More on Pop Warner

There is so much to discuss about the football history of one Coach Pop Warner that we just had to share more about the legendary coach.

When we last left our story on the history of football rules the discussion was focused on the contributions of a certain Glenn S. “Pop” Warner. Warner’s debut season of 1899 at the small Indian Reservation vocational school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to be exact. The remarkable game that season in particular against Columbia University where Warner introduced the ideas of the three point stance and an offensive shift, prior to the snap.

The three- point stance

The three-point stance is so common in today’s game it is basically a forgone conclusion that it will occur on every play but in the era of football around 1899 it was quite out of the ordinary. The common stance for line players was to be set before the snap by having their hands on their knees while slightly leaning forward. Pop determined that if sprinters in track thought they could get an edge in quicker starts by having a hand or two on the ground from a crouched position then why wouldn’t it work for a football player too. 

Warner’s contribution to the game was hardly complete in 1899 though. His story is still in the background phases as we bring the reader up to the date of our series in 1916.

More on Pop’s Carlisle career

Carlisle continued on the next few seasons under Warner’s guidance with some limited successes. The next real influential moment in football history that Warner and Carlisle had after the 1899 season occurred in 1903. As a matter of fact the innovation that Warner tried against Harvard was the talk of the 1903 season.

Before we get to the Harvard game that season we must review a game that took place a few weeks prior against Princeton. In the Princeton game they had probably the top Referee of the era, Mike Thompson. Warner told Thompson in the pre-game against Princeton that they had a play in their arsenal where as they would receive a kick and retreat all of their players to form a tight wedge formation. While the kick receiver would be concealed from the sight of the kicking team inside the compacted wedge, he would slip the ball under another player’s specially made jersey. A the same time the initial receiver would pull his own brown leather (not mandatory equipment at that time) off of his head and tuck it under his arms as if it were the ball. It is quite the diabolical plan but ingenious none the lass and under the rules of 1903, or lack of in this case, legal.      

The play was not used as foretold to Thompson in the Princeton game but when the renown Referee was presiding over a game of Carlisle Indians again, against Harvard it worked to perfection. Pop even went so far as to have the Carlisle school’s tailor, Mose Blumenthal, design a jersey that was laced with elastic to hold the ball in the back of Indian player Charlie Dillon’s upper torso garment. The play worked like a charm against the unsuspecting Harvard squad at the start of the second half. 

Carlisle quarterback, Jimmy Johnson, received the kick inside his own five yard line. The wedge formed and under the cloak of blockers Johnson tucked the ball under the rear of Dillon’s jersey. As Harvard players fought through the wedge formation to try and get Johnson who still appeared to have the ball, Dillon slipped out the back of the formation and down the field across the goal line. The only problem was that Dillon remained a “hunchback”a he could not remove the ball from the elastic design that worked all too well. He rolled around on the ground beyond the goal yelling to the befuddled Ref asking him, “Down, Mike? Down, Mike?”

The score was not recognized by the official though until Johnson immediately ran down took and took the ball out of his squirming and slithering teammate’s shirt and touched it down. The Indians went onto win 12-11 in that game.

Warner left Carlisle for a few seasons as he returned to Cornell but then triumphantly returned back to the small Pennsylvania Native American trade school in 1907 to field a team that would live on in tribunals of football lore. 

Warner would never have an undefeated season at Carlisle but in 1907 he got close. That season was the first for the infamous Jim Thorpe at the school. This 1907 was not so much of a powerhouse for having an then inexperienced Thorpe as a sub as they were for the style of offense they ran. Warner did not invent the forward pass but was coach in the East  who used the most with effectiveness. His starting backs were small so the forward pass was one way he countered for lack of size and the system worked.  Their only loss of the season came to Princeton in a game that many spoke of as overconfidence by the Indians rather than that of being defeated by a better team.

Please look back soon for more on Pop Warner in the next edition of Football History Rewind Part 36.

The banner photo is of Pop Warner while coaching at the University of Georgia in 1895, taken by an unknown.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: On This Day Sports, the Sports Reference's family of website databases & Stathead.com