What are the chances, when Notre Dame and Army renew their long-standing college football quarrel in New York City this coming Fall, that some sports journalist—steeped in history of the sport and of the profession—begins his or her game recap with some twist on “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky….”?

That’s how Grantland Rice commenced his report from the Polo Grounds a hundred years ago, a lede that has been called the most memorable in sportswriting history.

Of course, everything has changed since then—the evolution of sports coverage, mostly away from the “Gee-Whiz” tenor of Rice’s time; the rules and strategies and downright danger of football. This time, the two old rivals will meet at Yankee Stadium, long since Army (6-6 last season) has been a football power. In 1924, Army had lost only twice the previous two seasons and Notre Dame was on its way to a perfect 10-0 record.

They essentially were the two “national” college teams at the time, as Indiana University professor Murray Sperber documented in “Shake Down the Thunder,” his 2002 book that traces the history of Notre Dame football. Furthermore, as Allen Barra wrote in a 1999 New York Times recollection of that ballyhooed match, the 1920s “were the golden age of myth-making sports journalism.” And Grantland Rice was “king of the Gee-Whizzers,” the new breed of sportswriter that trafficked in “the most florid and exciting prose.” (And seen as opposing a more circumspect “Aw Nuts” school of scribes.)

Anyway, the story is that a Notre Dame press assistant happened to liken the 1924 Notre Dame backfield to a recent film, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” and Rice ran with that ball:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. 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.

Rice rhapsodized (and maybe embellished) Notre Dame’s dominance—the final score, after all, was a thoroughly competitive 13-7—“through the driving power of one of the greatest backfields that ever churned up the turf of any gridiron in any football age.” Those Notre Dame backs “seemed to carry the mixed blood of the tiger and the antelope,” and when Layden scored the first Notre Dame touchdown, Rice described the 10-yard run “as if he had just been fired from the black mouth of a howitzer.”

Another factor at work that day was what Sperber cited as Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne’s media savvy, an understanding that playing in New York City—which had 11 daily newspapers at the time—was a marketing gold mine (and birthed the school’s so-called Subway Alumni). And Rice, columnist for the New York Herald Tribune whose work was syndicated widely, was “by far the most famous sportswriter of his era,” according to “King Football,” the 2004 book by Oregon State University liberal arts professor Michael Oriard—a former player, by the way, for both Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Rice’s Four Horsemen narrative, for all its poetic use of imagery and spectacle, left wide gaps of information that would not meet current editing standards. He did not use first names of players. He did not provide cumulative statistics such as team or individual yardage gained. His report was vague about when the scoring transpired. There is not a single quote in the piece, from coach or player or official.

That was the fashion then. Just as the exploits of the Horsemen—fullback Jim Crowley, halfbacks Elmer Layden and Don Miller and quarterback Harry Stuhldreher—were decidedly feeble compared to numbers common in today’s wide-open offenses. Stuhldreher threw only 33 passes all season (completing 25), hardly in the same ballpark as 2023 Notre Dame quarterback Sam Hartman’s average of 25 passes and 16 completions per game. Miller was Notre Dame’s leading rusher during the 1924 season with 763 yards, followed by Crowley’s 739, according to Sports-Reference.com. (There are no game statistics available for the Blue-Gray October Sky game.)

Still, as Barra wrote, the rise of college football in the 1920s, to a status in the American sports pantheon just behind Major League Baseball, “coincided with the rise of the sports pages” and “combined to make each other. And both helped to create Grantland Rice.” Even now, that first paragraph in Rice’s Oct. 18, 1924 Herald Tribune tale of the Four Horsemen riding to victory against Army endures in anthologies of sportswriting.

It could be argued that the opening lines are as memorable in the sports journalism universe as some of the great ledes in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Or this one, from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which, come to think of it, recalls a certain extravagance in Rice’s account: “All this happened, more or less.”