Looking back nearly 100 years later, Ken Rouse’s selection as the Chicago Tribune Silver Football winner for 1927 might appear to most people to be an unusual choice.
Rouse was a center on a University of Chicago team that went just 4-4. However, the Lindblom High School graduate made quite an impression on the conference’s coaches and players throughout his career with the Maroons.
David E. Sumner, a professor emeritus at Ball State, did extensive research on the U. of C. football program for his biography on Rouse’s coach, “Amos Alonzo Stagg: College Football’s Great Pioneer.” Sumner said Rouse was often praised for his leadership on and off the field.
“He had a great sense of sportsmanship and was a great leader,” Sumner said. “He was popular among his teammates and he rallied the team during some difficult years. That’s the best explanation I have.
“The Silver Football award was about the player who had contributed the most to his team, not necessarily the most outstanding player, and from what I know, I think he had definitely done that.”
Rouse himself authored an article that ran in the Tribune on Nov. 1, 1932, titled, “My Greatest Thrill in Football.” In it, he told of one of the highlights of that 1927 season. The Maroons beat Purdue 7-6, with Rouse blocking an extra point for the decisive play.
“I think no one has ever had more pleasure in having a football kicked into the pit of his stomach than I had at that moment,” Rouse wrote.
According to a Dec. 18, 1927, Tribune story, Rouse was the editor of the school newspaper at Lindblom, head of the school’s ROTC program, voted the “most popular boy in school” and delivered the commencement address at his graduation.
He began his high school football career as a halfback before being moved to center.
At U. of C., he became the only sophomore to crack the varsity team in 1925. He then played “nearly every minute of every game” in 1926, according to the Tribune, and was voted a captain in 1927.
Rouse arrived at the tail end of the Maroons’ run as a college football powerhouse.
“It was the end of the glory days, the golden era, of Chicago football,” Sumner said. “The two main reasons were the stricter academic standards that made it so they couldn’t recruit the same kind of athlete they were in the past, and then the other Big Ten schools started pouring more money into football.”
U. of C. was a founding member of the Big Ten in 1896. In 1905 the Maroons went 11-0 and were named national champions by the Billingsley Report, Helms Athletic Foundation, Houlgate System and retroactively by the National Championship Foundation.
The Maroons also claimed a national championship in 1913, when they went 7-0 and were named champions by Billingsley. U. of C. won seven Big Ten championships between 1899 and 1924.
Rouse was one of the school’s two Silver Football winners, along with halfback Jay Berwanger in 1935. Berwanger that year also became the first recipient of the Downtown Athletic Club trophy, later renamed the Heisman Trophy.
But just as Berwanger was making history, U. of C. President Robert Maynard Hutchins was pushing for the school to place less of a value on football and focus fully on academics.
“Hutchins de-emphasized football and wanted to get rid of the program, which eventually happened because they were doing so bad,” Sumner said. “He felt that football had no place in a university with Chicago’s academic prestige.
“He made a very famous remark that I saw frequently quoted during my research: ‘Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I sit down somewhere until it goes away.’ So he had no appreciation for football.”
The university abolished its football program in 1939.
Stagg, who coached the Maroons for 41 seasons before departing in 1932, went on to coach at Pacific in California for 14 more years, served as a co-coach with son Amos Jr. at Susquehanna in Pennsylvania for another five seasons and was a kicking coach at Stockton College in California until he retired at age 96.
“Stagg was just tireless,” Sumner said. “He never quit. He never gave up. I wanted to call my book, ‘Amos Alonzo Stagg: The Coach Who Wouldn’t Quit,’ and the publisher changed the title. He kept coaching until he was 96 and he only quit when his eyesight started to fail.”
Rouse went on to become vice president of personnel and public relations for A.B. Dick Company, which manufactured copy machines and office supplies. He was named the Chicago-area alumni chairman for a U. of C. fund drive in 1955, according to a Tribune article.
He and his wife, Helen, had a daughter, Joanne. Rouse died on Aug. 6, 1958, at age 51.
The U. of C. football program was shut down for 24 years before a club team was formed in 1963. The sport regained varsity status at the school in 1969.
The Maroons currently compete in NCAA Division III and went 6-4 in 2023 under Todd Gilcrist Jr., the 12th coach in program history.
U. of C. Silver Football winners
- 1927: Ken Rouse, C
- 1935: Jay Berwanger, HB
