeople cheered them as they embarked on the Mountain Goat to start their momentous journey.

The crowd gave them a resounding cheer as they pulled out.

Rah rah ree varsity!

Hey-up, hey-up, Sewanee!

Sewanee rah, Sewanee rah!

Sewanee Tigers, siss boom ah!

The student newspaper recorded, "this precious cargo of football, grit, and muscle "was shipped via the N.C. & St. L. Railway "on the afternoon of November sixth.

"They and two barrels of Tremlett springwater "were stored away in a special sleeper "that was waiting for them in Cowan."

This sleeper served a team as a lodging house during the whole trip.

The train trip got off to an in auspicious beginning that threatened to derail the team before it even played Texas.

After they departed, Lea discovered that they had left all the cleats at the train station.

According to a 1948 letter from Arthur B. Chitty about the trip, the story of how manager Luke Lea, without even letting the team know it was missing, managed to have the equipment catch up with them at the University of Texas in Austin is a saga in itself.

Luke Lea managed to get the equipment to Austin, Texas simply by using the utmost ingenuity.

When he reached Nashville, he sent a dispatch back to Sewanee, care of the stationmaster, instructing that the equipment should be put on the next train to go via express.

Checking the schedule and railroad timetables with which he had been furnished, he then wired an alumnus in Nashville to meet the train, transfer the equipment across town in the middle of the night and put it on another train instead of waiting until the next day.

The equipment finally arrives shortly after the team did in Austin.

He didn't say a word to anybody on the team, and I don't think anybody ever was aware that there was a close call about that.

[Narrator] The first game of the road trip was played on Thursday, November ninth against Texas in Austin.

(crowd cheering) On the opening drive, Texas went 80 yards to Sewanee's 15 yard line.

At that point, Sewanee alumnus Pop Atkins waved a fist full of money saying Texas would not score in the game.

He had many takers, and Atkins came very close to losing the bet.

These hefty Texas boys really didn't like all of that running, but the Sewanee players were smaller, fleeter, nimbler, in better condition.

They ran the Texas boys to death.

An eyewitness to the game, 14 year old James N. Young, recalled years later, "I will remember Simkins' marvelous punting, "his long, beautiful spirals and his line plunging, "and the marvelous teamwork of the Sewanee players, "who acted as though they had played "the game for many years together."

Luke Lea sent a telegram to Sewanee after the game, which read.

[Luke] "To "Sewanee Purple:" Sewanee, 12; Texas, nothing.

Seibels and Simkins and all the men played great ball.

Sewanee's superb defense on her third yard line and first down.

Game played in Texas territory.

Men in good fix."

[Narrator] Lea's telegram, however, omitted a crucial event in the first half of the game.

Ditty Seibels sustained a laceration over his eye.

If you know anything about facial wounds, they bleed extensively.

His side of his head was gashed open in that game, but he wouldn't come out of the game.

They put a spackling compound over his gashed wound, which is plaster, to stop the bleeding, so he could play Texas A&M the next day.

[Narrator] "The Austin Daily Statesman" reported, "the most painful one was the injury sustained "by captain Seibels of the Sewanee team, who had his head "badly cut and he bled like a hog.

"He would not quit the game, however, "continuing to play to such good advantage that he secured "the credit of both touchdowns.

"He came out of the game in "a rather bloody condition, however."

Years later, Seibels wrote.

[Ditty] "I suffered a fractured rib and a bad gash above my eye and still bear evidence of the scar."

They would do anything to continue to play football, and I think there was a real pride about these players continuing to deal with injuries.

It was just a very, very different time and a different place.

The injuries were gonna be severe because they didn't have the protective gear that we have now.

[Narrator] Herbert Smith recalled years later.

[Herbert] We wore very little padding with no headgear.

Most of the players used a small patch of padding on their kneecap and a small patch on the hip joint.

Above the waist, the regular uniform consisted of a sweat shirt and a jersey.

You didn't have face masks early on.

The badge of courage of a good blocker was that he, his whole side of his face was always roughed up because it meant that he was sticking his face in there, a good blocker.

Of course, a lot of 'em didn't have any teeth, and that was kind of a, I guess, a badge of courage as well.

