Georgia Tech athletic director Mike Bobinski will lead the charge to recover a most important loose ball.
A football believed to be the game ball from Tech’s historic 222-0 win over Cumberland in 1916 went up for auction Wednesday. From his Twitter account, Bobinski announced the school’s intention to bid for it.
“We’ll see how it plays out, but obviously we’d love to have it somehow, somewhere within our family,” Bobinski told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The ball has been in the possession of the LA84 Foundation, which supports youth sports in southern California and is selling the ball as a fund-raiser. The foundation inherited it from a Los Angeles sports museum – the Helms Athletic Foundation – which had received the ball from a sports collector, Bill Schroeder. Schroeder, who died in 1987, often wrote to athletes and coaches for memorabilia and may have obtained the ball from Tech coaching great John Heisman.
Appreciate the #GaTech fans who have contacted us about the Cumberland 222-0 game ball. We will do our best to secure it for our museum.
The ball will be up for auction on the SCP Auctions website until Aug. 23. Bobinski said there is some room in Tech's budget to bid, but acknowledged there isn't quite enough room to engage in a bidding war. He said if the bidding stays in a "reasonable range," he might call on donors to contribute. He also said he would be willing to loan it to the College Football Hall of Fame, scheduled to open in Atlanta also on Aug. 23.
The bidding opened Wednesday at $5,000 and was up to $8,860 by 7:30 p.m. The highest winning bid for a football in the SCP Auctions online records was $26,046, in 2012, for a ball signed by the 1966 Green Bay Packers, winners of the first Super Bowl.
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