Remembering Findlay's Golden season

FINDLAY — Findlay High School's football team did not score a point in the first two games of the 1925 season.But the opposition didn't either, and so began the story, stamped into the history books 100 years ago this season, of how a scrawny (by today's standards), scrappy group of Findlay High gridders staked a claim to the title of being Ohio's 1925 state football champions.Jimmy Aiken had 23 players in uniform that season, his second as Findlay High head coach. An article in the Morning Republican before a Week 6 game with Lima Central said the "Golden Tornado" or "Little Gold" as the Trojans were often referred to, would be the underdogs against a huge Lima Central squad that averaged "188 pounds per man on the front line."By comparison, Findlay's front-line regulars – tackles Cloyce Taylor, Christian Dietsch and William Mains, guards Hollis Plotts and Charles Sattler, center and team captain Clifford Glathart and ends Jim Miller and Levon Copeland – averaged a mere 155.Findlay would beat Lima Central, though, with the headline in the Morning Republican proclaiming: "Gold Downs Lima Team In Mud, 12-0."Sports writing being what it was in the day, the lead article read: "Findlay High's football ship, covered with mud from top to bottom, rolled out to sea again Saturday upon the light tide of victory, leaving behind the badly battered and ill-fated Lima Central craft moored in a bog."Plotts recovered a Lima fumble to set up Findlay's first score, a 2-yard burst by star running back Art Huston. Huston's little brother Clyde, a sophomore, would set up the second score when he intercepted a pass and, as the newspaper reporter who went by the byline Gee Tee wrote, "He speared the mud-covered pigskin sailing through the air after probably saying to himself, 'Come here you elusive pill,' and returned it to the Lima 20."Due to heavy rains that week, the field was a quagmire. Early indications were the contest might be postponed – or cancelled – and officials debated right up to game time before making a last-minute decision to play.Before the first quarter was over, it was reported, players' uniforms were so mud-covered it was impossible to tell one team from the other. What was evident, though, was the slick execution of Findlay's offensive attack, complemented by a force that would trademark the 1925 season, a stiflingly aggressive, every-man-to-the-ball defense that refused to be scored upon.The win over Lima Central was Findlay's fifth shutout in six games. The "Golden Tornado" would score only 144 points all season. Defensively, though, Findlay allowed just 25 points and shut out eight of its 10 opponents in posting an unbeaten 8-0-2 record.Marion Harding scored six of those 25 points, but it was a lone touchdown in a 19-6 loss. In what was one of the pivotal games of the season, perennial state and even nationally recognized power Toledo Scott scored three times against Findlay, but could not convert a point-after in a 21-19 loss.Findlay had opened the season with a 0-0 draw with Upper Sandusky. Week two was another 0-0 stalemate with Toledo Woodward. The defense pitched another shutout but, offensively, the "Little Tornado" had a touchdown called back due to a penalty. Findlay then beat Tiffin Columbian (14-0), Marion Harding (19-6) and Middletown (7-0).The win over Middletown, which had nipped Findlay 7-0 a year earlier and was a highly respected program on the state radar, came in a bizarre battle. On a wet, sawdust covered field, both coaches used the kicking game to try to establish favorable field position.Copeland, Findlay's kicker, punted nine times, including twice on first down from deep in his own territory. Middletown's kicker, a fellow named Wilson, punted 12 times. Findlay blocked three of them, with one of the blocks setting up the only score of the game and, as Gee Tee wrote, "nearly 2,500 spectators were sent into an outburst of victory inspired frenzy and a whirlwind of excited joy."Following its mud-bowl win over Lima Central, Findlay blanked both Bowling Green (26-0) and Bucyrus (13-0). Unbeaten through eight games – and virtually unscored upon – anticipation, intensity and talk of a possible bid for a state title amped up as Aiken and his team prepared to face Toledo Scott, a perennial power that had put a 90-0 whupping on Findlay when the teams first met in 1916. That year, 1916, marked the first of five state and four national prep football championships for the Toledo school.A crowd of 8,000 packed Scott Stadium for the big game. The Maroons, as Scott's athletic teams were called at the time, took an early 7-0 lead. But Art Huston was a man on a mission that day, carrying 17 times for 157 yards and scoring two second quarter touchdowns to put Findlay up 14-6 at the half.Gee Tee put it this way: "Art Huston, a will-o-the-wisp of the football