By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
DES MOINES, Iowa, Dec. 5, 2025 — Never been a week like this for us Vanderbilt University football fans.
On Saturday, Nov. 29, when I should have been dedicating the day to my wife Mary Riche’s birthday, we turned on the TV in time to hear the announcers say my Commodores were facing their “greatest football moment in school history” — a game against our arch-rivals, the Tennessee Vols, on their home field in Knoxville. Victory would mean the first 10-win season ever for Vandy football.
And our lads walloped UT, 45-24!
The Commodores are now 10-2, probably just outside the 12-team College Football Playoffs. Nevertheless, they’ll almost certainly be selected for one of the more prestigious and financially lucrative bowl games. All those selections will be determined after conference championship games are played this Saturday, Dec. 6, and they’ll be announced this Sunday evening, Dec. 7.
Maybe most exciting of all for Vandy fans, our already-storied quarterback Diego Pavia is expected to be one of the four finalists for this year’s Heisman Trophy. Have you seen him play? He’s a veritable magic man with the football, whether throwing or running. He has re-made Vanderbilt football.
The fans are rallying for Diego Pavia, the Vandy magic man. (Photo from ESPN TV coverage)
That Heisman award, founded by the old Downtown Athletic Club in New York City, is now given to the “player of the year,” as determined in voting by sports media and college football officials across the nation. The ceremony will be televised in the late-afternoon of Saturday, Dec. 13.
But now, can we go back to “prestigious bowl game” here?
In the past seven days, there have been lots of “bowl projections,” with knowledgeable media and other “experts” predicting which teams will play where. And by midday Friday, Dec. 5, many are saying it will be — OMG! — the Vanderbilt Commodores playing the Iowa Hawkeyes at the “ReliaQuest Bowl” in Tampa, FL, at 11 a.m. CST on New Year’s Eve, Wednesday, Dec. 31.
At our house, that would be a “RicheBurger Bowl”! It would have the 8-4 Hawkeyes of Mary’s alma mater, the University of Iowa, playing my Vandy lads.
Should I be calling my cardiologist Dr. Hamza Oglat to see if he can go to Tampa with us?
This bowl in Tampa started in 1986 as the “Hall of Fame Bowl,” then became the “Outback Bowl” in 1995, then the “ReliaQuest” Bowl in 2022. That “ReliaQuest” title sponsor is a cybersecurity technology company, headquartered in Tampa with offices and operations around the world.
Now, if this bowl match-up happens, and before all my Iowa readers start lining-up to cheer for Mary’s Hawkeyes, I do want to tell or remind you of some deep Vanderbilt football history — with an Iowa connection — that I think you’ll find interesting.
You know how the media today is saying we Commodore are now living Vandy’s “greatest football moment in school history”? Well, they’re really measuring the glory of this season, and last, against the Vanderbilt teams of 100 years ago. That is when Vandy’s head coach was Dan McGugin, a native of Tingley, Iowa!
Tingley, located in Ringgold County in south central Iowa, is today a town of only 136 people.
As I’ve written before, when I showed up on the Vanderbilt campus in 1965 as a freshman, I would occasionally find myself around older Vandy sports fans. When it would come up that I was from Iowa, I’d often hear, “Dan McGugin’s home state!”
Soon I learned that Dan McGugin had been Vanderbilt’s head football coach from 1904-’34, when he made the Commodores a national power. His teams compiled a record of 197-55-19, and he was inducted as a charter member of the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951. Still today, many of the VU athletic offices are in the “McGugin Center.”
The even-more-fascinating-to-me part of the story is how McGugin got from Tingley to Nashville.
I learned most of this 25 years ago when I escorted a couple of McGugin family members to Tingley to explore their roots, and was able to introduce them to the town’s unofficial historian, Sue Richards.
The McGugins, Richards told us, “were farmers and had a place east of town and just a little north. There’s no house there anymore.”
Now let me take you back to a story I wrote in 2006 about all this.
