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).

Transcript

Darin Hayes 
My football friends, this is Darren Hayes at pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. We're going to pick up on a conversation we had recently with Dr. John Behee, who wrote a great book called Coach Yoast, Michigan's Tradition Maker. It's just a fantastic book on the life of football of Fielding H. Yoast, the most famous of whom is the Michigan Wolverines coach and tradition maker, just like the book title says. And Dr. John Behee, as we discussed in part one of this series, if you haven't listened to that yet, please go back and listen to it. It covers a lot of Coach Yoast's early career in football playing and coaching. And we're still in the early part of his career. Part one ended with his tenure in Nebraska, which was a one-year period in Nebraska. So we're going to pick up with Dr. Behee's conversation right now just to leave Nebraska. 

Dr. Behee 
Now, this is Yost; I can't do anything but brag. He goes back to each time he finishes a season back in West Virginia and talks about how great they were and how he was. After finishing the season at Nebraska, he goes back and talks to his players. The guy said, well, the guy who played next to him was coaching West Virginia, six foot four, 210 pounds, a wonderful athlete. And he was the other tackle in the Osos flank for the West Virginia team. And he talks to him about how great the guy says, you know, I've got to come out and play for you. And maybe I'll come out, and the Osos are thinking about, you know, well, you're slipping ringers over and down there. And he thought, what the heck? I got an idea. Maybe I'll run it past you, and then they will do it. Well, the idea was this big guy would come out. He'd pretend he came from a small Kansas town, a country bumpkin who had no ability and no coaching, and so the guy had to act the part. And out he comes, and they play Missouri, a really good team. And before he ever gets to the game, about two weeks before that, one of the athletes who was playing football finds this guy. He says, you know, most of the talent came from students. You didn't recruit talent very often, anyway. You played whatever was on our campus. And he goes, you're going to be off the football. You're pretty good. I mean, you're big. You've learned it pretty fast. And so he tells the coach about it, and the fellow who helped the Osos as a defense coach and line coach was Mr. Nate Smith. He was their basketball coach. He's the inventor of basketball. He's on the staff there to coach basketball, but Osos puts him to work with football. So, anyway. 

Darin Hayes 
Dr. James Naismith, wow, that's interesting too. 

Dr. Behee 
That's him. And so, and Naismith is not in on this. He does not know what's going on about this Krebs kid. 

Darin Hayes 
Yeah, well, let's make sure we say his name so that the player in question who used to play with Yost is George Krebs, correct? That's K -R -E -B -S. OK. You got it. You got it. 

Dr. Behee 
And so anyway, this was a typical thing for coaches, and they still do this some of the time. If they think a guy is pretty good, but they don't know if he has the mental toughness to stand a punishment and come back for more, grab about three of the guys who are pretty good players, and they say, and more came over. Let's see what he's made of. And they do. And so pretty cool. I mean, they really start pounding on him. And pretty soon, Krebs will come to life because he's a heck of an athlete. And he starts dealing him like cards, for a guy's sake. I mean, he is knocking him all around, and Yost calls off the dogs because he doesn't want to hurt the guy or hurt the players. All right, so Krebs plays for him. They wind up beating Missouri, and he doesn't come back to Lawrence, Kansas, after the game. He pleads for a mother to die or the death of the family. He's got to go, and he's heading back to West Virginia is what he's going to do, never to be heard of from again, except that Winterspruit Pagler, who was a sports writer who could have been a top-notch detective anywhere in the country. He decides that this thing, you know, has two mud. It taints. It smells. I've got to get to the bottom of this, and my gosh, he does. And he finds Krebs. And I think at that point in time, he's in the Carolinas. But anyway, he finds him and gets him to say, yes, it was a hoax. I came out there, pretended this as a, and so he said, and so Phog Allen is the great Phog Allen basketball coach in Kansas, and he is the AD. And he says, let's get him back here to celebrate. And so he decides he will come back. He'll come clean with them, tell them exactly what happened, and celebrate. He's getting up there in years, Krebs, and he knows while there are no rules against what he did, it was unfair. And so he comes clean, and they celebrate. He's coming back. He didn't live very long after that, as I recall. But anyways, another yost get by with that now for it. No one found out about that for at least 20 years. So he's done with Kansas. But that quest to learn, to be adventuresome, was there. And so he starts hunting for something out on the coast. He talks to the Sigma Chi boys, and they say Stanford needs a coach. And he makes the application. And, of course, now he has even more people to write for him. And so he's got, oh, they are loaded with endorsements. And they hire him. Oh, as a matter of fact, the manager of football decides that he will come out to a meeting of coaches, athletes, directors, whoever, in the East. And he will stop and see Yost in West Virginia. An Israel travel. And so now he has firsthand met him. And he wants him for sure. Stanford has just hired a coach, I'm sorry, a president who was at Indiana University. And so this president wants to get his hands in this mix. So he decides he has a meeting he wants to go to in the East. And so he goes out that way and meets with Yost. And is thoroughly impressed. So Yost makes his way then to Stanford for the 1900 football season. 

