Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they were known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden.

Grantland Rice coined this famous description in his game story about Notre Dame’s backfield—Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden—after Notre Dame defeated Army 13–7 at the Polo Grounds in New York City on October 18, 1924. The quartet had already gained a reputation for coordinated, fast, deceptive play, and the upset over a powerful Army team gave Rice the occasion to cast them in mythic terms. The “Four Horsemen” label quickly became a defining piece of Notre Dame lore and a landmark example of early 20th‑century American sportswriting’s elevated, literary style.

Rice frames a football backfield as an apocalyptic force, borrowing the Four Horsemen imagery to suggest inevitability, dread, and overwhelming power. By calling the biblical names “aliases” and substituting the players’ surnames as their “real names,” he collapses myth into modern spectacle: the gridiron becomes a stage where contemporary heroes assume archetypal roles. The passage also exemplifies Rice’s influence in turning sports reportage into narrative literature—transforming a single game into legend and helping to build Notre Dame’s national mystique through memorable, quotable language.

1) “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again.”
2) “In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death.”
3) “But these are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”