Pete Smith's Football Thrills

A review of the 1937 football season.

The annual compendium of highlights from last season's major intercollegiate gridiron classics.

Pete Smith narrates some of the most spectacular college football plays from the 1940 season.

A Pete Smith Specialty. The annual compendium of highlights from last season's major intercollegiate gridiron classics.

A Pete Smith Specialty. The annual compendium of highlights from last season's major intercollegiate gridiron classics.

A Pete Smith Specialty. The annual compendium of highlights from last season's major intercollegiate gridiron classics.

Pete Smith would make a "Football Thrills of...." each year as part of his Pete Smith Specials. 1944 was in the midst of WW II and most of the college football teams across the nation had been decimated because most of their athletes were in some branch of the Armed Services, which is why the teams from Army (West Point) and Navy (U.S.Naval Academy) were the best in the country during the war years...and not since. And some were in Special Services and were playing for various armed services stations and camps across the country, such as Fort Sill, Great Lakes Naval Training (coached by Notre Dame's Frank Leahy), Fort Ord and others and were beating up on the freshman-and-4F-dominated college teams of the era with week-after-week regularity. Service teams and Army and Navy disappeared as football powers after the war but they were the kingpins in 1944.

A Pete Smith Specialty. Classic high spots from last year's football landmarks.

A Pete Smith Specialty. The annual compendium of highlights from last season's major intercollegiate gridiron classics.

A Pete Smith Specialty. The annual compendium of highlights from last season's major intercollegiate gridiron classics. Reliving past games of Notrè Dame-Navy, Southern California-Illinois, Fordham-Pitt and Princeton-Vanderbilt.