Fielding Yost the Later Years

The general respect that Coach Yost paid to his players made them love him. His teams were ready as Dr,. Behe points out that there were four main reasons for his and his football teams' successes: Curiosity; Risk Taking; Preparation; and Charisma.

This book, Coach Yost: Michigan's Tradition Maker, has so much football history in it, and you can tell the passion by which its author speaks that you are in for one great football history lesson from this Pigskin Professor, Dr. John Behee.

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.

Fielding Yost and his later years in coaching and administration with biographer Dr. John Behee. Here is our transcript of this portion of our conversation:

We are going to learn more from Dr. Behee in just a moment. This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatches, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history on a daily basis.

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hays of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the pigpen, your portal to positive football history. And we're going to go into our recent conversation with Dr.

John Behee on his excellent book Coach Yost Michigan's Tradition Maker. You can find that book at behee.com. It's B-e-h-e-e .com. Dr. John has some great lines of communication to get you through some vendors that are selling this book.

That's outstanding. I read it is a must-read for football historians out there, especially lovers of early football and some of the brilliant minds of football, like coach Fielding Yost. So make sure you get that. In our conversation, we listened to the first parts of one and two, and if you haven't listened to either one of them yet or maybe one or the other, go back and listen to them because Dr.

Behee has such exciting insight into Coach Yost. Fielding Yost is a fascinating subject to discuss and read about, so ensure you do that. Earlier, we discussed part one of his early life and how he became a football lover, player, and early coach. Some of his early assignments as a coach, and then we got into part two, a little bit about his winning ways. He caught on and was winning right away. You got Stanford Michigan and just dominating teams that his team that Michigan played, and Stanford played, and he was really developing a good routine.

Well, now we're going to get into Dr. Behee's conversation on how Coach Yost motivated his players and made them truly one of the best teams in football history. And we'll get into that here. Here's Dr Beehe.

As I went through this research, I could see Coach Yost and his trainer, Keen Fitzpatrick, who was a world-class track coach. I could see them building the mental side of it as they went along.

When Yost started teaching skills, they were not going to be doing them correctly or perfectly at all, and they might get discouraged. You know how people can be their own worst enemies. They said to find their mistakes and beat themselves up for them.

And he would never let that happen. Never let it happen, and continue the belief that you are not only going to get it, you're going to get a form of better than anyone you play against. You will demonstrate to them how smart a guy you are and how tough you are.

I mean, eventually, he continually built that self-confidence trilogy. It was easy for people who played this game. There's a lot of point scoring here. I just gave you what they did in 1901 and 1905; they had swagger.

They were so dominating that they could see the opponents as they began to crack and collapse, even in the really big games. But they they knew eventually, they would break the will of the opponents. They were so bright because they were conditioned mentally by Yost and by Team Fitzpatrick.

Now, here's another one. I'm going to get to the one you asked about here. But anyway, rules knowledge. Rules knowledge! Now, you did some officiating for about 27 years. Yes, sir. And did you witness any examples of students or athletes who did not seem to know the rules and, therefore, suffered a penalty because of it?

No, absolutely. There's a lot of – I found it very interesting that Coach Yost taught them the rule because it probably would help almost every team out there at the high school and collegiate level, with the players knowing as well as the officials.

And it definitely helps the game go much smoother, and they can find advantages within the rules to gain over their opponents. Yeah, and so they never lost games because of a lack of knowledge of the rules.

I had a good battle that they got into the Big 10. You undoubtedly read that Michigan got bumped down to the Big 10 because they didn't want to buy some of the rules that have been put in place by the faculty.

So they've got to the east to find their opponents, and they play the pin, and the Yost is up on the rule and pin is not, and he tells the officials, and officials say, you know, Yos is correct, and then the pins say, then we're not going to play.

You can take the team and go home, but I can play, okay? And so the officials return to the ocean and say that's a big problem here. They are just not; they refused. If you say they cannot run that play that way, and I know you're right, they won't play.

Let's figure out a way to get the game going. And, so, Jospy Lynch. And they wanted to plan the games. But the point is that he knew the rules better than the officials, for God's sake. He talked to the players, and there's a fascinating photo of Coach Yosh, where they're meeting at the boarding house.

They're getting their food there. They have something there on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, five days. And I've got the page. I forgot what page it is. Anyway, I have all of the agenda.

One night, it was rules. So they had to come in with the written rules and quiz each other. And it had to be fast-paced. We move quickly, and the game moves quickly, so you have to make quick decisions correctly.

