Temple’s Unbeaten Season Helped Give the First Sugar Bowl Its Start

Before the Sugar Bowl could become a New Year’s Day fixture, it needed something more immediate: two teams people would want to see play.

New Orleans had Tulane, a strong team with a home-city following. For the visitor, the organizers chose Temple. The Owls had finished their regular season without a loss, and their coach, Pop Warner, was one of football’s best-known figures. On January 1, 1935, Temple and Tulane would meet in the first Sugar Bowl.

The choice looks straightforward from a distance. An unbeaten northern team against a southern team made an appealing introduction for a new game. But Temple’s invitation also shows how different postseason football was before bowls became an established network of coveted destinations. New Orleans was building an event as well as arranging a contest. It needed a visiting team with a record and a name that could help make the venture credible.

Temple supplied both. It also supplied half of an opening game that New Orleans had good reason to remember: the Owls took a 14-point lead before Tulane rallied to win, 20–14. (allstatesugarbowl.org)

Temple’s record deserves its full shape. The 1934 Owls went 7–0–2 in the regular season. They were unbeaten, not undefeated in the sense of winning every game. They tied Indiana and, in their last regular-season game, Bucknell. In between came a five-game winning streak that included a 14–0 victory over Holy Cross on November 3. (owlsports.com)

That Holy Cross result matters because it rules out a tempting but mistaken version of the story. Holy Cross was not an unbeaten team passed over in favor of Temple for the first Sugar Bowl. Temple had beaten Holy Cross nearly a month before the bowl pairing was settled. The invitation is interesting without a snub attached to it. (owlsports.com)

Temple had made a strong case on the field. Its season included wins over Virginia Tech and Texas A&M, and it closed the schedule having allowed no opponent to beat it. Yet an unbeaten record did not make the Owls the East’s undisputed choice. As The Philadelphia Inquirer later noted, several eastern teams, including Pitt, Navy, Colgate and Columbia, stood above Temple in the Dickinson ratings. New Orleans organizers nevertheless presented Temple as the “best team in the East.” (inquirer.com)

That was a promotion of their selection, not a verdict everyone had reached by the same measure. It captured something important about the young bowl’s task. A rating could order teams; it could not, by itself, assemble a New Year’s Day attraction. Temple offered a record that needed little explanation and a coach whose name traveled well beyond Philadelphia.

Warner had long been a prominent figure in college football. His presence gave a new game a connection to an established one. Temple, meanwhile, gave the proposed North-South pairing a sporting basis: it was a team that had faced a varied schedule and come through it without a defeat. New Orleans did not have to sell a famous coach in place of a competitive opponent. With the Owls, it could offer both. (owlsports.com)

The invitation came from an enterprise that was still taking form. New Orleans’s Mid-Winter Sports Association had been organized to create a New Year’s Day football attraction. The Sugar Bowl’s account of its beginnings says the group had $30,000 in escrow by late October 1934. Money and civic ambition, however, were only a start. The association still had to turn the idea into a game with teams willing to play and an audience willing to come. (inquirer.com)

The Sugar Bowl’s later history says its committee expected to make its final decision on December 2, then reconvened the next day and made the Tulane–Temple pairing official that night after contacting the schools. That sequence is a useful reminder that the first Sugar Bowl did not emerge from a familiar annual selection ritual. Organizers were working through the practical questions of a new event. (inquirer.com)

Nor was their game alone in trying to establish a place on the calendar. The Sugar, Orange and Sun Bowls all debuted on January 1, 1935. The Rose Bowl already existed, but the broader bowl landscape that later generations would recognize was only beginning to develop. There was no settled national postseason system directing New Orleans toward one eastern team rather than another. (inquirer.com)

The first Sugar Bowl therefore made a choice with two purposes. Tulane brought the local connection and a strong season. Temple brought an unbeaten northern season and Warner’s reputation. Their matchup offered a clear reason to pay attention even to people for whom “Sugar Bowl” meant nothing yet. (inquirer.com)

For much of the game, Temple appeared ready to become its first winner.

Dave Smukler, the Owls’ fullback, had a hand in every point of their early lead. He threw a seven-yard touchdown pass to Danny Testa for the first touchdown in Sugar Bowl history. He later scored on a short run and converted both extra points. Temple led 14–0. (allstatesugarbowl.org)

The margin put Tulane in a position that no organizer could have scripted away: the local team was in danger of losing the new city game before it had found its footing. Then a kickoff return changed the contest’s direction. Johnny McDaniel received the kick and lateraled to Claude “Monk” Simons, who went 85 yards for a touchdown. (allstatesugarbowl.org)

The play carried Tulane back into the game in a single burst, but it did not complete the comeback. Tulane tied the score in the third quarter. In the fourth, Dick Hardy caught the touchdown pass that put the Green Wave ahead for good. Temple, after building the first two-touchdown lead in Sugar Bowl history, lost the first Sugar Bowl, 20–14. (allstatesugarbowl.org)

Smukler and Simons give the game two memorable names, though its outcome was larger than either man. Smukler had thrown, run and kicked Temple into command. Simons’s return made that command suddenly fragile. Tulane still had to erase the remaining deficit and score the winner, while Temple had to absorb the reversal of a game it had led by 14 points. The result was not merely a successful selection on paper. It was a contest with the sort of turn people could recount afterward.

Accounts of the first crowd do not agree on an exact figure. The Sugar Bowl’s own game page gives two different totals, and retrospective reporting uses one of them. The sounder measure is about 22,000 spectators. That was a substantial audience for a new event, and the teams gave those spectators a game that remained unsettled into the fourth quarter. (allstatesugarbowl.org)

It is easy to let Tulane’s comeback claim the whole story. The home team won; the home city’s new attraction drew a crowd; the inaugural game ended with a dramatic reversal. But Temple’s role was not limited to giving up the lead. The Owls helped make the event possible as a credible sporting proposition, then gave it a demanding first opponent.

That distinction is especially worth preserving because bowl invitations can be read backward through modern expectations. Today, a postseason berth often looks like an assessment of where a team belongs in an established order. Temple’s invitation came before that order existed in anything like its later form. New Orleans’s organizers were not simply recognizing a season. They were choosing the teams that would introduce their game.

They chose an unbeaten Temple team, even though other eastern teams rated higher. They could point to Warner and to the Owls’ 7–0–2 record. They could pair Temple with Tulane, with its strong record and New Orleans connection, and make the meeting itself part of the attraction. The judgment was both football-related and practical. For a first-year bowl, those concerns were inseparable. (inquirer.com)

The Owls’ season also resists being reduced to its final score. Their only loss came in New Orleans. They had beaten Holy Cross well before anyone could suggest Holy Cross was overlooked for this invitation, and they had arrived after a regular season in which no opponent had beaten them. Their early lead over Tulane showed that the visiting team was more than a recognizable name brought in to fill out a program. (owlsports.com)

The Sugar Bowl would grow far beyond the scale of its first afternoon, but its beginning was a local gamble rather than an inevitability. Organizers had to find the money, secure the teams and persuade an audience that a new New Year’s Day game was worth watching. Temple helped answer the question before kickoff by agreeing to play. Temple and Tulane answered it together on the field.

New Orleans got its winner in the Green Wave. It also got an inaugural opponent with the record and reputation to make the pairing matter—and one strong enough to force Tulane’s winning story to begin with a comeback. Temple did not leave with the first Sugar Bowl trophy. Its unbeaten season helped get the first Sugar Bowl started.