I invented the end-around, hidden-ball trick, fake punt, quick-kick, man-in-motion, double reverse, huddle, backfield shift, Statue of Liberty play, padded goal posts, and numbers on players' backs. Knute Rockne said, "All football comes from ____." He was a baseball player at Yale and turned down a pro contract. He invented the batting cage for baseball and the trough for overflow in swimming pools.
Clarke

Amos Alonzo Stagg: Just Who Was This Guy, Anyway?
by Ron Newsome, Ed. D.

“Who was Amos Alonzo Stagg?” To answer the question about the man for whom the NCAA Division III National Championship Game is named and his role in college football is, literally, to know the history of college football. Stagg’s career as a player and as a coach spanned a longer period of time than that of any other person associated with the game. He was a part of the game as both a player and as a coach when the game was nothing more than advanced English rugby. But as a head football coach, first at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA Training School, then at the University of Chicago, later at the College of Pacific, then as an assistant to one of his sons at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania and finally as a volunteer assistant at Compton Junior College in California; Stagg helped transform college football from the game of rugby to the wide-open, highly competitive game we know today.

Allison Danzig in his book Sport’s Golden Age, called Stagg—with Knute Rockne, Fielding “Hurry Up” Yost, and Robert Zuppke—one of the “big four” coaches of the 1920s saying, “Stagg’s influences are seen in every phase of the game of college football as we know it today.” Edwin Pope, writing in The Fireside Book of Football, stated, “Hardly a coach is now alive who has not ‘invented’ a gimmick for his offense or defense only to learn later, ‘Hell, Stagg used that years ago.’” Pope added, “He was football’s Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison rolled into one.”

Famed sports writer Grantland Rice listed three coaches that he called “great inventors” in the game. Of the three—Stagg, “Pop” Warner, and Zuppke—Rice did not pick a greatest, but he considered Stagg one of the “advance guard” of the football inventors. Former college coach Jim Tatum believed that the man who contributed the most to football innovations and strategy was Stagg, adding that Stagg “probably had more clever ideas about the game than any other man, present or past.” Such was the nature of the man who was an active coach longer than anyone in the history of the sport and for whom the Championship Game is named.

Bob Considine in The Unreconstructed Amateur wrote of Stagg, “It is not intended to be facetious to say that it would take you a hundred years to find a man like Amos Alonzo Stagg. Because maybe it would take you longer. As a person, as an unmatched figure and influence in his field, he is unique. There never was a man of Stagg’s stature in U. S. sports, and there never will be.” In his book Oh How They Played the Game, Danzig called Stagg “the dean of all football coaches, the patriarch of the game.”

Four days before his 100^th birthday, The New York Times of August 12, 1962, said of Stagg, “His was the most prolific mind football has known in devising and originating plays, formations and techniques that helped to shape the pattern of the American game that evolved from English rugby into the spectacular running, passing test of skill, brains and brawn that attracts millions annually.”

As an end at Yale, Stagg was named to Walter Camp’s first All-America team; but Stagg was also an outstanding baseball player, originally as a third baseman and then as a pitcher, pitching Yale to five conference championships.

He was instrumental, with James Naismith, in developing the game of basketball while both were instructors at the YMCA Training School and, in fact, scored the only basket for his team in the first public game of basketball in March 1892.

Stagg enjoyed overwhelming success as a coach, not only of college football, but also in nearly every other sport. When hired at Chicago by President William Rainey Harper in 1892, Stagg was “the” coach; and during his 41-year tenure at Chicago, he coached not only football but also baseball, track and field, and basketball. At Chicago, Stagg became one of the most notable coaches in college history, and his was a career marked by the most creative, ingenious and original influence the game has perhaps ever known. Though primarily known as a player in football and baseball and as a college football coach, Stagg also served as an assistant coach for the United States Olympic track and field teams, and he served on five Olympic Games Committees from 1906 to 1933. He also conducted the first tour of Japan by American baseball players, and he invented troughs for overflows in swimming pools.

For his achievements in the sport of football, he was voted into the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and as a coach, the first person so honored. For his contributions to the sport of basketball (the five-on-five game was his idea), he was selected for membership in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as a member of its inaugural class.

Truly, Stagg was a pioneer in the development of college football and one of the most innovative coaches in the formative years of the game in the United States during his professional career which spanned over seven decades. Pope, in his book Football’s Greatest Coaches, said of Stagg, “On number of years alone, Stagg was the number one coach of all time. No other football figure approached the ‘Grand Old Man of the Midway’ for inventiveness.”

“Lonnie” Stagg overcame a boyhood of poverty to become one of the most important figures in the history of college athletics—not just as a football player and a coach but also as the dominant college baseball player of his day, as an early contributor to the sport of basketball, as a preeminent figure in the early days of college and Olympic track and field and as one of the early leaders in the discipline of Physical Education.

Perhaps his greatest legacy was instilling in his players and his students the virtues of self-discipline, hard work, sacrifice and honesty—traits that he learned at home and traits that he subscribed to in his undergraduate and graduate years at Yale while playing baseball and football and studying for the ministry.

Amos Alonzo Stagg was born on August 16, 1862 in West Orange, New Jersey, the fifth of eight children born to Amos Lindsley and Eunice Pierson Stagg. At the time of Stagg’s birth, Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States and the country was embroiled in the Civil War. Stagg was seven years old when the first intercollegiate game of football was played in the United States—that infamous game between Rutgers and Princeton.

