Maisel on Yost and Rockne Feud - "Hurdle the Dead"

...punch as I was about to post this myself.

MVictors.com has several outstanding treatments of this topic that shed some additional light, including much that's offered by John Kryk, author of Natural Enemies:

• A Century Ago Today: "Notre Dame and Michigan have played their last game together"
• Blue Books: The Yost-Rockne Feud
• History Police
• Gophers Here, Gophers There
• Joy Miller & the Disgrace of 1909

So what was the feud all about?  Undoubtedly there was some anti-Catholicism in spite of his protestation to Rockne that:

Creed has nothing to do with it. Three of the last four football captains at Michigan have been Catholic and many of my best friends are…. [emphasis added]

But ultimately, it was about Yost's conclusion that Notre Dame simply flouted the rules. Yost was ruthless about protecting the Michigan program and fighting anyone who dared to upset its dominance. He clearly felt that Notre Dame ran a program that gave it advantages over its competitors (more games on the schedule, freshmen team that played intercollegiately, questions about the eligibility of players, and the use of the Notre Dame shift that put up to 4 players in motion at the snap). In particular:

The [1909 loss to Notre Dame] rankled Yost and his team, because Michigan was observing the new Conference rules that barred freshmen and limited player eligibility to three years, while Notre Dame was still wantonly playing freshmen and four-year men.

Michigan grudgingly rescheduled Notre Dame for 1910, solely to give Yost and the players a shot at redemption. But they insisted Notre Dame play by Michigan’s rules — namely, no playing any freshmen or four-year men.

Rule 6 of the 1910 Notre Dame-Michigan game contract

Come fall, three of Notre Dame’s star players from 1909 returned — grizzled linemen Ralph Dimmick and George Philbrook, and back Lee Matthews. Michigan did more digging into their pasts and found that Dimmick and Philbrook were in their seventh years of college football, after having played one season at the University of Pacific in Oregon, three at Whitman College in Washington state, and two previous at Notre Dame. And Matthews had played at the University of Washington in 1907 and the two previous years at Notre Dame. But it wasn’t as cut-and-dried as that.   Pacific and Whitman weren’t included on the Conference’s "list of colleges" for the determination of counting such years of eligibility, and thus Notre Dame argued these men were only in their third years. 

So Maisel did a good job capturing the feud, but washes over the validity of Yost's concerns about Notre Dame's 1909 and 1910 teams.

I really enjoy these kinds of looking-back into the history and lineage of Michigan football.

I keep waiting for "tradition" to become an out-of-fashion concept, but from what I see and read about some of the incoming recruits ... it still resonates.  I'm glad it does.

And as usual the comments in an ESPN article are a disgrace, I don't even know why I bother reading them

...if any Catholics played for Yost?

When does the "hurdle the dead" shirt hit the mgostore?

Unverified Voracity hurdles the dead