One of the first pieces of equipment commercially made and distributed was known as a Morrill nose guard, and it was a black rubbery type material that you'd wear over your nose and you'd hold it in with your teeth, and then it had a strap that went around your forehead.

You didn't have helmets until the mid 1890s.

They were very flimsy.

Some were just like little straps and they offered very little protection.

Largely, players just let their hair grow long.

Before they had head gears, they would grow their hair long so they'd give them a little more padding.

They call that a chrysanthemum of hair, which essentially was some form of padding for those shots that might be exchanged between head gears or the raw skull to a leather helmet, or maybe bone to bone.

[Robert] Due to the rules that they had, they were vulnerable to injuries throughout the body, chest, abdomen, and lower extremity.

There were catastrophic injuries to the head and neck.

There were guys with hurt knees and gashes on their head and today's player, he's quickly getting himself checked out, or the trainers are getting him out because he doesn't look like he can continue on.

These players didn't have that option.

These players had to fight through that.

The expectation was, if it wasn't a broken leg or a broken arm or something that kept you from playing, if all we're talking about is pain, if all we're talking about is blood, you were gonna find a way to stay in the game and find a way to patch it up.

My grandfather said in one of his letters that the team's motto was no body hurt.

Not just nobody, but no body hurt.

The moment that victory was accomplished, the news was telegraphed back to Sewanee.

(chapel bells ringing) Now, the way you summon students in Sewanee in those days, and in fact for much of the next century was to ring the chapel bell or to ring what was called the convocation bell.

[Narrator] The student newspaper reported, "that evening, the University of Texas German Club "invited the boys to a dance.

"They went of course, but could only stay long enough "to discover how much they wished they could stay longer."

Black later reminisced in a letter to Ditty Seibels.

[Ralph] "The Sewanee folks and us so happy and hilarious over our victory.

The fine dance, beautiful Texas gals, the curfew at 10, off to Houston in our tourist sleeper, the care to drink only out of our Tremlett springwater barrel."

[Narrator] After an all night train ride, Sewanee faced Texas A&M in Houston on Friday, November 10th.

Despite the gash in his head from the Texas game, Ditty Seibels played the whole game with plaster of Paris over the cut.

The "Bryan Morning Eagle" reported, "a young man in a football sweater "sent a telegram this morning.

"His eye was closed by a lump of no mean proportions.

"A bystander wrote it for him.

"It was to a girl and read, 'nobody hurt.'"

At one point in the match, the A&M runner broke through and was on his way to score when Simkins ran him down with a crushing tackle.

Sewanee prevailed by a score of 10-0, and the team then rode all night to New Orleans.

They were in a train traveling.

So there wasn't a lot of practice time in between these contests.

They had to really get their act together before the season ever started.

When they'd stopped to switch tracks, they would sometimes get out and practice plays on the side of the tracks there if they had an open space just to get their legs moving and stretch a little bit.

That's probably the most unique aspect of this story is what these men went through to play these games.

I mean, it's challenging to play after six days off to play this sport.

These guys are playing almost every day and dealing with travel.

It's unthinkable to imagine what they went through, what their bodies went through, and how they managed to survive it and to be as good as they were.

While all this is going on, they're having to study.

They're having to work at their academics.

When they came back from that glorious trip, they still had to come back to class and they had to take exams.

[Narrator] The third game on the road saw Sewanee in New Orleans to face Tulane on Saturday, November 11th.

Lea sent the following telegram to Vice Chancellor Wiggins after the game.

[Luke] "Sewanee 23, Tulane nothing.

Gray, Kilpatrick, Simpkins, Bolling, Jones, and Wilson played best game.

Men showed better physical condition than Tulane.

All well."

[Narrator] The Tulane newspaper reported on their loss by observing.

"Then too, we must remember that the Sewanee boys "have the advantage of being strengthened by "the exhilarating mountain air that blows around "their university, and as the Sewanee students have rights "in their university and have dormitories "instead of living at home and attending colleges "as day scholars, there is to be a great college spirit "fostered in the hearts of the Sewanee students."

After the game, the team went to dinner and a play.

I know they spent one night in New Orleans, but I think Luke would not let them go out on the town.

They had to attend a play.