After finishing high school in 1883, Stagg attended Phillips Exeter Academy in order to prepare himself academically for Yale. Strongly influenced by his sister, his Sunday school teacher, and his minister at the First Presbyterian Church of Orange, New Jersey, Stagg chose to attend Yale because it had a divinity school…not for its athletic program.

Stagg entered Yale in the fall of 1884. In the spring of 1885, he tried out for the baseball team and was soon promoted to the varsity as a third baseman, not as a pitcher where he had starred as a high school player and at Phillips Exeter. Stagg was moved to the mound after Yale’s star pitcher was moved to catcher. In his five years on the mound (athletes at that time could play varsity athletics while in graduate school), Stagg pitched Yale to five conference championships and, after his senior season, was offered $4,200 to play for the New York Nationals. Stagg refused the offer because of his strong belief in amateurism…a belief that would be a part of his makeup throughout his professional career as a coach.

Stagg got involved in football at Yale almost by accident. Walking across campus on a fall afternoon, Stagg and a friend were invited to football practice by a former Stagg high school teammate, Charlie Gill. With little to do during the fall semesters, Stagg joined the football team but played little until the 1887 season, his junior year. After playing as a regular at right end as a graduate student in 1889, Stagg was named by Caspar Whitney and Walter Camp to their first All-America team.

By the time he had become a football star, Stagg had given up his life-long dream of becoming a minister because of his inability to speak effectively before large groups. Looking for an avenue to spread his ideals to young men, Stagg entered the YMCA Training School to prepare for a career as a coach, teacher and athletic administrator.

During his first year at the Training School, Stagg organized and played on the school’s first football and baseball teams. One of the players that Stagg recruited for the football team was a fellow graduate student named James Naismith. Stagg placed Naismith at center because, according to Stagg, “Naismith could do the meanest things in the most gentlemanly manner.” In turn, Naismith recruited Stagg to play for the faculty team in the first public game of basketball in March 1892. In fact, Stagg scored the only basket for his team as the faculty team lost to a team of students 5 baskets to 1. In his two years as head football coach at the Training School, Stagg’s football teams were a combined 10-11-1.

Stagg stayed at the YMCA Training School for just two years before moving to the University of Chicago where he spent 41 years as head football coach, chair of the Department of Physical Culture and as an associate professor—the first athletic coach in the nation to hold faculty status. Stagg was lured to Chicago by his former theology teacher at Yale, Dr. Harper, the new president at Chicago.

During his time at Chicago, Stagg helped organize the Western Conference—today’s Big Ten Conference. In his 41 years at Chicago, Stagg-coached football teams won seven conference championships, and his 1905 team was widely recognized as the National Champion after defeating Yost’s undefeated Michigan team 2-0. Most historians consider the 1905 Chicago-Michigan game the greatest game in the early history of American college football—certainly the greatest game in the “five-yards-to-gain” era of college football. Stagg’s Chicago teams won 242 games, lost 112 and had 27 ties.

Forced to retire by Chicago at age 70, Stagg’s football coaching career was not over. He moved to the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he coached for 14 years as head football coach. During his Pacific tenure, the Tigers won five conference titles including the school’s first-ever Far Western Conference crown in 1936. After the 1943 season—a year in which the Tigers won 7 games and lost 2—Stagg was named National Coach of the Year by his fellow coaches of the American Football Coaches Association, an organization that Stagg helped found.

Stagg compiled a record of 62-76-7 at Pacific. His 1946 team, in the final game of Stagg’s career as head football coach, defeated North Texas State Teachers College 14-13 in the Optimist Bowl in Houston.

After his Pacific tenure, Stagg joined his son Lonnie Jr. for a six-year stint as “co-coach” at Susquehanna College in Pennsylvania. The two Staggs led Susquehanna to a record of 21-19-3. After leaving Susquehanna to return to Stockton in 1953, Stagg—at age 91—began his association with Stockton Junior College as an “advisory” coach for head coach Don Hall, a former Stagg player at Pacific. Stagg worked as an “advisory” coach on a daily basis until 1960.

On September 16, 1960, the 70-year coaching career of Amos Alonzo Stagg came to an end when Stagg announced to Hall that he was officially resigning his position. At age 98, football’s “Grand Old Man” was through coaching. Stagg died in his sleep in a Stockton nursing home on March 17, 1965 at age 102.

“Who was Amos Alonzo Stagg?” He was a star baseball and football player at Yale and a member of the first All-America football team. He was the first college coach to win 100 football games and the first to win 200 games. He was the second coach in college history to win 300 games when he won number 300 on November 6, 1943 against St. Mary’s of California at age 81. His overall record as head football coach was 314-199-35. He was the first person inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a both a player and as a coach. He was a major organizer of what is now the Big Ten Conference. He helped organize the original Football Rules Committee in 1904 and was the Committee’s only lifetime member. He was chair of the NCAA track and field meet for 12 years. He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in the inaugural class in 1951 for his contributions to basketball.

“Who was Amos Alonzo Stagg?” He was perhaps the most important individual in the early history of college athletics and probably had more impact on the game of football as we know it today than any other coach. Throughout his career and along with all his tangible contributions to college athletics, Amos Alonzo Stagg was a shining example of honesty and integrity and pure amateurism in athletics—a spirit that is exhibited throughout NCAA Division III athletics. That was Amos Alonzo Stagg.

Sports Lore wishes to thank Ron Newsome for permission to reprint this article which had appeared previously at Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl.