Atlanta Daily World

Foils Championship Bids

TS Morris Brown Mentors To Throw Pepped Up Offense At Ky. State

H E

A prime dissenter to Prairie View's No. 1 United States ranking as national champions during 1953 was veteran coach Henry Arthur Kean. He did not resort to public prints to sustain his contention that geographically his team had played the toughest schedule of any Negro team having gone unbeaten in the Midwestern Athletic Association while tying Lincoln (Mo.) 19-19, beating such Southwest powers as Langston and Texas Southern, and bowling over the CIAA's finest in North Carolina College and Virginia State, in addition to whipping Allen University and Morris Brown of the SIAC.

Tennessee State's feat was not good enough to impress the writing gentry who in yokel fashion was gawking at such skyscrapers as Florida A and M and Prairie View and their publicized foray into the Miami Orange Blossom Classic. This was the game of the year the writers reasoned and in the starry-eyed fashion of the hero worshippers ignored the legalistic pigskin brief of the Tennesseans.

Now, Football's highest court will have to rule again on whether or not the experts were wrong. Coach Kean with testimony gathered in eleven full years as pilot of the Tennessee State Tigers has compiled a record of 21 straight games without a defeat. This year, the Tigers have won five in a row.

Put it down in your scrapbook that his foes were no pushovers. They were men not boys. You can't whip Lincoln (Mo.) 33-13, Virginia State 18-0, Langston 14-0, Allen 21-2 and Paul Quinn 74-6 and be a patsy. No football fairy could whip this lineup of giants. Look at what happened to many who tried. The graveyard of challengers reads like a who's who.

In weeks to come the Keansmen will play Central State, North Carolina State, Texas Southern, Kentucky State and Bluefield State. No one has put these teams down as second class citizens.

North Carolina College won the CIAA football championship in '53. Texas Southern played the Southwest's best in Grambling, Prairie View, Alcorn A and M, Southern and Texas College and many others.

Kentucky State (highly underrated as Morris Brown College will find Friday night when the Thorobreds visit Atlanta) dueled the Tigers down to wire before losing 12-6 last Thanksgiving.

The Tigers' finale will come against Bluefield State which has virtually panicked the CIAA this year by turning in diamond-like triumphs over Hampton Institute, Winston Salem and Central State.

of the Midwestern.

Tennessee State has never played a regional schedule. The team likes to travel and they journey in style. To play Allen University the Nashville school chartered a plane and flew to Columbia, South Carolina.

They'll also use an airlift to visit Texas Southern and Houston, Texas.

The main thing is that Tennessee State is a pacesetter whether you like their methods or not.

President Walter S. Davis has adopted a philosophy of athletics which Coach Kean studiously follows. The A and I president believes that his college must be A-1 and to achieve this he gives his coaches the horses. Corralling the best horses usually brings resentment and plenty of it has been targeted at A and I.

The win-loss record is no freak. A and I President Davis has repeatedly told this writer that in order for his school to achieve equality it must compete on a similar basis. He envisions the day when A and I will play University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech, etc.

To enhance this possibility, Tennessee A and I goes out to win. The Tennessee steamroller generally does.

Last year, when Johnny McLendon, then the CIAA statistician wrote a letter to Baltimore Afro American Sports writer Sam Lacy pointing out Tennessee State should be acclaimed national champions his rating brought immediate and hostile dissent.

It was perhaps the effrontery of McLendon to question the wisdom of the newspaper know-it-alls that acted against his statistics.

There hardly will be any of that type of hostility this year if the Tigers go unbeaten.

It is perhaps too early to settle the mythical national championship. Such leaders as Florida A and M, Virginia Union and Maryland