Alex Miller analyzes how Spanish Flu impacted 1918 A&M football season

Key notes from Alex Miller interview

• I'm very blessed and fortunate to have a job right now. It has worked out. It has been great.
   
• A couple of weeks ago, the editor came to me and asked me to go through some of the old archives to see how The Eagle covered the Spanish Flu pandemic. When I was going through, I noticed that an A&M football game, the season opener with Howard Payne, was canceled the morning of because of quarantine and such. The more I researched, I found more and more about how the pandemic affected the football season. Then I discovered more about Dana X. Bible leaving to go to war. It spans about a year from 1918-1919 when Bible finally does come back.
   
• The whole campus was quarantined the entire month of October. That's a big reason why the football season was pushed back for three weeks. President Bizzell put the campus under quarantine in September. The game with Howard Payne was supposed to be played in the first week of October. They put some pretty strict restrictions on what the cadets could do as far as school and military training. A&M loses three games because of the quarantine. The season starts on October 26 and stretches into December. They played a game after the traditional game with Texas on Thanksgiving. They played their last game in the first week of December.
   
• The only game that A&M played as scheduled in 1918 was the Baylor game. Everything else was rescheduled or moved around.
   
• D.V. Graves takes over after Bible leaves. He was the baseball coach and assistant football coach. He gets the flu the week before the season starts. He gets healthy again, and when he comes back, his team isn't even the same one that went undefeated and unscored upon. He doesn't have his senior class or most of his juniors because they're off at war. He's missing some of his star players that come back and join that really, really good 1919 D.X. Bible team. He had a random group of players.
   
• When you consider what Graves was working with and the circumstances between war and pandemic, it's incredible. They weren't playing just average joes. They went out and won these games in these make-shift contests and make the best of it.
   
• Bible sent a letter to the athletic director, the president, and Graves himself and said that his service time in France is over. He reclaims his job, gets the boys back together and they go to work. As we know now, A&M retroactively claimed the 1919 national championship. They were named national champions by three polls that year. Remember, this was before the AP poll. The 1919 team is one of the best teams A&M has ever had.
   
• One guy that I grew up watching: Chad Schroeder. A&M has had a lot of good receivers over the years, but he was fantastic. He was number two to Terrence Murphy. He was reliable, dependable, and tough as nails. He was one of those under-appreciated guys.
   
• One of the most under-appreciated players of all-time is Kellen Mond. He's on track to be A&M's all-time leading passer. He catches all of this criticism and heat, but he's tough as nails. He takes hits and gets back up. Say what you want, but he is very under-appreciated by Aggies.

You can read Alex’s full story for The Eagle HERE.