I knew Bill Belichick had a fondness for old-time football, especially vintage books on the topic. I remember an old story from SI if I recall correctly where he cited that his favorite was an old book called ‘Kicking the American Football.’ That happens to be a book that I bought years before on eBay and it’s pretty cool.
Anyway, in a pre-Super Bowl presser this week Belichick talked about his love of football history and he mentioned a familiar name:
…And the books (my father) collected were really old books. I’d say he didn’t want anything really after 1960. And there’s surprisingly quite a few football books that were written in that era. So talking about the people that were featured in those books — people like Amos Alonzo Stagg, who coached Coach (Wayne) Hardin, who was the head coach at Navy. We talked about him yesterday. (Robert) Zuppke, (Fielding) Yost, (Walter) Camp. I mean, you can go all the way back to the 1900s and the teens. And then the pro coaches — (George) Halas and (Curly) Lambeau and so forth — all those people were prominent in the development of the game.
This struck me because while you tend to hear Yost’s name mentioned in these parts – from U-M people of course, or Notre Dame zealots screaming that Yost was a bigot against Catholics – I don’t think many outside Ann Arbor would put him on any Mount Rushmore-ish list of old-time coaches.
I didn’t grow up in the Ann Arbor area but was a football fan and played youth and high school football. Early on I certainly knew names like Pop Warner, Knute Rockne, and Walter Camp. I don’t think I knew of Yost beyond knowing it was the place Michigan hockey played its games. That changed later of course and now I’ve gotten to know the old boy pretty well.
Yost’s legacy outside Ann Arbor is an interesting topic. John Kryk discussed this in Stagg vs. Yost and I addressed it briefly in my recent lecture on campus this week. Despite a nearly unrivaled record of success in his Michigan career, headlined by the six national titles, he doesn’t seem to have the national reputation as an all-time elite coach. He’s more of a local/regional legend. It seems a couple of Yost’s rivals, namely Rockne and Amos Alonzo Stagg, and other men like Warner and Camp, stand out as more universally-recognized names.
Stagg is an interesting case. His name alone (once Paterno was removed following the mess at Penn State) adorns the B1G championship trophy. This despite his Chicago Maroons squad quitting football in 1939 and leaving the B1G in 1946. But Stagg built and maintained a reputation of being everything that is good about sports, a paragon of athletics virtue. Compared to Yost, however, his overall coaching resume doesn’t really hold up. Stagg at .667 is pretty far down on the all-time B1G win percentage list (Yost is at the top at .888), and his pair of national titles (vs. Yost’s six) speaks for itself.
I’m not knocking Stagg. There’s no doubt he and Yost (and later guys like Rockne) were innovators and responsible for putting ‘Western’ football on the map. And it helped that Stagg coached into his 90s, lived to 102(!), and was adored throughout his life. Yost died passed away at 75.
While I really only know about the other guys from my own experience and through the lens of Michigan football history, it seems the other names I mentioned stand out as national coaching icons – for various reasons.
Walter Camp established his winning reputation on the east coast at Yale in the early days. He also became a prominent sportswriter and seemingly was “the” voice on college football during the early days.
Pop Warner had big historic wins over traditional Eastern powers that undeniably elevated his status with the powerful east coast media. And Warner’s name remains closely tied to youth football around the country to this day.
Then there’s Rockne, whose fame was built during the run of his great Notre Dame teams in the late teens and 1920s. He and the Irish attracted a huge national following thanks to their travels all over from New York to Minneapolis to California. He and the Irish were media darlings and he was a wonderful speaker. Though tragic, it undoubtedly helped his legend that he died so young (43) in a plane crash in 1931.
Yost had the wins, as we know. He was also, like Rockne, an outstanding speaker and he traveled the country and delivered hundreds of speeches. But it can’t be argued that today Yost is considered on the same level as Rockne when it comes to being a coaching icon. You have to wonder if Yost’s penchant for boasting and bragging of his own achievements wore thin on his peers, and even with sportswriters of the day. Rockne knew that it was more effective to come off as humble or self-deprecating and to let others do the bragging for you (and they did).
It also hurt Michigan during the Yost era that it didn’t have much exposure to the east coast media as the men mentioned above. Early attempts to schedule games in New York fell through. While Yost did his part, over the years, to help kill the notion that Western football was of a lower quality to that of the East, there certainly was a bias in place during his most effective and memorable run from 1901-1905 (the Point-A-Minute teams).
More >> Check out the MVictors must-read book list including selections from John Kryk, John U. Bacon, John Behee (hey, that’s a lot of johns), and others here.
