“Perhaps the keenest disappointment that ever came to me in football was the fact that I could not play in that famous Yale-Harvard game my freshman year.  However, I came so very near it that Billy Rhodes and Heffelfinger came around to where I was sitting on the side lines, after Fred Murphy had been taken out of the game.  They started to limber me up by running me up and down the side line, but Hinkey, the captain, came over to the side line and yelled for Chadwick, who went into the game.  I had worked myself up into a highly nervous condition anticipating going in, but now I realized my knees would not allow it.  The disappointment that day, though, was very severe.  To show you what a hold these old games had on me, many years after this game Hinkey and I were talking about this particular game, when he said to me:  ’You never knew how close you came to getting into that Springfield game, Jim.’  Then I told him of my experience, but he told me he had it in his mind to put me in at halfback, and ever since then, when I think of it, cold chills run up and down my spine.  It absolutely scared me stiff to think how I might have lost that game, even though I never actually participated in it.

“The Yale football management, however, on account of my work during the season decided to give me my Y, gold football and banner.  The banner was a blue flag with the names of the team and the position they played and the score, 12 to 6.  It was a case where I came so near winning it that they gave it to me.”

Jim Rodgers played three years against Garry Cochran and this great Princeton captain stands out in his recollections of Yale-Princeton games.  He goes on to say: 

“If it had not been for Garry Cochran, I might be rated as one of the big tackles of the football world to-day.  I used to dream of him three weeks before the Princeton game; how I was going to stand him off, and let me tell you if you got in between Doc Hillebrand and Garry Cochran you were a sucker.  Those games were a nightmare to me.  Cochran used to fall on my foot, box me in and hold me there, and keep me out of the play.”

Jim Rodgers is very modest in this statement.  The very reason that he is regarded as a truly wonderful tackle is on account of the great game he played against Cochran.  How wonderfully reliable he was football history well records.  He was always to be depended upon.

“In the fall of 1897 when I was captain of the Yale team,” Rodgers continues, “perhaps the most spectacular Yale victory was pulled off, when Princeton, with the exception of perhaps two men, and virtually the same team that had beaten Yale the year before, came on the field and through overconfidence or lack of training did not show up to their best form.  We were out for blood that day.  I said to Johnny Baird, Princeton quarterback:  ’Princeton is great to-day.  We have played ten minutes and you haven’t scored.’  Johnny, with a look of determination upon his face, said, ’You fellows can play ten times ten minutes and you’ll never score,’ but the Princeton football hangs in the Yale trophy room.