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Winnipeg Free Press
27 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
‘It's legendary' – AP All-America honor resonates for some of college football's all-time greats
Desmond Howard walked up a ramp in Schembechler Hall, looking at black-and-white pictures hanging on a white wall where Michigan honors its All-America football players. The 1991 Heisman Trophy winner stopped to point out the image of two-time AP All-America receiver Anthony Carter, who starred for the program several seasons before Howard crossed the Ohio border to become a Wolverine. Howard grinned after taking a few more steps and seeing his high-top fade hairstyle captured in a photo that cemented his legacy for the college football program with the most wins. 'You're remembered as one of the greats, that's for sure,' Howard told the AP. 'You put on the V-neck sweater with the maize block 'M,' and you take your picture and you know that you're in a special group.' With the 2025 season here, the AP named an all-time All-America team to mark the 100th anniversary of the first team from the early days of the sport. Many outlets have named All-America teams over the decades, but only a few such as AP have stuck around. A number of player sspoke with AP about what the honor meant: Hugh Green, Pittsburgh When the three-time All-America defensive end is asked who was the most influential people in his life, he says Bob Hope. Hope's annual Christmas specials featured AP All-Americanss from 1971 to 1994 and Green recalled the late comedian pulling him aside during commercial breaks to rave about his play in games that were not on TV. 'Kids today might take it a bit different, but we should always have a person that has his credentials do the AP All-American show every year,' Green said. 'That was something very special and unique.' Herschel Walker, Georgia Walker won a national championship as a freshman with the Bulldogs and said he got too much credit over teammates like the offensive linemen who paved the way for his success. The three-time All-America running back is proud, though, to have shown that someone from Wrightsville, Georiga, with a population of about 3,000 people, could make it big. 'I wanted to inspire people from my little hometown — or kids from small towns around this country — to let them know you can do it too,' he said. Anthony Carter, Michigan The late Bo Schembechler was known for a run-heavy offense at Michigan, but that didn't stop a 155-pound freshman from becoming a big-play threat right away and eventually a two-time AP All-America. 'No one thought I would last in the Big Ten,' Carter said. 'To be an All-American means a lot, coming out of Michigan because we didn't throw the ball a lot. I wouldn't have achieved what I did without a lot of great teammates.' Orlando Pace, Ohio State Buckeye Grove is a small patch of land with a sea of trees a few steps south of Ohio Stadium, a place where Ohio State honors its All-America football players with a buckeye tree and a plaque. 'When you get older, you kind of appreciate those things,' said Pace, a two-time All-America offensive tackle. 'I have kids that go to Ohio State, and I always tell them to go by and check out my tree.' Greg Jones, Michigan State He played in 20 games, including the playoffs, as a rookie linebacker for the New York Giants when they won the Super Bowl in 2012. His NFL career ended after a six-game stint the next season in Jacksonville. His back-to-back All-America honors, however, still shine as accomplishments. 'It's etched in history,' Jones said, holding one of the plaques with his All-America certificate. 'Obviously, you can get cut from an NFL team, you can lose your job, but that can stay forever.' Braylon Edwards, Michigan The Wolverines' all-time leader in receptions, yards receiving and touchdown catches was aware two decades ago that there were a lot of college football All-America teams, but recalled one being the most coveted. 'The AP was the one I that cared about,' Edwards said. 'The writers telling me that I was the player that deserved to be All-American, that was the one that I was waiting for.' James Laurinaitis, Ohio State When the three-time All-America linebacker takes recruits on tours as an assistant coach, Buckeye Grove is always a stop on the visit. 'It's pretty cool to kind of honor that tradition,' he said. Ndamukong Suh, Nebraska He is the only Associated Press College Football Player of the Year to exclusively play defense, but still laments that he finished fourth in Heisman Trophy voting. He was an AP All-America in 2009. 'The Associated Press saw something special in me that the Heisman didn't,' Suh said. 'I am all 10 toes down with The Associated Press.' Aidan Hutchinson, Michigan As the son of second-team AP All-America defensive tackle Chris Hutchinson, earning a spot on the All-America wall alongside his father was a goal for Aidan Hutchinson during his senior year four years ago. 'There's a lot of All-American teams, but AP is different,' he said. 'It's legendary.' Terrion Arnold, Alabama The Crimson Tide recognizes its All-America players on a wall in their training facility, intentionally putting the displays in a room recruits visit on campus, and at various locations at Bryant-Denny Stadium. 'Just walking in there and being a little kid and just thinking, one day that would be me, and then just going out there and fulfilling that dream,' Arnold said. 'It's also one of those things when I take my future family to Alabama, and look at it, `Son, this is what your dad was like.'' ___ Follow Larry Lage on X. ___ AP college football: and
Winnipeg Free Press
27 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
From Red Grange to Travis Hunter, the AP All-America team has been the ‘gold standard' for a century
For 100 years, The Associated Press has honored the best of the best in college football with its annual All-America team. Nearly 2,000 men — from Red Grange to Travis Hunter — have earned the distinction of AP All-American in a tradition that rivals the longest in the history of the game. 'For anyone named an AP All-America, the honor has immediate cachet,' said John Heisler, who worked in media relations at Notre Dame for 41 years and is the author of 11 books on the Irish's football history. 'If anyone received multiple All-America honors, it always seemed like the AP recognition would be at the top of the list.' Notre Dame leads all schools with 85 AP first-team picks since the news organization's All-America honors debuted in 1925. The Irish are followed by Alabama (83), Ohio State (79), Southern California (77) and Oklahoma (75). The Southeastern Conference has had the most first-team picks with 340. The Big Ten has had 331. Independents, which anchored the sport's power structure into the 1950s, have had 309. There have been 204 players twice named first-team All-American, including 12 three-time picks. Malcolm Moran, who covered college football for four decades at The New York Times and other major newspapers, said the AP All-America team drove growth of the sport because it introduced football stars to pockets of the country where exposure to the game was limited to newsreels. 