One of the characters was dressed in purple and it aroused the team so much 'cause that was their team colors, they stood up and gave the Sewanee cheer and the whole audience went kind of nuts.

The Sewanee cheer went, rip them up, tear 'em up, leave 'em in the lurch.

Down with the heathens, up with the church.

Yay, Sewanee's right.

[Narrator] Following the Tulane game, the team had a day of rest.

They took Sunday off, 'cause as you know, this was an Episcopal school and they had to go to church.

[Narrator] Then they traveled to Baton Rouge on Monday, November 13.

LSU had a grass field which Sewanee players considered a real luxury.

The "Sewanee Purple" reported, "our boys, who practiced every afternoon on Hardee Park "with rocks for a gridiron nearly went to sleep on "that nice soft field every time they were tackled."

Sewanee prevailed by a score of 34-0.

The LSU newspaper reported on their loss to Sewanee by noting, "the features of the game were the beautiful interference "and teamwork of Sewanee and the fine work of her backs, "Hull, Kilpatrick, and Wilson."

It was the newspapers in New Orleans and in Memphis that picked up on this and saw the news value in it.

News traveled fast because of the telegraph.

It wasn't just so when they got back to Sewanee that people knew what had happened.

They knew all along the way, what was beginning to happen as we defeated team after team.

You do have to think about what they would feel like after a game.

I mean, the physical beating you would take, and then you gotta play the next day, plus you gotta get there and you gotta travel by train to get where you're going.

Think about playing one football game, where you are completely exhausted, you get in a tub of ice, you get the kinks worked out and you're ready to go again on Saturday.

Try playing five games in six days.

[Narrator] One reason the Sewanee players were able to play at all were the African American rubdown men who worked tirelessly to help the boys recover from each game.

The quarterback Warbler Wilson later recounted the contribution of these rubdown men.

[Warbler] "There are no little stories about team members being rubbed on the train between games.

This was regular routine.

We had two big, husky colored men as rubbers, and they both were good.

They rubbed those who needed it every night on the trip after the first game, but after the game, it was impossible for me to sleep, and one of these Negro rubbers would rub me and the others in the same situation until you went to sleep.

This would often have to be repeated during the night.

[Narrator] That wasn't the only contribution these gentlemen made to the team.

[Woody] They're hauling those barrels of water.

We may think that having Tremlett Springs water is a great thing, but that's because we're not carrying that water.

We're not having to do the laundry, wash the uniforms.

We're not having to carry all the suitcases and the equipment.

They are there and doing that visible, but to us invisible labor that enabled these men to be made seemingly of iron.

The fact that they were two African Americans who served as trainers of the team and neither are broadly celebrated or recognized in terms of the achievement and glory of that team is analogous to the American story as a whole, but the fact that we're talking about it now as an integral part of this story is a bright beacon for where we need to be going together in the years ahead.

[Narrator] On Tuesday, November 14th, Sewanee played Ole Miss in Memphis for the final game of the road trip.

The Ole Miss team was known as the longhaired knights of the oval from Oxford.

The Mississippi players objected that Sewanee had these meager little leather helmets because to their mind, honor dictated that you play with long hair and not a helmet, and so there was a big disagreement at the beginning of the game about whether they would play or not, 'cause Sewanee was cheating by wearing these little helmets.

[Narrator] The "Commercial Appeal" reported on the game and noted, "as the bandaged boys in purple took their positions, "Coach Suter applied fresh plaster over the cut "which Seibels received in the Texas game.

"The sight of the Sewanee men as they stood ready "for the referee's whistle was enough "to create a wholesome respect for them.

"Sewanee was putting forth a fierce attack, "and with coach Suter yelling for them to 'tear 'em up.'"

The coach of the team was not supposed to be giving instructions out to the players on the field.

Suter apparently was known for making his suggestions known out to the players on the field, which drew some complaints.

[Narrator] It is obvious from this account that by this time the Sewanee players were beaten up, heavily bandaged, and bone weary.

Despite their wounded condition, however, they prevailed over Ole Miss 12-0.

The team returned to the mountain on Wednesday, November 15th, after winning all five games by a combined score of 91-0.

