The Mississippi River Commission and Army-Navy Football?

Dredging Up the Past: A Commissioner Cancels the Army-Navy Football Game

On New Year’s Eve 1985, Clarence Jones connected on a 26-yard touchdown pass late in the third quarter, capping off an 81-yard drive that put Army ahead 28-23 against the Illinois Fighting Illini in the Peach Bowl. Army would go on to win the game 31-29. The young receiver who caught the go ahead pass in the final game of his West Point football career was Scott Spellmon , who would go on to serve as the current and 55th Chief of Engineers. The victory at the Peach Bowl was no doubt a small consolation to soothe the sting of the 17-7 defeat Army suffered against Navy on December 5. For Army, the game against Navy was the only one that really counted.

The Army-Navy Game has a long tradition, reaching back all the way to 1890, when West Point cadet Dennis Michie organized and coached Army’s first football team. Michie also arranged for some midshipmen friends to send a challenge to West Point for a football game. West Point accepted the challenge and the first ever Army-Navy Game was held at West Point on November 29, the week after Thanksgiving, a tradition that continues to this day. Navy easily won the game 24-0, but that only inspired Michie and the West Point cadets to get their revenge the next year, defeating Navy 32-16 on their home turf in Annapolis.

In the spring of 1893, Mississippi River Commission member Lt. Col. Oswald Ernst was appointed Superintendent of West Point and quickly became concerned that the cadet’s enthusiasm for the Army-Navy game was a distraction that threatened to undermine discipline and encouraged an unhealthy rivalry between the two branches of the armed services. Evidently, Ernst had been too hard at work battling the Mississippi River a thousand miles away to concern himself with gridiron battles between Army and Navy. However, once at West Point, Ernst sought to get to the bottom of this football business, and he did so in the most engineer-way possible: he ordered a detailed study of football and its place at West Point.

Ernst allowed the 1893 season to go on as planned, but only as an experiment to gather information on football and its impact at West Point. Perhaps Ernst had spent too long down in the Mississippi valley studying and experimenting on the river. Nonetheless, Ernst’s study did not doom football at West Point. Ernst determined that the game had no discernable effect upon scholarship or discipline and, if anything, it helped to divert the “animal spirits” of the young men away from more harmful activities.

But Ernst concluded that the Navy game caused unreasonable excitement and bitterness between the two services. If allowed to continue, the game would cause this bitterness to grow, leading to an unhealthy rivalry. Ernst concerns were validated when a brigadier general and rear admiral got into such a heated argument over the game at the Army-Navy Club, that they almost arranged a duel. This was the last straw for Ernst and Secretary of War Daniel Lamont. Football would be allowed to continue, but Army and Navy were forbidden to play each other. The game was not restored until after Col. Albert L. Mills replaced Ernst as Superintend of West Point. Just a few years later, Col. Ernst returned to the Mississippi River Commission as its president, where he could direct his energy towards battling the Mighty Mississippi rather than battling the Navy football team.

In 1899, Secretary of War Russell Alger gave Mills the order to restore the game, but it would be held at a neutral site, Franklin Field in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beginning the long tradition of holding the game at a neutral site, usually in Philadelphia. The restoration of the game was bittersweet. The year before, Captain Dennis Michie, who was now dubbed “the Father of Army Football,” died fighting in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

But it’s good to have friends in high places. Army won the game 17-5.? ???