field, was like a dream apple feverishly clutched by the sleeper who wakes only to find that he has grabbed frantically at empty air and a lot of it."In the second half, quarterback/defensive back Worth Kramer would intercept a Scott pass in the end zone, and Plotts would return a fumble 13 yards for Findlay's third TD. Copeland dropped kicked his third PAT and the Trojans/Golden Tornado led 21-6.Scott, one of the first prep programs to utilize the forward pass as a key component of its offense, completed 18-of-36 passes and threw for 199 yards that day. And by doing that, the Maroons made it interesting, scoring two fourth-quarter TDs, the last with a minute on the clock. A costly penalty forced Findlay to punt it away in the closing seconds, setting up one last chance for Scott. Findlay tackled the return man as the final gun sounded, though.Findlay had one game left, at Sandusky on Thanksgiving Day, but it was a formality. Kramer zig-zagged his way for one score, Copeland recovered a blocked punt in the end zone and Art Huston threw for one touchdown and ran for another. Harold Martin, who in pre-season camp was the team's starting center before Aiken moved him to fullback, also scored in a 32-0 romp.It was all over but the shouting … which was pretty much how state champions were decided at the time. There was no OHSAA playoff system back then. And polls done by the Associated Press (sportswriters) and United Press International (coaches) – another way of crowning state champions – would not come into the picture until 1947.In an article about the history of Ohio prep football that Timothy Hudak of Sports Heritage Specialty Publications did for the OHSAA, it was stated that "If a sportswriter or group of them said that a team was the state champions, then they usually were unless someone came along to challenge it."If two or more teams staked what they felt was a legitimate claim to a state title, schools often established a head-to-head showdown to settle the issue. On a bigger, sea-to-shining-sea stage, that kind of matchup was almost mandatory. In being proclaimed national champion in 1922 and '23, for example, Toledo Scott traveled to Oregon and Iowa to beat prep teams staking their own claim to that title.There was speculation, following its win over Sandusky, that Findlay might make such a road trip and play some of that season's top prep programs in the south. It was decided, though, that the cost and time lost from school did not warrant the journey.Findlay's claim to a state title, then, had to stand on the merits of its 8-0-2 record.There were challenges, and one AP account listed them. While acknowledging Findlay's claim, the article mentioned other possible contenders like Steubenville, which was coming off a fourth straight unbeaten season; Mt. Vernon, also undefeated and champion of the Central Ohio League in 1925; Toledo Waite, a former state and national champion; and Toledo Libbey, which was unbeaten and also owned a win over Toledo Scott.All had a right to at least throw their leather helmet in the state championship ring. Findlay's portfolio was strong, though, and school officials were not shy about rattling off 1925's impressive wins against then likes of:--- Toledo Scott, a perennial power that had trounced a Cleveland West team that had won the Cleveland Senate championship.--- Lima Central, which had tied the best school in the Akron area.--- North Central Ohio Conference champion Bucyrus.--- And a 7-0 victory over a highly regarded Middletown team that owned wins over Dayton Stivers and Springfield, considered two of the top schools in the Dayton area.In the end it was probably as much how Findlay won as who it beat that quieted the challengers and earned the school acknowledgement as Ohio's 1925 state champion. Despite being outweighed and undersized against nearly every opponent on the schedule, Aiken's team displayed an amazingly strong defense that could have easily been the poster child for that phrase, "Offense wins games but defense wins championships."Holding eight opponents scoreless and giving up just 25 points all season earned Findlay an undefeated record and an Ohio prep championship that, 100 later, will always stand out as one of the most remarkable seasons in school history. FOOTNOTE: Jimmy Aiken coaches only two seasons at Findlay High, but continued to have an outstanding career. He later coaches, ironically, at Toledo Scott and at Canton McKinley. He then moved on to the college ranks where he had a number of stops, including at Akron and at Oregon.--- Steubenville went 10-0 in 1925 and allowed only six points all season. The school continued to voice its claim as 2025 state champion, and historical accounts of the program say that "Big Red completed its first ever undefeated, untied season …. and also capture its first State Championship this year."