The 1899 road trip was an incredible adventure riding across the country, trying to sleep some, looking out the windows, some of them going to places they had never seen before.

It had to be exciting.

It had to be one of the greatest adventures of college students of that generation as they went from school to school to school and eventually came back to Sewanee bearing the laurels of victory.

I can't imagine the accomplishment that those players felt when they came back onto the Sewanee campus after that accomplishment of not only a very successful trip, but looking back at what they had done in a week's time.

It would never be done ever again.

When the team returned from the road trip, -they were greeted as heroes.

-(crowd cheering) They were greeted as already legendary figures.

The young men picked up at the Sewanee Depot from the Mountain Goat after it had chugged up the mountain, put on carts and then paraded up University Avenue to the main campus, cheered the entire way, fireworks going off, the vice chancellor, the president of the university riding in the front car, then afterward these enormous bonfires that illuminated the central campus.

It tells us something about the importance of college football here and growing at other campuses in the South, but also the way in which it brought almost the entire community together here.

[Male] It's certainly the greatest, if not the single most impressive road trip a team has ever been on.

They've got a record nobody'll ever top.

Nobody'll ever top it.

[Narrator] A poster created about the team stated that Sewanee played five games in six days, and on the seventh day, they rested.

While the Biblical reference to resting on the seventh day is poetic, it is far from accurate.

Yeah, the whole moniker, the Sewanee team won five games in six days, and on the seventh they rested.

Actually they didn't.

These poor guys had to go play three more games.

[Narrator] Game 10 took place on Monday, November 20th at Hardee Field where Sewanee manhandled Cumberland 71-0.

Bart Sims scored 11 extra points during the game, which is still a Sewanee school record.

Vice Chancellor Wiggins, who was a big fan of football, wrote a letter on November 28th, 1899, about the season to that point.

[Benjamin] "Our football team has had a most wonderfully successful season from every point of view, and the result is that today they have piled up 311 points to opponents' nothing.

We have two heavy games to play this week and our season ends."

[Narrator] Sewanee had played 10 games in five weeks.

This grueling schedule had left many players with injuries, which required Coach Suter to move players around.

Incredibly all of the players were still able to play.

There's not been enough made about Sewanee playing possibly the two finest teams in the South in three days.

[Narrator] On the morning of Thursday, November 30th, the team traveled to Montgomery to play Auburn.

[Woody] The game with Auburn was a Thanksgiving Day game.

[Male] And that's when John Heisman was the coach.

John Heisman was supremely confident, sometimes bordering on arrogant man, and everybody understood that.

He built programs at Clemson, built a program at Auburn, built a program at Georgia Tech, and we all remember Georgia Tech beating Cumberland only 222-0.

At half time it was 146-0, and John Heisman said, you know, you're gonna have to play harder in the second half, 'cause you just can't trust those guys from Cumberland.

[Narrator] A dispute before the game was an omen of things to follow that day.

In 1944, Black told a reporter for the "Atlanta Constitution" about the division of receipts at the Auburn game in Montgomery.

[Ralph] "Manager Lea called for a division of the receipts.

The Auburn manager preferred to delay the payoff.

After some argument, manager Lea pulled a pistol and announced immediate division of receipts.

Gun in hand, he counted out dollar for dollar."

The field didn't have a grandstand.

It was just a field marked off for the game.

So the crowd had pushed up against the outer boundary of the field and as the game progressed, people became so worked up and excited that they edged onto the field.

Suter insisted that Auburn was actually using more than 11 players because as the players involved in the game mingled with the crowd, you couldn't tell who was in or who was out of the game.

So it was something of a free for all.

There was fighting in the crowd.

At one point, guns were actually drawn when some of the Sewanee people challenged the Auburn people.

It was near almost a riot, kind of a ballroom brawl.

[Narrator] Warbler Wilson wrote later.

[Warbler] "The Auburn substitutes were placed along the sidelines and kept coming into the interference.

We were playing outside the city limits, no police protection, and the large crowd kept closing in when the game was stopped by the referee Woods because the teams didn't have 100 feet square space to play in."

[Narrator] Luke Lea in a letter to Ditty Seibels in 1943 said about the Auburn game.

[Luke] "Phelan Beals saved my life that day.

