Ryan Schneider couldn’t believe it. It was 2014, and the Buckhead patent attorney was scrolling through a sports memorabilia auction website when he came across a photo of a 98-year-old football. Schneider, ME 90, immediately and intimately recognized the item, even though he hadn’t seen it in nearly 40 years. The ball was faded, stained, and misshapen, with two laces missing from more than a century of being passed around the country. Schneider didn’t even have to read the inscription emblazoned on the ball in thick black lettering:
GA. TECH. 222
CUMBERLAND U 0
OCT. 7th. 1916
This football, possibly this very photo, had been emblazoned in Schneider’s memory since he was 7 or 8 years old, growing up a sports-obsessed kid just outside of Philadelphia in Wilmington, Del. He had first seen it in the Guinness Book of World Records, a relic of the biggest blowout in college football history, Georgia Tech’s 1916 home-turf shellacking of poor Cumberland College. At the time, the Yellow Jackets were coached by John Heisman, who had also led the Tech baseball team when Cumberland ran up the score on them 22-0 earlier that same year. Heisman and his Georgia Tech footballers were out for revenge. “I was into sports numbers and statistics—all the stuff on the back of the baseball card,” says Schneider. “And while I wasn’t big into college sports as a kid—always more of a Philadelphia pro sports fan—that lopsided score and that ball were seared into my mind.”
Coincidentally, Schneider’s father had graduated from Georgia Tech. And when Schneider’s own love of numbers led him toward mechanical engineering, the son became a second-generation Yellow Jacket. (His daughter, Lily, became a third-generation Jacket in 2022.) He brought with him a passion for sports, writing about Tech baseball, football, basketball, and golf for the
Technique for four years between 1986 and 1990. He remained in Atlanta after graduation and eventually fell into intellectual property law—a career that provided him with the means to indulge a penchant for collecting memorabilia. But even this experienced auction-goer was shocked to see this particular pigskin up for bidding. “Here was the actual ball? No way it’s on the market! I thought for sure that Tech had it or it was in the College Football Hall of Fame or something. This was nuts,” says Schneider. “But this was taking me back to when I was 8 years old. It’s my alma mater. There was no way I wasn’t going to get this ball.”
Since the online bidding was anonymous, Schneider had no way of knowing whether he was bidding against another alum or even an Institute representative, but he wasn’t taking that chance. After five or six bids, he submitted a late-night offer for $33,657 ($40,388 with the buyer’s premium). He woke up the next morning, owner of a piece of Georgia Tech history.
Elated, Schneider held on to the ball for about a week to share it with his kids, who were around the age he was when he first learned of the record. Then he contacted Tech and arranged to donate the artifact to the school for display. “I’m not so much into what the ball stood for—beating the hell out of another team and piling on,” says Schneider. “And I don’t worship items. But holding that ball, it was hard to breathe. Maybe now, when an 8-year-old or someone walks through and sees the ball, they’ll have the same feeling I had.”