By Tom Mattingly
Led by tailback Hank Lauricella averaging an amazing eight yards per carry, the Tennessee Volunteers won both the writers’ (AP) and coaches’ polls (United Press) wire to wire as the Vols captured the 1951 collegiate football national championship.
“Fed by the 1950 win over Kentucky and the improbable defeat of Texas,” Haywood Harris and Gus Manning wrote (”Six Seasons Remembered: The National Championship Years of Tennessee Football”), “optimism, enthusiasm, and expectation had never been more evident in the history of Tennessee football.”
There had been significant personnel losses from an 11-1 team from a year earlier, Harris and Manning added. “It was assumed that these all-star caliber players would be missed, but the cast of returnees was so impressive that Tennessee’s reservoir of talent, combined with Neyland’s coaching genius, would pave the way for a championship season in Knoxville.”
That prediction turned out to be right on the money. All the pieces fell together in exactly the right way to give fans and future historians ample reasons to consider it among the school’s best over the years.
Al Hust, Harvey Robinson, Farmer Johnson, Ike Peel, Ralph Chancey, Chan Caldwell, Burr West, Mickey O’Brien, John Sines, and Emmett Lowery comprised Gen. Robert R. Neyland’s coaching staff.
Shields-Watkins Field had been enlarged at the South end three years earlier, bringing stadium capacity to 46,390. The average attendance in 1951 was 23,961.
The 1951 team celebrates its 75th anniversary this season.
Here’s the Vols’ starting lineup both offensively and defensively.
OFFENSE: Ends Tex Davis and Vince Kaseta, tackles Charles Stokes and Jim Haslam, guards Vernon Lyons and John Michels, center Bob Davis, blocking back Jimmy Hahn, wingback Bert Rechichar, tailback Lauricella, and Dick Ernsberger and Andy Kozar splitting duties at fullback.
DEFENSE: Ends Mack Franklin and Doug Atkins, tackles Bob Fisher and Bill Pearman, guards Ted Daffer and Francis Holohan, linebackers Gordon Polofsky and Bill Jasper, halfbacks Ray Martin and Joe Maiure, and safety Rechichar.
According to Tom Siler (“Tennessee: Football’s Greatest Dynasty”), Lauricella provided the “finesse” and Herky Payne the “driving power” in the 1-2 punch at tailback. At fullback Kozar was the “piledriver,” Ernsberger “the rapier,” Hahn, Kaseta, and Michels “led the blockers,” and “defensive stars” were Daffer, Pearman, and Holohan. Rechichar played both ways.
As efficient on defense as they were offensively under Neyland’s single-wing, the Vols whipped Mississippi State, 14-0, in the season opener and enjoyed such one-sided triumphs as the methodical outings over North Carolina (27-0) at Chapel Hill and 46-21 in the Vols’ first-ever visit to the Ole Miss campus. The win in the season opener avenged a 7-0 loss in Starkville a year earlier. The Vols would not return to Oxford until 1988.
In that 1951 season, the Vols also defeated Southern Miss (13-0), Duke (26-0), Chattanooga (42-13), Alabama (27-13), Tennessee Tech (68-0), and Washington & Lee (60-14).The Tennessee-Alabama game was telecast by the local Birmingham NBC affiliate.
The Vols faltered somewhat near season’s end, edging Vanderbilt in the season finale (35-27) after nearly squandering a 21-0 lead, then losing to Jim Tatum’s powerful Maryland contingent (28-13) in the Sugar Bowl.
There are, however, veteran Vol watchers who will swear there’s never been a more devastating performance offensively and defensively than the one that wrecked Paul Bryant’s Kentucky Wildcats, led by Babe Parilli, 28-0, on a bitterly cold November afternoon at Stoll Field in Lexington. It was the Vols’ third consecutive shutout over their archrivals from the Commonwealth.
“We had a few men,” said Kentucky head coach Bear Bryant after the game. “They had 50.” It was, according to many observers, the team’s best performance of the season and most consistent. “Neyland ended his career without ever having lost a game to the Wildcats,” wrote Harris and Manning.
The 1951 campaign was Tennessee’s first perfect regular season since 1940 and was UT’s only undisputed national championship until the 1998 aggregation did likewise.
Lauricella earned All-American honors, joined by Daffer and Pearman. Hank was runner-up to Princeton’s Dick Kazmaier for the Heisman Trophy. He gained a school-record 881 yards, a mark broken by tailback Haskel Stanback 21 years later.
“It is necessary to qualify the statement that Dick Kazmaier of undefeated Princeton is the best triple-threat back in college football. One of the best is safe. I got my first look at Tennessee’s Hank Lauricella in the North Carolina game,” wrote Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram.
“It was an eyeful, an eyeful of wonderment, admiration, and appreciation. He can do everything Kazmaier can do.”
The Birmingham Quarterback Club named Lauricella the SEC’s Most Outstanding Back. Lauricella, Daffer, and Pearman were joined on the All-SEC first team by end Doug Atkins, Rechichar, and Michels.
Neyland (1956), Lauricella (1981), Atkins (1985), and Michels (1996) were later named to the College Football Hall of Fame.
Hahn earned the Jacobs Trophy as the SEC’s best blocker, the third former Vol so honored, following two-time winners Sam Bartholomew (1938-39) and Billy Bevis (1944-45).
Neyland was named SEC Coach of the Year by AP. Jasper won the first Knoxville Journal Award as the senior with the highest academic average.
Rechichar was team captain. The Vols finished 10-1 overall.
Here’s how Siler summed up the 1951 season. “This was a team that had everything, 10 stars on defense, 10 stars on offense, and the inimitable Rechichar playing both ways.”
Plus, of course, they had a legendary head coach, Robert Reese Neyland.