Darin Hayes 
OK, so he's already been at three schools, four schools, and coaches for a school in four years coaching. 

Dr. Behee 
I found out three, and this is his fourth year. This is his fourth school. He's got Ohio Wesleyan, he got Nebraska, he's got Kansas, now he's at Penn. 

Darin Hayes 
Right, Stanford is his fourth school. OK, gotcha. So he, so he's out there. He's got some, you know, some good talent out there that's sort of untapped. And I know he has a pretty good season at Stanford, but I found it really interesting that there was a player who played on a different team that sort of caught his eye during the season. 

Dr. Behee 
Yeah, well, first of all, you know, he's, he's wondrous, he's single, he's, he's never been to the West Coast before, he's all eyes and all ambition. The first thing they've got him going and doing is the freshman team. They're, and they're, there's only one, this is like Michigan and Ohio State, there's only one game. OK, and that's Stanford versus Cal. So he's got to get the freshman buddy, and he puts out the call and gets a very, very cute turnout. And he goes to the newspaper. He just did the; you see them, the articles in the newspaper, come on the class, ought to be out here, we got a lot of good messages here. Come on and be a, be a factor in terms of our school, help everybody out, help the school out, and out they come. It isn't long, and he's got about 18 freshmen out. And, and he's, he's, he is a whirling dervish. He's got things going; they're practicing and doing, making noise, and everything else. They wind up with one heck of a good turnout and with a pretty darn good team, but Cal has recruited from their area, says San Francisco, they have recruited some really good kids and, and they're just as pleased as they can be. And they know they're going to win. And before coming out there, two years prior to that, the mayor gave the governor of the state, I believe, a trophy to the team that won two games in a row, two years in a row, if you could win two in a row and, and Cal did. And they got a wonderful trophy, maybe the first game trophy ever in college football. And I got a picture of it. It's, you know, two athletes and two football players, and it's still on their campus to date. Anyway. So now you got to look at that. And they, and they, they kicked the Stanford's Keester pretty soundly. So Yost is fighting bats. And of course, Yost is never going to say, we're going to do, he's going to say, oh, yes. Hold on just a second, John. Yes, we have another visitor. You're right. 

Darin Hayes 
OK, I think he's calmed down now. OK, sorry about that. Yeah, OK. 

Dr. Behee 
So Yost, Yost is out there and he knows he's got his hands full trying to get people out to the game, out to the team. He does that successfully and then pretty soon he gets the Stanford newspaper on his side and he gets the students on his side and they wind up going up there to Cal and winning that game. 

Darin Hayes 
Wow!

Dr. Behee 
It's one heck of a game. Now, there's a very eventful thing that happens. They're playing in a park with a lot of low-income people living in that park area, and there's a factory there. And this is exactly, but they have both of them. 

Darin Hayes 
It's the Pacific Glassworks factory. 

Dr. Behee 
You got it. That's it. That's it. And they had an absolute catastrophe. First of all, they sell out the place. Now, there's no room. All these kids in that hole, in that area, they wouldn't have two dollars to get into the game anyway or a dollar. But you've got to find something. You have to climb a tree or do something. They climbed on top of that roof and just had it filled. And, of course, they're not going to sit still. They're going to cheer. And those dolls inside were tending that molten glass. And the roof collapsed. Now, we don't have a PA system at the football field. There's a whole lot of noise going on. But they have no idea in the stands what it is. They think that somebody must have done something. But they're making so much noise about the game itself that they can't focus on anything else outside. And there's no way for anybody to tell them that things are a mess. And the game continues on. And Stanford wins. That, I think, made a big difference to the Stanford president. He thought that's one good reason why we need to do something about football. Too big, too noisy, too out of control. And this disaster should never happen. So that's the freshman. He then gets to get the varsity going. He has tremendous success with adversity. And they play at the point you made a moment ago; they play San Jose Teachers School. It's one of those two-year schools where you're going to be a teacher. And they have a song by the name of Willie Heston, H -E -S -T -O -N. And thinks, you know, this guy is pretty darn good. We had a hard time stopping him when we played him. And they played him twice. So in any case, what he winds up, you know, I'm a little afield here. I'm not sure. You probably can help me out here. 

Darin Hayes 
Yeah, well, he gets done with the season and I believe San Jose was playing somebody else for a title game. Chico State. 