'The thing that connected 3,000 miles of players,' said Moran, now director of the Sports Capital Journalism Program at IU Indianapolis, 'was the AP All-America team.' It still does. 'The AP All-America teams are probably the most consistent throughout the last 100 years and have been considered the measure most often used when chronicling the history of college football's greatest players,' said Claude Felton, who retired as senior associate athletic director at Georgia last year after overseeing the Bulldogs' sports communications for 45 years. How it began Walter Camp, regarded as the 'Father of Football,' is credited with being the first to honor the top players across the college game. Camp starred as a player at Yale and later was its coach, and he was the sport's chief rules maker and ambassador in the early days. He saw football as a means to develop manly traits necessary for success in the male-dominated corporate and industrial worlds at the turn of the 20th century, Camp biographer Julie Des Jardins said. Camp named 11 players to his first All-America team, in 1889, and their names appeared in This Week's Sport, a publication owned by Camp associate Caspar Whitney. Camp selected All-America teams every year until his death, in 1925. Famed sports writer Grantland Rice selected the Walter Camp teams into the 1950s, and coaches and college sports information directors have picked the teams for the Walter Camp Football Foundation since the 1960s. What constitutes an All-American has evolved since the days of Camp, who didn't necessarily look at the All-Americans as individual standouts. To Camp, it was more about team. 'He almost looked at them as the ones who were doing all the work under the hood,' Des Jardins said. 'He really glorified the center because you could barely see what he was doing. But the center was essential. And he also was part of the machine that made the machine work better than the sum of its parts.' By the 1920s, when a multitude of media outlets were naming All-America teams, individual performance was the main criteria. Grange, Bronko Nagurski, Davey O'Brien, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard became synonymous with gridiron greatness in an era when sports fans relied on the nation's sports pages and magazines to be arbiters of who was best. The NCAA football record book lists 22 organizations that have named All-America teams, and there have been dozens of others. Most have come and gone. The AP team Like Camp, Alan J. Gould, the AP sports editor in the 1920s and '30s, saw All-America teams as a way to promote the sport and create a national conversation. He unveiled the inaugural All-America team the first week of December in 1925. Those early teams were selected by consensus of 'prominent eastern coaches,' according to dispatches at the time. As it was then and remains today, the picks can be fodder for debate, the conversation around game days and postseason hopes. In a write-up about that inaugural team, it was noted that Dartmouth coach Jess Hawley chose three of his own players — not surprising given the undefeated team's dominance that year — but one of his omissions prompted second guessing. 'Hawley honors three of his own stars, Parker, Diehl and Oberlander with places on the team but does not pick his brilliant end, Tully, who has been placed on nearly every all-star team named so far,' the AP story said. No worries. George Tully got enough votes from other coaches to make the AP All-America team anyway. The methods for selecting the AP All-America teams have varied over the years. Coaches' picks gave way to a media panel headed by the AP sports editor and made up of sports writers from the AP and newspapers across the nation. Later, the teams were picked by a small group of AP sports writers. For the past two decades, the teams have been selected by some five dozen media members who vote in the weekly AP Top 25 football poll. 'The AP was the one I that cared about — the writers telling me that I was the player that deserved to be All-American,' 2004 All-America receiver Braylon Edwards of Michigan said. 'That was the one that I was waiting for.' Exposure for the AP All-America team was elevated when selected players were featured during a segment of entertainer Bob Hope's Christmas television special. Each player, including the likes of Earl Campbell, Billy Sims and Marcus Allen, would jog on stage. Hope would make a funny remark and then the next player would come out. The tradition lasted 24 years, until 1994. 'That's the first thing I thought of when I saw 'AP All-American.' I thought of Bob Hope,' Moran said. Where the AP once was the chief purveyor of national college football news, there are now myriad outlets where fans can get their fix. But through all the changes in the media landscape, the AP All-America team has endured and continues to have the most gravitas. 'This,' Moran said, 'has been the gold standard.' ___ AP Sports Writer Larry Lage in Ann Arbor, Michigan, contributed. ___ Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP college football: and
Edmonton Journal
2 hours ago
- Edmonton Journal
Tom Brady didn't understand football, says Wayne Rooney after 'work ethic' jibe
Article content Wayne Rooney has described criticism of his work ethic by Birmingham minority owner Tom Brady as 'unfair' and said the NFL legend did not understand football. Article content Former Manchester United and England captain Rooney, was sacked as Birmingham manager in January 2024 after less than three months in charge. Article content Article content Seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback Brady, who became a minority shareholder at Birmingham in August 2023, said he was 'a little worried about our head coach's work ethic' during a recently-aired documentary after visiting Blues' training ground two months later. Article content Article content 'I think Tom came in once, which was the day before a game where the days are a little bit lighter anyway, and I don't think he really understood football that well,' Rooney said on his new podcast, The Wayne Rooney Show. Article content Article content 'Football is not NFL — NFL works for three months a year. Players do need rest as well, so I think he's very unfair, the way he's come out and portrayed that.' Following Rooney's departure, Birmingham appointed Tony Mowbray and Gary Rowett as managers in the 2023/24 season but were relegated to League One. Article content 'When I went into Birmingham, they were in a mess really,' added Rooney. 'Hence the fact that the players weren't really the players who could take the club forward. Article content Since then the project, headed by American-based hedge fund Knighthead Capital, has turned around. Article content Birmingham's wealthy backers invested an unprecedented £30 million ($41 million) in transfers for a League One club last season and broke an English Football League record by amassing 111 points as they stormed to the title. Article content
