Stagg, Amos Alonzo (1862-1965)

views updated

Stagg, Amos Alonzo (1862-1965)

Amos Alonzo Stagg, the charismatic "Grand Old Man" of college football, was one of the sport's immortal leaders and innovative strategists. Stagg coached on the college level for an astounding 57 seasons. He started out at Springfield College in Massachusetts and, in 1892, became head football coach and associate professor of physical culture at the University of Chicago, where he enjoyed his lengthiest coaching tenure of 40 years. After retiring from the Big Ten school in 1932, he went on to the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he headed up the football program through 1946.

Stagg was born in West Orange, New Jersey, and attended Yale University, where he participated in several sports. In 1886, he pitched Yale to a victory over Harvard to win the college championship. He also played end on the football team, coached by Walter Camp and made the 1889 All-America squad. It was under Camp's peerless guidance that he became a student of the game. Stagg, who originally wished to become a minister, also developed the conviction that within football there existed the positive force with which to mold men's characters. This concept, which he adhered to with evangelical zeal, was to become one of the cornerstones of his football philosophy.

At the University of Chicago, Stagg became the nation's initial tenured football coach, as well as his era's most imaginative, enterprising, and dominant athletic mentor. His on-field innovations ranged from the "ends back" flying wedge formation to end-around plays and hidden-ball plays (in which he had his runners hide the pigskin under their jerseys). He instituted the modern T-formation and the flea-flicker pass and was the first coach to spotlight the forward pass in his team's offense. He also was fabled for devising forceful defenses. The one he employed against the powerful Harold "Red" Grange of Illinois resulted in a 21-21 tie in 1924 and a moral victory for his underdog Maroons.

Stagg was the first to organize scrimmage games. In order to decrease injuries during practice, he devised the tackling dummy. He also was the first to add numbers to the jerseys worn by his players. As a coach, Stagg was noted for his intensity. Occasionally, he would even suit up and illustrate for his players the way he wished them to block and tackle. "No coach ever won a game by what he knows," he observed. "It's what his players have learned."

Stagg coached in the era in which professional football first emerged and was in its infancy. As his University of Chicago football program became renowned nationwide, he seized on the idea to commercialize the sport. In this regard, he and the university's president, William Rainey Harper, served to transform football from an intercollegiate pastime to a high-profile, moneymaking industry. In their wake, for better or worse, universities came to be defined by the success or failure of their football programs. Stagg also was a crafty recruiter of athletic talent. In 1902, he established the University of Chicago interscholastic, a national track-and-field tournament for high school students—an event which served to acquaint him with the country's top scholastic athletes, whom he then could entice to enter his athletic program.

At the University of Chicago, Stagg amassed a 268-141 record and earned six Big Ten conference titles, along with a tie for a seventh crown. Upon his retirement in 1932 at age 70—when his football program was in the process of deteriorating—he moved on to coach at the College of the Pacific. At the end of the decade, the University of Chicago decided to close down its varsity football program. However, its unofficial demise came in 1938, when it was blanked 32-0 by a rising football power from California: Stagg's College of the Pacific team.

Stagg was 84 years old when he retired from the College of the Pacific in 1946. Incredibly, the following year, he became an assistant coach at Susquehanna College in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, working under his son, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Jr. The younger Stagg coached at Susquehanna between 1935 and 1954; his father remained at the school for six seasons. Stagg, Sr. did not officially retire until 1960, when he was 98-years old. During his career, he guided his teams to 314 victories, which ranks third among major college coaches (be-hind Glenn "Pop" Warner's 319 wins and Paul "Bear" Bryant's 323; division I-AA Grambling's Eddie Robinson is the all-time NCAA leader, with 408).

Stagg was the initial individual inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and coach and was cited as coach of the all-time Big Ten team. Across the land, high schools and athletic facilities are named for him, including those at the schools in which he coached. Each year, the American Football Coaches Association hands out the Amos Alonzo Stagg Award, honoring "the individual, group or institution whose services have been outstanding in the advancement of the best interests of football."

—Rob Edelman