Perfect Dominance: Ball State’s Flawless Football Season

It was a different era of college football in 1949.

Army was still a national power. Tulane was the SEC champion. Ivy Leaguers like Cornell and Princeton played as independents and were ranked in the top 20.

Helmets still lacked face masks. Freshmen were not eligible for varsity competition. The landscape was different, with a variety of programs that now classify as FCS then playing major college football and vice versa.

There was no such thing as the College Football Playoff … or the Bowl Championship Series … or the Bowl Alliance. In fact, the top four teams in the final AP poll finished the year undefeated, with Notre Dame earning the most votes to claim the title of national champion. The Fighting Irish didn't even play in a bowl game.

Roughly 150 miles southeast of South Bend, another Indiana school put together an undefeated season of its own, also without a bowl appearance (more on that later). Ball State would not jump to the major college football ranks for another 26 years, but the Cardinals' 1949 squad took down every opponent it played.

The schedule was more regional for Ball State in those days, with games largely against teams that would soon formally comprise the Indiana Collegiate Conference.

The makeup of the team was different, too, with a roster about half the size of today's and only two assistant coaches (today there are 10). Players often competed on both offense and defense. Some even played multiple sports. Star halfback Fred Kehoe also lettered in basketball and track.

But 70 years later, the 1949 team still stands alone in Ball State football history as the only one to finish a season unbeaten and untied. A perfect record with eight wins, zero losses.

18907 — ***Head*** coach John Magnabosco led
the Cardinals to an 8-0 season in 1949
and 14 straight wins spanning
the '48 and '49 campaigns.

It was a team coached by program architect John Magnabosco and led by Kehoe, the top scorer in the state of Indiana. The Cardinals' roster featured 21 seniors and a handful of World War II veterans, the war having ended four years earlier.

Sadly, with the 1949 season growing ever more distant, fewer than 10 players from that record-setting team are still living. Among them is former reserve quarterback Winslow (Jake) Stephic, who backed up starter Bob Baker (also the team's placekicker).

Stephic was a first-year varsity player after a season on coach John Lewellen's freshman squad. As the legend of the '49 team has grown over the years, Stephic's primary memory remains the close bond the group shared.

"They were 50 of the greatest guys in the world," he said in an interview for this story. "There wasn't a bad apple in the bunch. We were like one big family. We just all got together and everybody wanted to out-do the other one."

The will to out-do each other built a team that far out-did its opposition. It wasn't just that the Cardinals won, but how they won. Ball State squashed every opponent by double digits, winning its eight games by an average margin of roughly four touchdowns.

The stout defense, led by the likes of Bill King, Ed Bird and Ned Slocum, surrendered just 7.6 points per game. The 14 points they allowed to St. Joseph's in the season opener would be the most they gave up all year.

Stephic recalled a long Kehoe touchdown in the opener setting the tone for a 28-14 victory and for the season in general. The Cardinals never looked back. There was the first-ever win over DePauw, 33-13 … a 35-0 Homecoming shutout of Anderson … a 33-2 rout of Michigan Normal (now Eastern Michigan) in Ypsilanti … a 50-7 thrashing of Manchester.

The biggest test of the season came in late October against Valparaiso, which grabbed an early lead and kept the Cardinals at bay into the second quarter. But Dick Lamb ran for a score, and Baker hit Bill McClain for another, as the Cardinals overtook Valpo for a 16-6 victory. It was the only game in his 14-touchdown season that Kehoe did not score.

A 34-6 win against rival Indiana State moved the Cardinals to 7-0 on the season, setting up a revenge matchup with Eastern Illinois in Muncie to close out the season. Eastern Illinois had shut out the Cardinals in the second game of the 1948 season.

There would be no shutout this time. Instead, it was an onslaught. The Cardinals were playing for perfection and a little something more.

18909 — Star halfback Fred Kehoe led the state
of Indiana with 14 touchdowns in 1949.

In a feature penned in 1974 by Ball State assistant sports information director John Ginter for the team's silver anniversary, Kehoe recalled the motivation for that day. "Coach Magnabosco's mother had passed away, and he was unable to be there," Kehoe said. "Plus Eastern was the last team to have beaten us the year before. So that inspired me and the rest of the men."

Kehoe scored the first of his two touchdowns in the first quarter, as the Cardinals rolled to a 47-13 victory, capping their perfect season and running their two-year winning streak to 14 straight games. It is still the longest winning streak in program history.

Two Ball State teams since then have finished regular seasons undefeated. The 1965 squad, with Kehoe serving as an assistant to coach Ray Louthen, went 9-0 before a tie with Tennessee State in the Grantland Rice Bowl. And the 2008 team under Brady Hoke famously went 12-0, climbing into the national rankings, before falling in the MAC Championship and the GMAC Bowl.

So the 1949 team remains the only one with a completely unblemished record. Perhaps its only mistake was missing out on a chance to make more history as the school's first bowl team.

Ball State held a bid to the Refrigerator Bowl, a game played in Evansville from the late 1940's through the mid 1950's. But the Cardinals thought they might also receive an invitation to the Tangerine Bowl in Florida. They voted to hold out for a trip south. By the time the Cardinals learned they would not be invited to the Tangerine Bowl, their spot in the Refrigerator Bowl had been given away. The school would have to wait 16 more years for that first bowl appearance.

Still, the 1949 season was the crowning achievement for Magnabosco, who took over a program low on numbers and recent success in 1935, built it into one of the state's best and shepherded it through the war years. He coached three more years after the perfect season before resigning his position to deal with a heart condition.

Sadly, the man affectionately known as "Maggie" died of a heart attack in 1956 at the young age of 52. Yet all these years later, his 68 coaching victories with the Cardinals continue to stand as the program record.

Perhaps his impact on the program, though, was best summarized in his Ball State Athletics Hall of Fame induction. It recounted the transformation under his watch in this way: "Football morale was at a low ebb with hardly enough men reporting to his first practice to comprise two complete teams … By 1946, 250 players reported for preseason practice."

Magnabosco, Kehoe and King would be enshrined in the Ball State Athletics Hall of Fame with the inaugural induction class in 1976. Baker and Charles Hilton (largely for his track exploits) went in a year later.

They were all eventually joined by the entire team in 2011 when the 1949 squad was enshrined as a unit. It was the first time a team from any sport was inducted into the hall of fame.

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Perfect Dominance: Ball State’s Flawless Football Season

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