I acted as lineman in the second half, and an Auburn supporter was about to hit me over the head with the other lineman's stick when Phelan drew his gun.

Thereupon there was the largest number of guns I ever saw drawn until I was in the Meuse-Argonne in World War I."

Heisman used some tactics that the Sewanee players and coaches felt were illegal that were not in line with the rules of the game.

One thing he did that seemed to cause havoc for the Sewanee defense, particularly defensive ends, they would run a sweep and they would lock arms.

They were a sweep within themselves coming, running around there, four people locking arms.

Their defensive ends got killed.

What Suter did was to tell his ends when they saw him coming to run right at him as fast they could and throw their feet right into the whole pile to clog it up where the defensive backs, the linebackers could make the tackle.

The Auburn players had leather handles, so loops sewn onto their pants so that the ball carrier could grasp the handle and then allow the other players to pull him forward, giving them an extra advantage.

Suter and Lea demanded that the loops were cut off and the officials did.

They came out with scissors, cut them off, which outraged the Auburn players and all the fans who were there.

They considered that game to be the roughest game they played all year.

[Narrator] This was a hard fought game, and Auburn was the first team to score on Sewanee this season.

At halftime, the score was Sewanee 11, Auburn 10.

My uncle Emmett came down to my grandfather at halftime and said, Ditty, we bet the house on the game.

You've got to do something.

We'll lose the house.

We have to kick your mother out.

Without a doubt, one had his hands full, and it appears that Auburn had the upper hand throughout the game.

They out did Sewanee, and as they were able to hurry up the game and they came back, they came back, they came back.

The sun going down was instrumental and arguments during the game that slowed down the progress of the game as the sun inevitably went down.

They'd make a grievance as to how things were gonna wind down when it, and it got too dark to see, to play.

Well, the second half only lasted 14 minutes.

The referee called the game on darkness.

[Narrator] The final score was Sewanee 11, Auburn 10.

By the end of the game, Auburn had rushed for 323 yards to Sewanee's 82.

Heisman and the crowd were outraged when the game was called.

I think all great football teams need a lot of luck, and that was the day they were luckiest.

They took the win and left town quick as they could and headed to Atlanta.

[Narrator] On December 13th, 1899, Squire Brown wrote in the "Sporting News," "it would be an extremely difficult proposition to determine "which was the hardest fight, the Auburn-Sewanee "football game here on Thanksgiving Day "or the aftermath of that battle, "an aftermath that has been raging ever since."

Heisman always believed that they should have been declared the winners of the game.

[Narrator] Coach Heisman threw fuel on the fire of controversy when he wrote the "Birmingham Age Herald" newspaper, which published his letter on December fourth, 1899.

Heisman's long letter to the editor stated in part, "I think the work of both officials was, by all odds, "the worst I ever saw, and I don't mind "proclaiming it from the housetops."

Interestingly, umpire Taylor responded to Heisman's letter with his own letter to the newspaper where he said, "this professional coach, would-be actor of character parts, "to quote his own words to me, expert gambler "in football futures, and would-be professor of elcoution "and oratory considers the sporting world out of joint, "and that he like Hamlet, is born to set it right.

"To those who know Mr. Heisman, his loud mouth utterances "have little weight and his assertion that he was dragged "into this discussion can only provoke a smile."

In 1935, Grantland Rice interviewed Suter and Heisman.

They discussed a disputed call by the referee and the reporter noted, "both Suter and Heisman still remembered every detail "of the play in question and still disagreed."

In 1954, Arthur Chitty at Seanee wrote to an editor for "Sports Illustrated" about the Sewanee-Auburn game of 1899, saying, "I've heard that fights in hotel lobbies for years "after that game could be started by anyone taking "a strong position on either side of the argument."

The final game of the season against North Carolina was scheduled for Saturday, December the second in Atlanta.

In fact, you had the two leading schools of the South playing each other at the end of the season.

It was in effect the championship game of the South.

Heisman made a bet apparently against Sewanee when they played North Carolina.

Somebody told all the players that and that got them really fired up to play as well as they could against Carolina, not just to win that game, but to give Mr. Heisman a second disappointment.

[Narrator] Ralph Black later wrote.

