Gator Talk - Rise To Prominence Slowed By Unforeseen Circumstances
Saturday, September 11, 2010 | Football
By Norm Carlson, Assistant Athletics Director/Gator Historian
Florida teams of the “Roaring 20's” set a standard for excellence that would stand until the Ray Graves' teams – the “Silver 60's”—won 70 games and played in five bowls from 1960-69.
The first 15 years, 1906-19, are for the most part easy to forget. Best remembered are consecutive 6-1, 5-0-1 and 5-2-1 seasons in 1910-1911-1912 and 1908 captain William (Gric) Gibbs , a World War I hero who lost his life in battle. But the Gators also won only two games over a three-period from 1916-1918 and were 0-9 against the Auburn/Georgia duo that became their two biggest rivals.
It all started turning around when William Kline was hired as head football coach in 1920. Kline, who came from a football coaching assistantship at the University of Nebraska, was hired to also serve as athletic director and head basketball coach for the Gators. He also attended law school in Gainesville.
Kline's teams finished 19-8-2 in three seasons, including a 9-2 win at national power Alabama in 1921. When he finished law school after the 1922 season, he retired to practice law. Major James A. Van Fleet, head of the ROTC program and an assistant coach at UF, replaced him at the helm of the program.
Van Fleet, who played football at Army with Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, took the Florida program to a national level, playing at Texas, Georgia Tech, Army, Alabama and Harvard. The Gators finished 6-1-2 in 1923 and 6-2-2 in 1924 before he drew a new military assignment elsewhere.
The 1923 team defeated unbeaten Alabama in Birmingham in the season's final game, 16-6, knocking the Tide out of the Rose Bowl. They also tied Georgia Tech in Atlanta, 7-7, that season and the following year. The 1924 team was 6-2-2, losing a 14-7 game to Army at West Point and tying Texas in Austin, 7-7.
Van Fleet assistant coach Tom Sebring replaced him and won a then-school-record eight games in 1925. His three-year record was 17-11-2 before he finished law school and entered the legal profession. Sebring's recruiting skills paid off in 1928, when the players he left behind finished 8-1 under Charles Bachman, losing 13-12 at Tennessee in the final game of the season and leading the nation in scoring with an average of 39.8 points per game.
Bachman's 1929 team featured Clyde (Cannonball) Crabtree and future NFL quarterback Carl Brumbaugh, posting an 8-2 record and beating Georgia for the second-straight season. However, the stock market crash that year came two days before the Florida-Georgia game and started a slide that would change the course of Gator football.
The Great Depression was followed by a fruit fly epidemic that destroyed Florida's citrus crop and a hurricane hit in the Everglades, killing over 2,000 people in the West Palm Beach area and wiping out the sugar industry. The state of Florida and the University were financially devastated and scholarship funds for athletics virtually dried up. The effects were felt for almost two decades.