That's innovative coaching. When you know the rules quickly because you've rehearsed them, you're not going to make mistakes and give games away. And they didn't. Here's another one.

Cross-training. Now, that one got me. No player would know what position he was going to be playing. Because Joost said, you will play the position where you can help our team the most. I'm going to play quarterback. I'll do this and that because I will get a lot of ink.

They won't tell you that, but that's what they think. I'll feel a lot of pressure over that. No, that's not true. I'm a receiver. No, you are where you can help our team the most. We are, first and foremost, teams.

And the other thing that did was that you couldn't hurt them with an injury, and they were rarely injured. They were in outstanding physical condition, excellent in terms of training and mechanics, and they could play almost anywhere.

So if you hit, somebody went down, somebody else was in. And the other thing too, now this is not, one of the articles that I've read in the Michigan Daily that impressed me was talking about eligibility, and sometimes when I know that this was true with Stag at Chicago, he had some outstanding players, but he also had some players who refused to go to class.

They weren't dumbbells, they were just lazy guys, and they could get by with it because Stagg would go to the professors, and of course he had a president who would back him up on anything he wanted to do, including getting faculty members to give people grades.

It's because we gotta have a football team that represents Chicago well. When that whole thing was coming up and being discussed in papers and in admission, The faculty athletic representative at Michigan said, I can't remember once when Yos had a player who had conditions and had to work them off before he got back to play.

I cannot remember when he came and said you got to give him a better grade. He took the players that were available and played with them every single time. and the guys who were not academically eligible set out until they got their conditions worked off and get back into play.

That's remarkable. That is quite a testament to the coach, that's for sure. Yeah. Now you've got game participation. He was a perfectionist, my God. He knew more about what you wanted to do than you did if you were the opposing coach.

He knew your players better than you knew them, and he taught his players to analyze the opponents. Now, the coach is the only one who can make decisions around here. You guys have to know how tough it is for your guy to get over that.

What can we do? Do you need to double up on one guy? What do you do? What does he need to make them think and continue things? Of course, you received tremendous support from the paper and student paper at the rally.

4 ,000 students would come for a rally on a Friday night. It was a university hall at first and then became Hill Auditorium after that, when that structure was built. But they've run songs, cheers, and he would say all the right things to them.

He could hold that crowd of 4,000 students in the palm of his hand. If he were quiet, taking a measured speech, they would sit on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next word. I mean, he was a master of psychology.

Doctor, can I interject in here? You have a couple of things where you show where Yost is in some uncomfortable positions, and he makes some statements that are really quite remarkable. The one you were saying with the point-of-minute teams when they were on that great winning streak that they had, and this isn't verbatim what he said, but he basically said it wasn't his job to stop his team from performing at their peak, that was his opponent's job to do.

I found that to be interesting. I guess he was running up the score he was being questioned on. Yeah, and his whole point was that all this is good. It almost sounds like all I ask of you is everything. You know, you loved me for a lot of my life. You know, that sort of thing.

That's all I ask of you. That beautiful music from Phantom of the Opera. All I ask you, man, is that you give me 100% for every single play and practice in the game. That is all that I asked. So, the concept is that you cannot take the day off.

You can't take a playoff; I need you every single play. He started telling them this at the start of the season, during spring training and fall workouts. He started to tell them, we run people off the field.

In the Iowa game, let's see, this is 1901, 1902 I think it is, yeah, in December. Now they like to play the Michigan does, the final game in Chicago because you get a good crowd. So they're going to play Iowa there.

Iowa is going be the final games of the season. I think Chicago is about game number eight in that year. So, they are going to play in Iowa. Iowa has an excellent team. Michigan runs against Iowa in 217 plays.

I mean, it is just when you talk to me all if I'm going to if we're going to be the kind of team that I want you to be, he says we do not stop for people we call the play while we were unscrambling from the previous play so we know and I and the center have got to get right back where he can set the ball and anybody who's late getting back there is going to hold the whole team up you have to get back and get in the position we're going to go and go. It doesn't take very much for a team to; he's got them all stuck in the air on defense, and his team is going wild.

That whole concept of being able to play any position, being to play fast. What was your comment that brought this on that sparked me to go in this direction? What were you just saying about this?

Yeah, he says it wasn't his job to stop his team from performing at their peak and running up the score against somebody. That's his opponent's job, to start his teams from scoring. And yeah, because all I can do is coach my team, and you see how I'm coaching my team, we are going to go, go go.

And he's in practice at Michigan. He's got them going up and down the field doing single drills, and he is shouting, hurry up, come on. Hurry up. The students nicknamed him Fielding "Hurry Up" Yost.