Dr. Behee 
overstate for the title game. You got it. And so Yoast is faced with his season. He's got time on his hands. He is a bachelor. He's a football nut. And he says, would you like some help? Yes. They played to a standstill prior to this. So now they're going to break the tie. As a matter of fact, I think they played several games, not just one. Could not decide who was the champion. So Yoast gets involved. And he moves Heston from the back. I think he's playing the right half. And he moved into what would be a tailback position in today's game. So he can now go right or left. They knew when he was playing the right half; he would only go either straight ahead or around to the left. Now, he could go either way. And I think they won something like 46 or nothing. So, do you remember what that score was? 

Darin Hayes 
Yeah, it was a pretty big blow -up, but this had never been done before, correct, that nobody had put a back directly behind the quarterback until then. This was a new innovation, new formation on the backfield, and quite successful. 

Dr. Behee 
Yeah, but just as a strategist, he's been a great general if he'd gone to the military. Oh, I mean, he would know how to outflank you, he would know how to fake this and get you going that way, and then you're not going to beat him, and that's the way he was as a football coach. But they gave him a cup at their banquet on the inter-season, so he came. He's got all loaded with trophies and accolades, and Stanford has decided we're going to go with alumni coaches. This thing is out of the hand, and we're not going to pay a coach that Yoast has made. These, of course, are in the East, and those guys are making about two to three thousand, so he's not going to do that. So we will not need you, Coach Yoast; thank you, but goodbye. So now he's looking for a job, but he thinks that he only talked to Sigma Chi guys, and they say, you know, I think Illinois might be, so he goes to Illinois on the way back home, and they say no, but New York Michigan's looking. He stops, Yost, does, in Illinois, and talks to the coach there, and he says Michigan's looking; I'll take your proposal, your request, and give it to them because we're going to beat in Chicago very shortly. Well, then there's Charles Baird, who was Michigan's director of football and athletics, and Baird's going to Chicago, and he gets that information. 

Darin Hayes 
But I bet you, Illinois, regretted that decision later. Oh, yeah 

Dr. Behee 
They had a guy; they had just hired a guy. So I think that's a part of it too. And you know, we're still young enough in terms of the information pulling across the country about who's doing what. We're still young enough that I don't think that they really knew just how good he was. But they would; they were gonna find out in the next five years. Everybody in the Midwest they're gonna find out who Peter Yost was. So anyway, he goes back, and he gets the information that the Illinois coach relays to Charles Baird; Charles Baird contacts Yost and says, let's talk about the terms. And so they talked, and there's nothing formal here. It's all just gentlemen's agreements and an honor system. And Yost decides that he'll come to Michigan. And he sends, he keeps all the scrapbook, all the writeups, everything else. He sends not only all the information or all the endorsements that he can get people to send, but he also sends a box of clippings that is estimated to have weighed about 50 pounds. So Charles Baird has some reading to do and see just wonders that he has picked up here, and we have a coach for 1901 at Michigan. Just to tease people's appetites about this guy.  

Darin Hayes 
Go ahead. We know he's in Michigan, but he brought some interesting things to Michigan that you bring up in your book. One of them is the training table. Maybe you could explain what the training table was. 

Dr. Behee 
OK, I'm going to do that. Let me jump back to help people understand why the first five teams he had at Michigan were called point-of-the-minute teams. In 1901, they went 11 -0 and scored 550 points to their opponents' zero. 1902, they scored 644 points. The opponent is 12, and again, 11 -0. 1903, 565 points. The opponent is 6, and that 6 was the tie-up at Minnesota. They went 11 -0 and 1. Now they've got 33 victories and one tie. 1904, 576 points. The opponent scored 22. They go 10 -0. Now they have won 43 games and tied one. And then in 1905, 495 points to the opponents to the fluke of safety that broke their winning streak at 56. Fifty-five games, 55 games, one loss then, but 2 -0 to an undefeated Chicago team and one tie. So now he has, you can see why they were called point-of-the-minute, and he's absolutely, at that point in time, clearly the best college football coach ever. 