Benjamin Franklin McGugin was a Civil War soldier, considered by many a hero because he escaped from the Confederates’ dreadful and deadly Andersonville Prison in Georgia. Richards said she’s seen references to McGugin being one of the founders of the “Grand Army of the Republic,” the fraternal organization of Civil War veterans that was founded after the war and became a powerful political body across the nation.
Benjamin McGugin married Melissa Critchfield, and they had a daughter in addition to son Daniel Earle McGugin, who was born in 1879.
There was no football, and possibly no other organized sports, when Dan McGugin was going through Tingley High School. He graduated in 1895 “in a class that had only eight people, but was one of our more famous graduating classes,” Richards said. “One of the class members was Dan McGugin, who became famous in sports. Two of the other classmates, Roy Pollock and Stella McClure, married and were the parents of Jackson Pollock,” the famed American abstract artist who died in 1956. “And there was another classmate Ralph Tidrick who became a missionary, went to Sudan to work and was killed by a lion,” Richards said.
The Des Moines Register, in a 1955 story that profiled Dan McGugin as a new member of the newspaper’s Iowa Sports Hall of Fame, wrote that he had an odd start into sports. When he was 15, a vocal quartet from Drake University came to Tingley to perform at a Sunday evening church service. One of the singers was W.W. Wharton and he had been the first football coach at Drake, the paper reported.
“Wharton, a man of many talents, demonstrated his baton twirling abilities between musical numbers,” the Register story said. “After the service that evening, a stalwart young man (Dan McGugin) approached Wharton. He was intrigued by the baton twirling. He wondered if he could learn to do it. But the strong young physique suggested other possibilities to a man who had coached football. ‘Come to Drake University,’ Wharton suggested, ‘and we’ll make you as fine a tackle as there is.’ ”
So McGugin played two years at Drake, graduated in the spring of 1901, went to the University of Michigan that fall to start law school and wound up being recruited by a new young coach, Fielding Yost, to play guard for the Michigan football team.
Over the next two seasons, Michigan went undefeated, scoring 1,194 points to the opponents’ total of 12 points. Included was a 107-0 victory over Iowa. McGugin and the Wolverines also played in the first Rose Bowl, in 1902, beating Stanford 49-0. In the spring of 1903, McGugin earned his law degree, stayed at Michigan the next fall as an assistant coach to Yost, then in 1904 jumped at the chance to become head coach at Vanderbilt.
McGugin and Yost wound up marrying twin sisters in Nashville, and were friends and coaching competitors the rest of their careers.
Almost overnight, McGugin had Vanderbilt playing “…fine football, the best in the South. It was unbeaten by other Southern schools for a seven-year stretch… During that stretch, Vanderbilt also acquitted itself well against Fielding Yost’s Michigan team, Jim Thorpe’s Carlisle team, other powerhouses such as Ohio State and Navy, and even held mighty Yale, the unchallenged colossus of college football, to a scoreless tie in 1910.” That’s from a biography of famous sportswriter and poet Grantland Rice, who was a Vanderbilt football player before his 1901 graduation. He and McGugin were great friends.
One of the most amazing facts about McGugin is that throughout his coaching career, he was also a practicing attorney in Nashville, working days in a local law firm and even teaching a course at Vanderbilt’s law school. And he served one term as a Tennessee state senator in the early 1920s, according to documents on file in the Vanderbilt University Library. “According to an article published during his term,” one story reports, “McGugin didn’t want to get involved in politics, but he ‘was drafted into service by a citizens committee.’ ”
McGugin coached through the 1934 season, and died of heart failure two years later when he was only 56 years old. He is buried in Nashville.
So, here we are in late 2025, and it might be Vanderbilt vs. Iowa in a football bowl game?
If it happens, it’ll be a dream game for one of us RicheBurgers. Maybe a bit of a nightmare for the other. But, either way, a whole lot of fun.
Beating Missouri was another afternoon of fun for Vanderbilt this season!
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