[Ralph] "You will know how we emptied our pockets of dimes and dollars to cover every bet he had."

North Carolina's star player, Koehler, its back, probably was what people at the time called a tramp player or a ringer, that is, he was a virtual professional at a time when to play college football, you were supposed to be purely an amateur, but Koehler had been a semiprofessional athletic club player.

Koehler's specialty was that he was a leaper.

Once he was handed the ball, either leaping over the line and then continuing on running, or being catapulted by his fellow players.

So that was North Carolina's secret weapon.

The only problem was that on Thanksgiving Day, when Sewanee was playing Auburn, Georgia was playing North Carolina.

The Georgia players tipped off the Sewanee players about the leaping Koehler, and so they were prepared for him.

It was considered unethical as well as against the rules to scout your opposing team, but they had been slipped this secret knowledge by the Georgia players, which gave them an advantage.

It was virtual scouting at a time when scouting was forbidden.

[Narrator] Sewanee's undefeated season looked to be in jeopardy.

There were 43 punts in the game and it was a very close contest.

At one point, North Carolina had first down on Sewanee's one yard line.

They had five attempts to score because Sewanee was penalized twice for offsides.

There were three decisive pivotal moments over the course of the game between North Carolina and Sewanee.

The first was the goal line stand.

[Narrator] The Sewanee yearbook in 1900 gave its version of this goal line stand.

Koehler is called on again.

He rushes fiercely against that adamantine wall, hangs poised above the goal line one second, and captain Seibels twists him back before he has the breath to say, down.

The strain is over and Sewanee gets the ball within three inches of defeat.

The second critical moment of the game involved a punt when North Carolina punted to Sewanee.

The Sewanee player called a fair catch, but the signal in 1899 was not to wave your hand, but to tap your heel into the ground.

The fair catch was such a new innovation that the North Carolina player didn't recognize it and tackled the Sewanee player, and Sewanee was given a 15 yard penalty, which placed it close enough to the goal for Rex Kilpatrick to come in.

[Narrator] Warbler Wilson described this critical play.

[Warbler] "In the second half of this game, I was playing the back field as I always did, and North Carolina kicked.

It was a high spiral.

I signaled for a fair catch on the 42nd yard line and was tackled, which gave us 15 yards and the choice of play.

We were about 10 yards from the left sideline.

I called Kilpatrick and held the place kick.

He kicked it six or eight feet above the crossbars."

My grandfather kicked a field goal, which was five points at the time to win the game.

(referee pistol firing) [Narrator] The third pivotal moment was the game being called at 30 minutes, rather than 35 minutes at the very end, which cut it short at the very moment when North Carolina was at least threatening, if not very likely to score and even win the game at the very end.

The North Carolina fans accused the Sewanee team of cheating in a number of ways.

Most obviously they accuse Suter of coaching from the stands, which was absolutely forbidden.

When you lose in a close game, the first people you point to are not yourselves.

You point to this pattern of cosmic injustice.

[Narrator] As the sun slowly set on Piedmont Park, the Sewanee Tigers capped off their momentous and undefeated season with a final score of 5-0.

For the season, Sewanee had scored 327 points to their opponents' 10.

The team was welcomed back in Sewanee with a joyful celebration.

As noted in the yearbook for that year, "the night of the '99 football demonstration, "when we had won the championship of the South, "is an illuminated page in Sewanee's history.

"You could have read a newspaper out at Morgan Steep "by the glare of the bonfires."

The words Fuzzy Woodruff wrote in his book, "History of Southern Football," still resound today.

"In 1899, a new luminary flashed through "the Southern firmament and its light remains shining, "a star of the very first magnitude "for many, many long years.

"That team was the Purple of the University "of the South at Sewanee."

[Woody] At the end of the season, people on campus and observers who were writing in newspapers in Nashville, for instance, or Atlanta saw this as a team for the ages.

This was a group of guys that really believed in themselves.

They obviously were in great condition and had all of the intangibles.

You speak of intangibles of individuals, but then as a team, you speak of the intangibles of a team playing together with this great camaraderie.

The key is the word team.

Team, team, team.

The number one thing is loyalty and togetherness.

I don't know of anything and I know a lot about college football and its history, but nothing can compare with what the '99 team accomplished in my opinion, in the history of football.