Darin Hayes 
I would say that's a pretty good record there, with a lot of scoring and good defense. OK, but OK, so Let's go back. Let's talk about the training table a little bit, and then I want to go back into something else you talked about. Right after that, tell us a little bit about what the training table was. OK 

Dr. Behee 
Now, first of all, I wanted to explain; you know, I said that I did my dissertation on Yost, Fielding Yost Legacy to the University of Michigan, and then I did the story of Michigan's Black Letterman, and then I did a story about the Hudson High School football team over here in Michigan that won 72 games and set a new national record doing that, and I thought, you know, I think I'd like to do something else. And so I did some other things with industry and had some success with that, retired from my teaching, and retired from that, and decided all I'm doing is playing golf and worrying about my chipping and my putty, and I'm not leaving any footprints in the sands of time with my golf game. I need to get back to Michigan and find out how this guy's success formula was. And I did. I uncovered it, and I don't think anybody else has written this. First of all, you've got to have talent. I'll get to the training table here, and you've got to have talent. Now he goes to, while he's at Stanford, he sees Willie Heston, and he says to him, what do you want to do here? You're going to teach? What are you going to do? He says I want to go to law school. Well, tell you what, if you're thinking about law school, Michigan's going to be hard to meet. Yes, give it some thought, and that's all he said to him. That kid showed up at Michigan. He was getting ready to go back up to Oregon, where his home is, and he was at the train station, where there was a guy who came from Toledo with a round-trip rail ticket. So he goes about next door neighbor to Ann Arbor, and about 40 miles, 50 miles, and he sells that ticket to Willie Heston for a song. So Willie shows up on campus, Yost is there in 1901, and says, well, where have you been? What's going on here? And that's how he happened to get Willie Heston to Michigan. Now, Willie Heston, in four years at Michigan, you could play four years in college because this is kind of a prep school. It's kind of going to a grammar school or something like that. In any case, Heston plays 1901 and 1905, and so he won; he played in 43 victories in one tie, never tasted defeat, and was one of the greatest backs in the first 50 years of college football history. So that was talent search find number one. Then he has another guy out there who's his center, and he's not a good student, and so he was doing some makeup work. But he was a determined young man, and he got him to say, well, take a look at Michigan. And he did. So he comes to Michigan, and he becomes his center. Then he had some, oh, it's all by the name of Dan, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right. It's M -C -G -U -G -I -N. I don't know if it's McGuggin, from a Guggin, but anyway. Dan McGuggin was a wonderful guard, and he's about six foot and 200 pounds, and that's big for a guard out of Iowa. He had seen him when they were playing. When he was in Kansas, they played Iowa; it may have been Nebraska, but one of those two played Iowa, and so he got to know this guy. So he's coming back now from that he, Coach Yost, is coming back from Stanford to hit Michigan. He's coming by rail, but he can't pass up anybody he knows. So he has to get off the train and talk to this one, and he has to get off the train in Iowa and talk to Dan McGuggin. And he says, we got a great law school at Michigan; McGuggin says, I think I'd like to do that. All right, well, we'll put you to work until you come up. And he did. So he has three key players. Everybody else is he picked out of a student body, you know, but he got things going with the student newspaper, he got people out, and he built a good heck of a team. So, it was the first, but he had the talent; that was his talent search. He liked the idea of having early season training and experienced that in his second year at West Virginia as a player. And so he wanted to do that again. Michigan had already been doing that. They'd done it a couple of years before Yost got there, and they went over on not Lake Michigan but the other side, Lake Huron. And they had a campground over there. And the water was ice cold. The part of these guys would go through drills, but it was very important to get ready for the season. It was mentally important, too, and nobody shied away from it. And so they would jump in that darned water at the end of the drills and then run back to the cabin to try to keep them freezing to death. And the Michigan coaches liked that, and their athletic trainer liked that. Also, Kane Fitzpatrick thought that he just built a strong inner will and toughness. You're doing something nobody else has done. Yeah, you're not ordinary. You're above, you know, you're outstanding. So anyway, he did physical training, early season, cold swims, dips, and nutrition. I got the page. What page do I get that on? I think I wrote this down somewhere. I'll find it here; I know I will. Nutrition. All right, that's not right in front of me, but in any case, I have. In the Coach Yost book, which, incidentally, we're selling, we're not listening to beats. I gotta get off my podium here and get onto my, put my salesman's hand on here. If you purchased the Coach Yost book and Michigan's Tradition Maker, the menu they use is published there. And I saw that when I was doing the coursework for this, and how he's building in Kane Fitzpatrick. He's building not only physical training in fitness but also self-discipline. Do not, now, no alcoholic drinks, no tea, no coffee. I don't think tea or coffee would have hurt those guys at all. But just the idea, you know, a part of what we're doing here, here's the menu, here's all the things we eat and which we take care of you. We want you to have proper nutrition if we're gonna make demands on you physically. 

Darin Hayes 
It was part of their discipline of team building, is what you're saying, that the coffee and the tea as you say, has probably not hurt their nutrition, but just to make a self-sacrifice for the team, it sort of bonded them together. 

Dr. Behee 
That's exactly it, and that's just one time that they would do that in terms of building that part of the person's psyche. 

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.