Beginning of College Football Career
Following his graduation from Central High in 1947, Bright initially accepted a football scholarship at Michigan State University, but, apparently unhappy with the direction of the Spartans football program, transferred to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he accepted a track and field scholarship that allowed him to try out for the football and basketball squads. Bright eventually lettered in football, track, and basketball, during his collegiate career at Drake.
Following a mandatory freshman redshirt year, Bright began his collegiate football career in 1949, rushing for 975 yards and throwing for another 975 to lead the nation in total offense during his sophomore year, as the Drake Bulldogs finished their season at 6–2–1. In Bright's junior year, the halfback/quarterback rushed for 1,232 yards and passed for 1,168 yards, setting an NCAA record for total offense (2,400 yards) in 1950, and again lead the Bulldogs to a 6–2–1 record.
Bright's senior year began with great promise. Bright was considered a pre-season Heisman Trophy candidate, and was leading the nation in both rushing and total offense with 821 and 1,349 yards respectively, when the Drake Bulldogs, winners of their previous five games, faced Missouri Valley Conference foe Oklahoma A&M at Lewis Field (now Boone Pickens Stadium) in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1951.
Read more about this topic: Johnny Bright
Famous quotes containing the words beginning of, beginning, college, football and/or career:
“Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;”
—A.C. (Algernon Charles)
“Man was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle,
Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,
My ghost in his metal neptune
Forged in man’s mineral.
This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,
And my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“When a girl of today leaves school or college and looks about her for material upon which to exercise her trained intelligence, there are a hundred things that force themselves upon her attention as more vital and necessary than mastering the housewife.”
—Cornelia Atwood Pratt, U.S. author, women’s magazine contributor. The Delineator: A Journal of Fashion, Culture and Fine Arts (January 1900)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)