1940 Sun Bowl
| 1940 Sun Bowl | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6th Sun Bowl | |||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| Date | January 1, 1940 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Season | 1939 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Stadium | Kidd Field | ||||||||||||||||||
| Location | El Paso, Texas | ||||||||||||||||||
| Favorite | 7–5, Catholic University | ||||||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 12,000–13,000 | ||||||||||||||||||
The 1940 Sun Bowl was a post-season college football bowl game between The Catholic University of America (CUA) Cardinals and the Bulldogs from the Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe (now Arizona State University) on January 1, 1940. Despite predictions that it would be one of the highest scoring of any of the bowl games that year, it is the only scoreless tie in the history of the Sun Bowl.
Both were "Cinderella" teams, with Arizona State not having won a single in-conference game the season before and the Cardinals faced an "inauspicious preseason lineup." During the season Arizona State scored 212 points and gave up 56. CUA scored 299 and gave up 73. The game was supposed to decide "the old question of whether a good little team can beat a good big one."
Despite Arizona's State's troubles in 1939, they went undefeated in 1940 in Border Conference. Wayne "Ripper" Pitts was the leading scorer in the Border Conference. Pitts punted the ball 45 times during the season, and on 39 occasions the opposing team was not able to gain a single yard on the play. Before the game Joe Hernandez was "said to be impossible to catch" and scored touchdowns off three opening kickoffs.
The Bulldogs had two losses during the season, to Hardin–Simmons University and to the San Diego Marines. Coach Dixie Howell was credited for bringing his team "out of the so-so class and right into the Sun Bowl game at El Paso." Two years prior, when the "'miracle' coach" took the job, the team was "at the bottom of the conference heap."
CUA had a "colorful outfit" with the Piro brothers, Carmen and Rocco, a "trio of flashy halfbacks" including a "full blooded Indian," and "a drop kicking tackle called—of all names—Casmir Ksycewski (pronounced "Sneeze.)" Cardinals coach Dutch Bergman used a modified Notre Dame system by retaining the best features of the methods he learned from Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne and added some fancy ones of his own." As a result, commentators said, the "Cardinal attack is much more deceptive than the customary Notre Dame attack."
...
Wikipedia