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Countdown to kickoff: Notre Dame at Ohio State is four days away

IMG_9992by:Tyler Horka•08/30/22•

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notre dame four horsemen
The Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, (L-R) quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, fullback Elmer Layden, left halfback Jim Crowley, and right hafback Don Miller. George Strickler, Knute Rockne's student publicity aide posed the four players, dressed in their uniforms, on the backs of four horses from a livery stable in town. (Photo by Notre Dame University/Getty Images)

To preview one of the most anticipated games for Notre Dame this century and the official start of the Marcus Freeman era, BlueandGold.com is counting down the days to the matchup against Ohio State Sept. 3.

This daily series of 99 stories celebrates by the numbers some of the most notable names, dates, moments and memories related to the past and present of Notre Dame football. 

With four days until kickoff, we take a look back at the legend of Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen.

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The lines forever live in Notre Dame football lore. They’re taught in journalism classrooms all over the country, from Texas and Tennessee to California and Connecticut. Grantland Rice wrote a Notre Dame football masterpiece in October 1924.

His words won’t ever be forgotten.

“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again,” Rice wrote. “In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.”

The Notre Dame backfield of quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, right halfback Don Miller, left halfback Jim Crowley and fullback Elmer Layden led the Irish to a 13-7 upset victory over Army on the night Rice wrote his famed story and coined a phrase that still gets plenty of play nearly 100 years later.

Stuhldreher led Notre Dame with 520 passing yards in 1924. Miller had a team-best 742 rushing yards. Crowley had 742, and Layden had 445. It all amounted to a perfect 10-0 season and Notre Dame’s first-ever national championship, one of three won during head coach Knute Rockne’s tenure. The season was capped by the only Rose Bowl victory in Notre Dame history.

Rockne, the Four Horsemen and Notre Dame football were larger than life in the Roaring Twenties.

“Ironically, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, as recorded by Grantland Rice, are better known than the Four Horsemen from the Book of Apocalypse, as recorded by St. John,” wrote SPORT Magazine’s Bob Curran in 1962. “Such was the magic that flowed from coach Knute Rockne’s 1924 Notre Dame team.”

Rockne’s student publicity aide, George Strickler, set the quartet up on horses when they got back to campus after the Army win. The photo of the players and sitting on their steeds was picked up by wire services, the 1924 equivalent of going viral on social media. Soon everyone from coast to coast could visualize Rice’s iconic words. So many Americans could simply not get enough. The legend of Notre Dame football exploded in earnest.

As Rice wrote, “a cyclone can’t be snared.”

“It may be surrounded, but somewhere it breaks through to keep on going. When the cyclone starts from South Bend where the candle lights still gleam through the Indiana sycamores, those in the way must return to the storm cellars at top speed.”

Fighting Irish football was a cyclone in its own right in the Rockne era. The Four Horsemen kept the winds blowing.

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