Sport: Doing for Dear Old Rutgers

Rutgers, with an assist from Princeton, began the game of football back in 1869, and has since had considerable cause to regret it. Save for 1876, which scarcely counts—Rutgers had a severely truncated schedule of one game that year—the Scarlet Knights have never gone through a season undefeated. Down through the years they scraped together a barely respectable record, just a shade over the .500 mark, and even when they did come close to a perfect season, they managed to blow their chances at the last moment. In 1960 they thundered undefeated into the final game, only to be upended by a mediocre Villanova team.

Last week Rutgers seemed to be up to old tricks. Sporting an 8-0 record and the championship of the eight-team Middle Atlantic Conference, they were favored by two points to defeat Ivy League Co-Champion Columbia in their 1961 finale and, after 93 long years, to nail down their first undefeated season. They had a solid line, the East's best center in hard-hitting, hard-nosed Team Captain Alex Kroll, and a backfield that combined speed, drive and deft ball handling. Coaches thought enough of the team to rate it among the top 20 in the U.S.

But Columbia, with its hottest team in years, was out to even some scores—specifically, 61-0 in 1958 and 43-2 last year. At the end of three periods it looked as if the vengeance-bent Lions might do just that. They led 19-7, and an all too familiar sense of frustration numbed home town fans among a sellout crowd of 25,500 in New Brunswick, N.J.

Then, sparked by Halfback Pierce Frauenheim and second-string Quarterback Bill Speranza, the Scarlet Knights began to do rather than die for dear old Rutgers. On the first play of the final period, Speranza flipped a 10-yd. touchdown pass. Three plays later, Frauenheim intercepted a pass on Columbia's 48-yd. line to set up a drive capped by Speranza's 1-yd. dive into the end zone. Still rolling, Rutgers drove 60 yds. for the tiebreaker. Two plays later, Frauenheim plucked off another Columbia pass and raced 30 yds. for the Scarlet Knights' fourth touchdown of the period. Final score: Rutgers 32, Columbia 19.

The victory left Rutgers and Alabama as the nation's only undefeated, untied major teams.