Kellyanne Conway has admitted to making an error when she used the phrase "bowling green massacre" on MSNBC's "Hardball" on Thursday night. What she said in the show, in context, is "I bet it’s brand new information...that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here...and were the masterminds behind the Bowling green massacre. Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered." Twitterverse went crazy after the comments were made on "Hardball" with CNN tweeting their retort on Friday morning: "Kellyanne Conway is right," CNN's verified account tweeted, "We did not cover the Bowling Green massacre -- because it never happened" (February 3rd tweet).

Phrase described college football game

I have memberships with online databases for newspaper archives that date back hundreds of years. I decided to search the phrase "Bowling Green massacre" and lo and behold, the phrase has been used just once in the hundreds of thousands of historical newspaper articles that I can search over in about ten seconds with NewspaperArchive.com. Writing in October of 1977, Paul Cox with The Associated Press wrote an article called "For Findlay College Coin Toss Was Highlight" (The Messenger, Athens, Ohio/October 17th, 1977). The headline refers to a college football game where Findlay College played Bowling Green.

Cox notes, that there was nothing positive in the game for Findlay College after the coin toss as they lost 151-0.

The game, which was played back in 1921, is noted by Cox as one of the more one-sided contests in the history of college football.

151-0 unfathomable as a football score

Having personally been on the wrong side of some high school football drubbings, I still find it hard to imagine how a team could yield 151 points. That has to be just three-and-out over and over again followed by very quick touchdowns, perhaps many via blocked punts.

I guess it wouldn't be long before demoralization set in from the futility of being entirely outmatched.

Here's the Cox quote from 1977 in context: "Findlay did not score a single point in 1921. Besides the Bowling Green massacre, the team gave up 119 points to Defiance and 46 to Toledo." I guess that the revisionist history is that Iraqi refugees masterminded the football massacre in 1921.
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