Saturday is indeed another glorious day in Michigan football history. As we set to face the Spartans, you should know it exactly 51 years ago that Ron Johnson put up one of the greatest performances in college pigskin history:
#GoBlue. You can listen to this clip live on the WTKA 1050AM KeyBank Countdown to Kickoff starting at 8am Saturday.
script: November 16th is a glorious day in Wolverine lore. It was on this day in 1912 that we played our first recognized Homecoming game of all time with a 20-7 victory over Cornell.
More recently this day featured one of the greatest single game performances in the rich history of Meeechigan and really, college football in general. It was November 16, 1968 and Bump Elliott’s Wolverines were riding a 7-game winning streak, ranked #4 in the land and were set to face the Wisconsin Badgers.
Despite the streak, and the high national ranking on this November day the Big House was barely HALF FULL but— I’m guessing 10s if not 100s of thousands of fans WISH and maybe even CLAIM they were in attendence to witness what happened on this day exactly 51 years ago.
In sloppy conditions in the final season before Canham put down his carpet, U of M back Ron Johnson, behind a brilliant offensive line, DESTROYED the Badgers 34-9 and THRASHED the record books. In just over 3 quarters the Detroit native took the pigskin 31 times and gained an NCAA record 347 yards. He found paydirt 5 times from runs of 35, 67, 1, 60, and 50 to set a Big Ten scoring record.
The performance, coupled with this efforts that year which included 19 touchdowns earned Johnson All-American honors and he was named Big Ten MVP. Later, in 1992, Johnson landed in the college football hall of fame.
Sadly in 2018 we lost Johnson…but he’s certainly not forgotten as he sits comfortably up in MEECHIGAN’s football’s VALHALLA…
Go Blue! Beat Sparty. And for more, checkpoint MVictors.com and WTKA.com – for the Keyback countdown to kickoff this is Greg Dooley..
