The new Rose Bowl Friday miniseries marches on to the “third” Granddaddy of Them All, a 14-0 victory for the Oregon Webfoots over the Pennsylvania Quakers. With the stadium known as the Rose Bowl today still not built, the matchup was held at Tournament Park in Pasadena, just like the 1902 and 1916 games that came before it in the sequence. It would be 95 years before the University of Oregon won another Rose Bowl.

The future Ducks were 6-0-1 in the regular season, which featured only two victories over major colleges (their brethren in the fledgling Pacific Coast Conference: California and Oregon State). The third member of the PCC, Washington, fought Oregon to a tie. Three other victories on the Webfoots’ schedule came against very small schools in the central Oregon valley where Eugene is located, interestingly enough.

The other victory on its schedule? Against Washington State College, the victor of the second Rose Bowl the season before this one. Perhaps, then, it was no coincidence that another future Ivy League school was chosen for the Webfoots’ opponent in this game: the Penn Quakers. They came into the bowl game with a 7-2-1 record against eight legitimate teams, with wins over Michigan and Penn State. Alas, they were flawed.

The Quakers had lost to both small-time Swarthmore at home and big-time Pittsburgh on the road by a combined 0-26 margin. The Rose Bowl hadn’t quite yet been able to attract the best of the East Coast teams to come to California for the Granddaddy, clearly. So the Webfoots followed the WSC formula from the year before in their win: scoreless first half, a touchdown in the third quarter, and another TD in the fourth.

Yet the stat sheets tells us more about this game: first, forward passes were much more prominent this time around, and second, the Quakers were much better than the Bears had been the year before. Penn actually out-gained Oregon, 242 yards to 230 yards, and notched more first downs (13-8) as well. But the Quakers were done in by 5 interceptions in a game where both teams combined for 26 punts. Let that sink in, please.

Penn attempted 27 passes and completed 12 of them for 131 yards, but clearly the Oregon defense was well prepared for the Quakers’ passing game. The Webfoots’ offense only attempted 9 passes overall, completing 2 of them while seeing the Penn defense intercept the ball twice. Oregon ran for 198 yards despite those mere 8 first downs, and this game was clearly pretty sloppy with all the INTs and punts. Oh, to have seen it!