Best Team You Never Heard Of

Rozelle spent the week trying to convince New York sportswriters that Mat-son and the Dons were something special. He pulled out all the stops with the 71-year-old Rice, who was then writing a widely syndicated newspaper column. Rozelle even drove Rice to the game. But the publicist was worried. The team was still recovering from the 18-hour flight from San Francisco and could not expect to be as sharp as usual. His worst fears seemed to be realized when Matson dropped the opening kickoff. Mortified, the p.r. man glanced down press row to check Rice's reaction. But Matson retrieved the ball on the six-yard line and started upheld with a quarter-miler's strides. As Rozelle sank back in relief, Matson weaved his way through the entire Fordham team for a 94-yard touchdown return. It would take another 90-yard Matson kickoff" return in the fourth quarter and his three-yard touchdown run off a Brown rollout to pull out a 32-26 win over the Rams. Matson had gained 302 yards rushing and returning kicks. The next day, Harold Rosenthal wrote in the Herald Tribune that Rozelle should have "his stripes removed" for not telling the members of the fourth estate more about this extraordinary runner.

Matson piled up 249 yards rushing against San Diego Navy Training Center and 228 against Santa Clara in identically lopsided 26-7 wins. The word was now out that if the Dons could finish their season with decisive wins over College of the Pacific and Loyola, an Orange Bowl bid awaited them.

The little hilltop campus was buzzing with anticipation. The players were supremely confident. They beat Pacific 47-14, with Matson outgaining Macon 178 yards to 80. And in the final game of the season, played in the Rose Bowl, Loyola went under 20-2. The '51 team had become the first in USF football history to finish a season undefeated. The Dons had risen from obscurity to make a name for themselves. Their big line, anchored by Marchetti, St. Clair and 248-pound right tackle Mike Mergen (a future Chicago Cardinal), had held USF's opponents to a net rushing average of 51.6 yards per game over the nine-game season. Matson had led the nation with 1,566 yards rushing, four short of Texas Mines' (now UTEP) Fred Wendt's 1948 record for a single season, and with 21 touchdowns, one shy of the 1950 record that was shared by Nebraska's Bobby Reynolds and Arizona State's Wilford White. He had made touchdown runs of 94, 90, 68, 67, 54, 53, 46 and 45 yards.

The Dons boarded Southern Pacific's Daylight train home from Los Angeles on Monday morning after the Loyola win. They were convinced to a man that a bowl bid was awaiting them back home, so the party started the moment the train pulled out of the station. Tringali on ukulele and guard Dick Colombini on accordion played endless choruses of Up a Lazy River and the team's theme song, Good Night, Irene. "They ran out of beer in there by Santa Barbara," recalls backup quarterback Bill Henneberry, then USF student-body president, now the school's director of athletic development. Even the normally reserved Kuharich joined in the revelry, raising a glass to the greatest season he would ever have.

As the party wound down, Henneberry and Matson talked. "Ollie had such a quiet emotional attachment to those guys," Henneberry remembers. "He told me he'd had offers to go to schools all over the country. He had chosen USF because no place was friendlier, no place made him feel so wanted. It was like a speech after the last battle."

The train reached the Third and Townsend Street station in San Francisco at about six o'clock that evening. "We were expecting a big crowd to meet us, but there was only a handful of people on the platform," says Henneberry. "We wondered why there weren't more there to share in our jubilation." And then, as they stepped off the train, they heard the devastating news: Georgia Tech and Baylor' would be playing in the Orange Bowl. All of the major bowls, except the Rose and the Sun, in El Paso, would entertain Southern teams only. Pacific, trounced by the Dons, would go to the Sun Bowl. "You could've heard a pin drop in that station," says Matson.

The announced reason for rejecting USF was its soft schedule. But San Francisco sportscaster Ira Blue reported that he was told by Gator Bowl president Sam Wolfson that the Gator, Sugar and Orange Bowl committees had all decided to avoid teams with "Negro" players. There was an intimation that had the Dons been willing to play without Matson and Toler, they might have been extended a bid. That was out of the question. "What I think we should've done," says Scudero, "is send Ollie and Burl to one of those bowls and leave the rest of us home. Hell, the two of them could've beaten most of those Southern schools by themselves."

The season had ended in noble failure, but there was at least one compensation: Matson did make Grantland Rice's Look Magazine All-America team. He made it as a defensive back, a curious distinction for the nation's leading rusher and scorer.

In early December, Kuharich, sensing the inevitable, resigned to accept the head coaching job of the NFL Chicago Cardinals. On Dec. 30, the Reverend William J. Dunne, S.J., president of the university, issued the melancholy announcement: "It is my unpleasant task to inform you of the withdrawal of the University of San Francisco from participation in intercollegiate football.... The efficiency of academic processes is our primary obligation. Present world conditions have created an abnormal strain on the resources of private colleges and universities.... To maintain, therefore, an extracurricular activity such as football...under present conditions, would be financially imprudent...."

The school's best football team was to be its last. "Time did what no opponent could do," wrote editor Walt Johnson in the school newspaper, The Foghorn.