Flying Wolves: Nevada State Museum lecture series looks at early Nevada college football
The Nevada Wolf Pack and USC Trojans will meet for the sixth time in history on Sept. 2, 2023. The last time Nevada played USC was 94 years ago on Nov. 9, 1929 at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
The 1920s saw the emergence of college football as one of the nation’s most popular sports. Thousands of fans attended games and millions more listened on the radio. Two powerhouse teams of the era were Notre Dame and the University of Southern California (USC). Both had won national championships, and after their annual series started in 1926, football fans looked forward to their meeting as one of the premier games of the season.
In 1929, the University of Nevada football team’s schedule placed them right into the storyline of this emerging rivalry since, one week before the Notre Dame-USC match-up in Chicago was to take place, the Wolf Pack had a game against the defending national champion USC Trojans in the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Nevada captured national attention for a brief few weeks before the game by announcing that the team would fly in airplanes to Southern California. Nevada Airlines provided nine Vega Lockheed monoplanes, eight four-passenger planes, and one six-passenger to take the 32 members of the team, student body president, athletic manager, team trainer and its equipment to Los Angeles.
The Flying Wolves, as they were called by the media, were heavy underdogs. But the novelty of the method of travel and the closeness to the date of the upcoming battle in Chicago made the Nevada game against the Trojans on November 9 an unique part of football sports history.
Robert Nylen is Curator of History Emeritus at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. He has written widely in the field of Nevada history and is co-author of Brewed in Nevada: A History of the Silver State’s Beers and Breweries (1986) and Letters from the Nevada Frontier: Correspondence of Tasker L. Oddie, 1898-1902 (1992).
Visit https://www.carsonnvmuseum.org/event/frances-humphrey-lecture-series-the... to register for the in-person lecture or for the virtual lecture via Zoom Meeting.