Best Team You Never Heard Of

But this was hardly the end for the players. Matson, Marchetti and Toler were all invited to play in the 1952 College All-Star Game, against the NFL-champion Rams. Matson arrived for the game fresh from the Olympic Games in Helsinki, where he had won a silver medal, in the 1,600-meter relay and a bronze in the 400 meters. Toler, playing out of position at defensive end, was on his way to becoming the All-Star squad's Most Valuable Player when, in the fourth quarter, his right knee was shattered by a blind-side block. He had been drafted by the Browns, then acquired by the Cardinals in a trade engineered by Kuharich. But he never reported, deciding after an operation that he would play no more football. He went back to USF and got his teaching credentials and a master's degree in educational administration. He became San Francisco's first black secondary school principal and is now the director of services for the San Francisco Community College District, responsible for some 1,100 teachers and their administrators. And he kept his hand in football with weekend duties as an NFL official.

In 14 NFL seasons, only two of them with winning teams, Mat-son gained 12,844 all-purpose yards. He also earned his degree and teaching credentials, and after his retirement from the NFL, he coached and taught in Los Angeles public schools, serving for a time as head football coach at L.A. High and, later, as a backfield coach at San Diego State. For 10 years prior to his retirement in January 1989, he was event supervisor for the Los Angeles Coliseum. Marchetti, who played 13 mostly All-Pro seasons, made a small fortune in the fast-food restaurant business—with Gino's—then retired in 1983 and is living contentedly in Wayne, Pa.

Brown played 13 years in the NFL, eight with the Chicago Bears, who drafted him while he was serving in the Marine Corps in Korea. He led the NFL in passing in 1956 and was a Pro Bowl player in '56 and '57. The once wild and crazy guy recently moved to San Luis Obispo, after 10 years of living on a farm in the serenity of the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon.

Scudero played with the Toronto Argonauts in 1953, making the All-Canadian Football League as a running back. He played six more years in the NFL, five with the Washington Redskins, before a hamstring tear ended his career. He was voted into the 1956 Pro Bowl as a defensive back. In the off-season Scudero studied drama and acted both in television and in Off-Broadway plays. He finally abandoned the theater for another performing art, politics. He is now a special assistant to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, another old football player. He never did lose his interest in philosophy and theology, and he spent all of 1986 in prayer and contemplation at Roman Catholic retreats in Italy and California.

St. Clair played 11 years with the 49ers as a 6'9", 265-pound offensive tackle. He went to the Pro Bowl five times and was considered one of the finest line blockers of his time. Like Scudero, St. Clair entered politics after his playing days, but on a local level. He was the mayor of Daly City, a San Francisco suburb, for six years and a member of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors for eight years.

Stephens played six years as a starting guard for the Redskins, winning Honorable Mention All-Pro status in each of those seasons. Thomas played three years in the NFL, all under Kuharich, with the Cardinals and Redskins. At 178 pounds, he played both offensive and defensive end. Mergen played only one year for Kuharich, with the Cardinals, and then went into police work. At least nine members of that 1951 team became educators and coaches in college and high school.

The university prospered without football. It now has 2,617 undergraduates on adjoining hilltop campuses; more than 57% of them are women.

Kuharich was never again as successful as he was in 1951. In 15 more years of coaching he had only two winning teams—none in four years (1959-62) at Notre Dame. But in 1964 he was awarded a 15-year contract worth $900,000 to become coach and general manager of the Philadelphia Eagles. The team was bought in 1969, however, by the mercurial Leonard Tose, and Kuharich was fired. His Eagle teams had gone 28-41-1.

In 1970, when he was 53, Kuharich was discovered to have multiple myeloma, a particularly virulent bone cancer. He was given 30 months to live. Kuharich was too tough to accept that death sentence. "When someone tells me things aren't going right and that a situation is very serious and can't be solved, I can't accept it," he said. He fought the disease with heavy medication, downing as many as 78 pills a day, and those 30 months became 10 years.

He never did lose his hold on his USF players. He lived to see Marchetti and Matson inducted into the Hall of Fame, and he made one last visit to San Francisco, on Nov. 20, 1970, for his own induction into the USF Hall of Fame. The school was fighting a losing battle to keep alive a Division II football program that had been started in 1965. Tringali, who had been an enormously successful high school coach in San Francisco, was then the head man at USF, tilting at windmills with some of the determination of his old coach. But his teams would eventually lose 22 games in a row, and football would be dropped again after the '71 season, this time, presumably, forever.