Does anyone else find it ironic that aggy's greatest tradition and most sacred trademark is based on a lie about cheating. E. King Gill enters the game as a substitute, after not being on the roster, he's therefore ineligible so in their story they were going to play an ineligible player.
lol.
I find it ironic that their greatest tradition that is supposed to speak so loudly about their values as a group truly does speak loudly about their values as a group.
Actually, from all I can tell, the rules for eligibility didn't really kick in in the SWC until the fall of 1922. Gill was enrolled as a student and that was the only qualification to be on the team.
One thing that got Charlie Moran in so much trouble when he was coaching at aggy was that he would have ringers enroll in the middle of the semester on a Friday afternoon so they could be eligible to play, play on Saturday and drop out of the school on Sunday. Crap like that (and especially dirty play) was why when the SWC was founded in 1915 that aggy wasn't allowed to join the conference unless they got rid of Charlie Moran. Moran went on to coach at Centre College against the aggy team that played in the E. King Gill 1922 Dixie Classic game. He also went on to a number of other scandals and was later driven out of coaching altogether.
So Gill was eligible. In the fall of 1922, the eligibility rules were tightened to not allow freshmen to play varsity ball, to require the individual be in good standing as a full-time student and to have to sit out a year after transferring institutions. So even under the tighter rules, Gill would still been eligible.
It was because the rules for eligibility were so lax that no one thought a thing about Gill coming down to the field and putting on a uniform. Even if there hadn't been 9 other substitutes standing on the sideline and if Gill wouldn't have come down from the press box, it wouldn't have even been a big deal if the team played with fewer that 11 players. back then, teams having fewer than 11 players in a game happened more than one would think. In the 1894 Harvard-Yale game, Harvard finished the game with just 8 players on the field.
The eligibility rules, the precedent for playing with fewer than 11 players and the fact that even if the team was depleted of substitutes and only one student out of the 2,000 who were there that day was "willing to come to the aid of the team" were elements of E.E. McQuillen's story that were never addressed in the radio play.
Ask yourself what would have happened if Gill had gone in a gotten hurt? If they really needed substitutes and there was such a willingness to come to the aid of the team by the student body don't you think more than one of 2,000 students would have come down and would have done so before having to be begged to do so by the coach?
It is kind of like 2,000 people standing on the shoreline watching a drowning man and not doing anything at the first sign of danger, but waiting until the drowning man was begging for help. And after one guy finally rescued the drowning man the other 1,999 all started to pat themselves on the back and claim moral superiority for their willingness to save the man's life if he were ever drowning.