What seems like mythology, it just is such an amazing story that it it's mythic.

It's almost too fantastic to believe.

That this little known school could go on this barnstorming tour and come out on the other side victorious sets them apart from any team that'll be fielded in the future history of college football.

Most of the time when you do research in college football, the mythology sort of overwhelms the reality of the situation, but that was not the case in the iron men of 1899.

The '99 Sewanee team will be unrivaled.

No team ever in the history of college football will ever be able to do what they did.

It's like layer upon layer upon layer of what these guys went through that makes you just step back and really appreciate not just the grind of what they did playing both ways, but dealing with the injuries, but also, oh, by the way, you could get punched.

You could get bitten, you could get, deal with all kinds of consequences by being out there.

It's just the true iron man to be able to get through that.

Undefeated seasons are rare.

Teams that accomplish a perfect season have an uncommon combination of talent, tenacity, and teamwork which sets them apart.

Given the physical and mental demands of players at the turn of the 19th century, Sewanee's 1899 team exhibited an incredible level of grit, determination, and perseverance, making it truly an outstanding football team.

[Narrator] What the team accomplished was indeed amazing.

Yet, there is more to the story.

This is not only a saga of glory and achievement.

It is also a testimonial of pain and sacrifice.

These young men were tough.

They were determined.

They loved the sport of football, but they were human too.

They had to play through pain, play through injuries, and play through exhaustion.

That's the reason they got that name of the iron man.

It wasn't because they were iron and that they weren't hurt.

They just played through it.

With the 12 games in six weeks, they were really not giving their bodies a chance to recover.

So injuries were gonna be compounded, and with the lack of modern medicine, many of those injuries were going to afflict them for the rest of their lives.

[Narrator] The most poignant example was the star fullback, punter, and vicious tackler Ormond Simkins.

Simkins' knees were badly, badly torn up by his many years of playing and he later had first one, and then the second leg amputated from the damage that was done to him playing when he really didn't want to play, and he was bitter.

He blamed Suter and he blamed Lea for the pain that he endured for the rest of his life.

[Narrator] Simkins wrote his teammate Claiborne in 1916.

[Ormond] "I am no sore head.

God knows I've had enough to be sore about.

I've had enough to lose all my love and patriotism for Sewanee.

When I think of being crippled for life, I cannot help but feel bitter towards Suter and Luke Lea, who insisted on my playing while I was in a crippled condition.

Being crippled for life is no small matter.

However, I am glad I went to Sewanee.

I am proud of being a Sewanee man.

Sincerely, your friend Simp."

[Robert] Simkins had his second leg amputated in the '20s.

He was 42 and it was just before Christmas, and he died on the operating table at Georgetown University Medical School.

[Male] When I think about that band of brothers that fought side by side first for each other, then for the honor of their school, it is evidence of our continued reverence for the display of character that made that team possible, and that is worth embracing forever.

[Narrator] Luke Lea went on to own the "Nashville Tennesseean" newspaper from 1907 to 1933 and became one of the youngest US Senators ever when he was elected by the Tennessee legislature to the Senate in 1911.

He was inducted into the Sewanee Athletics Hall of Fame in 2018.

He died on November 18th, 1945.

Herman Milton Billy Suter coached at Sewanee throughout the 1901 season, then went to Georgetown.

Luke Lea later hired Suter at the "Nashville Tennesseean."

Suter spent the remainder of his career in publishing.

He died on October 31st, 1946.

There is no record of Cal Burrows at all after 1899, save the one photograph in a student scrapbook that says Cal under the photo.

Nevertheless, his legacy endures today.

William Blackburn Warbler Wilson graduated from Sewanee in 1900 with an LL.B.

degree and became a member of the law firm of Wilson and Wilson.

In addition, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature for two terms and served as Democratic State Committeeman from York County for three decades.

Wilson died on December eighth, 1958.

Ringland Rex Kilpatrick graduated from Sewanee in 1901.

Kilpatrick was a New York builder and real estate investor.

He died on November fourth, 1955.

William Wild Bill Claiborne was ordained as a priest in 1901.

He served as a chaplain with the 17th infantry, 42nd division in World War I.

