JohnB wrote:
I'm surprised the pre-flight school had a team...or at least a team good/experienced enough to go up against a regular college team.
We are always told that the training was pretty tough, so would they have had the time for members to build a proper team to face a opponent which was presumably used to working together?
That would be a bit different than the intramural (class, squadron or flight) teams you would expect to find at the school.
Essentially, the University of Georgia kept its football team and renamed it for part or all of the war to create better optics. Many schools did that, some more successfully than others. So, this wasn't a bunch of recruits playing against true college players.
The Heisman trophy winner in 1942 was Senior Frank Sinkwich who played at the University of Georgia/Georgia Pre-Flight School. He played in the 40-0 defeat of Tulane, which was the game featured on that program cover. After Sinkwich's college career, he joined the Marines and got a medical discharge (bad feet) then went on to play pro football during the war with the Detroit Lions, being the NFL player of the year in 1944. He returned to the military in 1945 to play football on the 2nd Air Force team.