This week’s edition of TWIMFbH covers an underrated figure in Meechigan history, John Maulbetsch. The small running back became a media darling after a 1914 trip to play Harvard, and the east coast newspaper men couldn’t get enough of him. He went on to coaching after his playing career and on this day in 1926, he led the Oklahoma A&M Aggies against Michigan in 1926.
This segment airs on the live broadcast of the WTKA 1050AM Keybank Countdown to Kickoff starting Saturday at 8 am EDT ahead of the Wisconsin game. And as always, see the entire This Week in Michigan Football History catalog here.
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This week we go all the way back to October 2, 1926, when Meechigan’s GRAND OLD MAN, Fielding H. Yost, prepared for his 24th and FINAL season as head coach of the Wolverines.
Yost had more on his mind than merely leading the football squad that fall—he had a dual role as athletic director and oversaw the construction of the new football stadium — but things were NOT going well. In September, excavators discovered WAY more water than they expected. It eventually reached disaster levels as ONE million GALLONS a day were pouring into the site. The H2O was eventually was tamed…and on this day in 1926, Yost got back to the business of football by opening the season against the Aggies of Oklahoma A&M.
The head coach for those Aggies was a Michigan football legend named John Maulbetsch. Mauly was a 3 time All-American for Yost from 1914 to 1916 and became a nationwide sensation. It all started with a trip to play Harvard in 1914. The East Coast media marveled at the running style and heart of the diminutive back. Maulbetsch folded his body like a jackknife, bent completely over, as he plowed over and over again through the Harvard line.
Michigan actually the lost game, but that didn’t matter to the media on hand. A sports star was born and as they loved to do back then, the nicknames followed. They dubbed him, “The Featherweight Fullback” and “The Human Shrapnel”, and “The Michigan Cannonball” amongst others. They followed Maulbetsch back to Michigan, where they learned he still ate dinner at his mom’s Ann Arbor home – with a typical meal consisting of TWO apple pies and a pot of coffee. During the summer, the legend spread that he had defeated “The World’s Strongest Man” in a wrestling competition on a Lake Michigan boat.
So back in this day in 1926 Mauly was welcomed back to Ann Arbor as head coach of Oklahoma A&M. The Yostmen were too much for his Aggies. In front of 18,000 at the final season at Ferry Field, fullback Bo Molenda found the end zone three times and Michigan rolled 42-3.
Later that season Michigan pounded Wisconsin in the final game at Ferry Field and in Yost’s final game—an unprecedented in-season REMATCH against Minnesota for the Little Brown Jug — his Wolverines defeated the Gophers 7-6 in Minneapolis. Meechigan’s grand old man was sent out the way he started in 1901 – AS A CHAMPION.
Go Blue, Beat the Badgers! For more, check out WTKA.com and MVictors.com. For the Key Bank Countdown to Kick-off, this is Greg Dooley.