He spent his life in Sewanee and was known as the apostle to the mountaineers.

Claiborne died on January seventh, 1933, and was buried in the University cemetery.

Ralph Peters Black went on to become an engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad and to fight in World War I.

He provided the plaque honoring the 1899 team, which was placed on the flag pole at Hardee McGee Field.

Black died on January 18th, 1960.

Henry G Ditty Seibels was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1973, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1992, and the Sewanee Athletics Hall of Fame in 2004.

Three decades after the ironman trip, in a radio talk the night before the 1931 Sewanee-Auburn game, '99 team captain Ditty Seibels would have this to say.

[Ditty] To what was Sewanee's brilliant success due?

I attribute it to one thing alone and it is the greatest thing any team can have, teamwork.

Discipline was perfect.

There were no jealousies, only the indomitable will to win, that unconquerable, never say die Sewanee spirit.

[Narrator] Sewanee awarded him a doctor of civil law degree in 1953 and at his death on September 29th, 1967 at age 91, Seibels was the final surviving member of the 1899 team.

1899 still resonates in Sewanee in the 21st century.

The bells in Breslin Tower still chime each quarter hour.

(church bells chiming) In the athletic center is a plaque naming the original gymnasium in honor of Ormond Simkins.

Out on the football field, another plaque commemorates the Sewanee team of 1899.

In All Saints Chapel is a stained glass memorial dedicated to the 1899 team.

[Woody] It recognizes Ormond Simkins, who's holding the football from the 1899 team.

I love All Saints Chapel.

It has become the center of our campus.

We have the stained glass windows all around the main part of the nave and the chancel that show biblical themes that show elements in the life of the nation.

We've got windows to Shakespeare, but we've also got windows to the 1899 football team.

It's a way of saying that life at Sewanee is whole and it's of one piece and we put those symbols there and we say, this is who we are, and that football team is part of who we are.

[Man] As the bigger schools have become bigger and bigger with small little Sewanee on top of a remote mountain in southeast Tennessee playing Division III football, non-scholarship, I think the story is even more worthwhile over time.

[Coach] All right, you guys ready to roll.

[Team] Yes, sir.

Hey, this rivalry started right.

1899, a 54-0 beating and we continue that tradition today, 'cause it lives on, that 54 point mark.

Nothing stops you guys are purple.

Play with pride, 60 minutes, let's go.

(players cheering) Very few folks get to experience the ghost of the past, the oneness with something that's a whole lot more established, more important than you as an individual.

[Crowd] We are the Tigers deep in the woods.

Down with the Eagles, down in the woods.

(players cheering) It's so amazing that we continue to be awed by it, and at some great degree inspired by it.

Institution is a strong, ongoing place and after we're all gone from it and the next generation comes, it's such a strong part of our legacy that it'll persist.

It'll inspire all people yet to come.

We tell ourselves stories to give meaning to what's happened, so myth and history are intimately intertwined.

One of the founding myths of the University of the South is that we had this remarkable team that did remarkable things.

At one time, we played against and prevailed over these schools that are now nationally known football powerhouses.

It's more than lore, it's true.

Right now, college football is more popular than it has ever been, and that's a good thing, but I think all of us who enjoy the game now need to look back and sort of look at where the game started, how it evolved, and appreciate what the teams did within their timeframe, and that's where Sewanee comes in.

What they did is remarkable 120 years ago.

It's gonna be remarkable 120 years from now.

It's gonna be one of those things that absolutely people will look back and go, that's unbelievable, but they did it.

[Woody] These were young men who did something truly extraordinary, something that no one else had ever dreamed of doing and that no one else would ever do.

They hoped to win a championship.

They ended up going down in history and they did it for the love of the game.

(upbeat music) [Narrator] The University of the South, based on its early football success was a founding member of the Southeastern Conference in 1932.

Sewanee left the conference after the 1940 season and continued playing football as a non-athletic scholarship school in Division III.

Sewanee has played its home games on Hardee McGee Field dating back to 1891.

As a founding member of the SEC, Sewanee has the right to rejoin the conference.

According to athletic director, Mark Webb, however, it ain't gonna happen.

(solemn music) (thrilling music)