Hurry Up Yost

Our Guest, Author Dr. John Behee joins us in the Pigpen to discuss the legendary football coach Fielding Yost and the fantastic "Point-A-Minute Teams" of the early Twentieth-Century.

Our guest in the podcast above is Dr. John Behee and he is the author not one but two biographies on Coach Fielding Yost. His latest, after over 50 years of research is titled Coach Yost: Michigan's Tradition Maker. Dr. Behee achieved a degree in History and then furthered his education at the University of Michigan and even got to spend some time as a graduate assistant coach for the Wolverines during his stay there. This kindled his passion for the football program's history and traditions and when he looked into them, the name Fielding H. Yost jumped off the pages, and the campus. Behee wrote his dissertation for his PhD on Coach Yost. Some 50 years later after that original published work, he recollected his notes dug a bit deeper and found even more revelations about this amazing coach from the early 20th century.

Fielding Yost coached at Ohio Wesleyan, Nebraska, Kansas and Stanford in consecutive seasons before he found himself hired as the head coach of the Michigan Wolverines. He had great teams at those other schools but his best work of coaching was yet to come as he used everything he learned from his playing days and tenure as the field boss to mold his squads into the top tier of gridiron squads.

In Yost's first five years as Wolverine's head coach, his high powered teams compiled a record of 55–1–1. They played stifling defense and on offense played fast, looking for any advantages they could exploit in their opponent's defense. These Michigan teams outscored their opponents by a whopping margin of 2,821 to 42. The teams from the years of 1900 to 1905 became known as Yost's "Point-a-Minute" teams, because their offensive production resulted in an average of at least one point being scored for every minute of play.

According to Wikipedia many Michigan's coaches and players from the Yost era have been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. The five coaches are Yost, Little, Wieman, Bennie Owen (assistant coach in 1901 who later won acclaim at Oklahoma), and Dan McGugin (assistant coach in 1903 who later won acclaim at Vanderbilt). The players are Neil Snow (end, 1898–1901), Willie Heston (halfback, 1901–1904), Germany Schulz (center, 1904–1905, 1907–1908), and Albert Benbrook (guard, 1908–1910).

The picture in the banner above is from the Wikipedia Commons photo collection of the Public Domain of Photograph of 1905 College Football Western Championship match between Michigan Wolverines and Chicago Maroonsby George Raymond Lawrence (1868-1938)

Special thanks to Dr. John Behee, and his wonderful book  Coach Yost: Michigan's Tradition Maker.