They found a new initial for the H—a new word for the "h" in his little name. Yeah, and so then he loved it. He just, oh, it brings a smile from ear to ear for it to be called Hurry Up Yoast. And see, I'm trying to think where I was going to go next.

Anyway, see the concept of fast, fast play. Go ahead. Well, I wanted to mention another statement that he made sort of on the other end of things when he was sort -of in a sticky situation, uncomfortable situation.

You have in the rare cases that his Michigan team suffered a loss, you have them quoted as saying, if you lose, don't find excuses; just congratulate the winners and move on. That was a powerful message to his players.

And, yeah, and I've got a page in here where I just, there are so many hurry-ups, I didn't want to put them all in the book, but I set ones that were a pretty choice, and you read those, if you're a coach or if your person who's working with youth sports, you look at that and say, I want to use that.

My goodness, one of them was that we didn't have time to get even. So if there's been an unfair situation like the last play, forget that because the next play might be the one that wins the game for us. You hear that enough.

You learn to be thick-skinned. Words of wisdom, that is, too. We could all probably use that in all walks of life, not just football. Yeah, and then back to the coaching about the officiating, one of his career officers said, you have not been assigned to referee this game.

That's in someone else's hands. We have given you other assignments. You focus on yours. I'm thinking; I've seen so many people, the teams out there where they're trying to show the official East Holding Michigan, you know it said all that gets you is some of the disappointment of the officiating crew that you have to beg and beg for God's sakes play the game pal learn to play in the games.

No, I think I bet you that's probably where coach Bill Belichick and in our modern times gets it where he just tells his players to do their job. That is all you have to just do your job. Don't worry about anything else.

Just do your job." Yeah, and the other thing, too, that I feel this is a part of Coach Joe's success formula is that the respect he had for officials, I can tell because I've watched enough sports events, I can tell when a coach has an official who will not hurt him with his calls.

You can just tell it. And you can when they're homers. Sometimes, if it's blatant, you can't tell. When they are hovering for the basketball, they call it that. There's a guy who's got four on him, and out he goes, and the game goes to the other team.

I mean, I can see that stuff. He had such great rapport with the officials that they were proud to cook to officiate his games. And he had enormous respect for the game. Did you see some examples and the coach's book where he kind of got hosed at the time by people?

They go so fast. His team does. The only way we can stop him is to fake injury. So we do that. And so then he stuck. But there are a couple of really good examples of that that I show in the book. And what did he do?

Okay, all right. Iowa went back when he was in Kansas. And so they're fending injury, and then finally, they show up late for the game. It's an afternoon game, so you're out of daylight, and they know they are going to go fast, so he has to argue every play to coach this for Iowa, has to argue every play, and delay, delay, and finally comes out at the end of the game, they all says it's too dark, Kansas is going to go back ahead, or not Kansas, I forgot, maybe Nebraska, they're going have a chance to go ahead in the games, so he comes up and says, it was too dark we've got to quit, quit.

The Yost team got the short end of a stick there in several ways throughout the game. He shakes hands and goes home. He is not going to do anything that would bring discredit to the game; he is going to preach clean football, and when it's over, it is over.

That is a lesson that we can all learn from, I think. And I think it's a good time to bring up another point that you make; you say multiple times in the book that in all those years of coaching, he never once said a curse word at a game or practice.

And that's unbelievable for what he was teaching and these men that are aggressive and doing aggressive actions and probably did some things that he didn't like and never to have a poor choice of words that would offend anybody.

I thought that was a remarkable attribute of Coach Yost. He's really a classy guy. A braggart, my God, yes, and he just beat you to death because he's so much better than you are. You don't even get a chance to lick your wounds; he is already getting press releases.

So there are a lot of reasons to not like the guy, but no cuss words. In the 26 years I've been on coaching programs where, I don't think the guys could go 26 minutes without coaching. And their feeling is that this is a part of the way you inspire athletes to do something difficult.

Well, I know some coaches who can't go 26 words without saying a curse word. Jared, you got it right. So that's a remarkable, remarkable record. No one keeps records like that. And then also drinking.

He was a teetotaler without questions the whole time. Interesting guy and very remarkable. Okay, now before I let you go, I want you to tell me in your own words you've written a biography on this man twice, so you were the foremost expert, I think, on Fielding Yost that is around, that's ever been probably, besides Field in Yos himself.

So what is maybe the one quality? Could you just say one thing about Coach to somebody to sort of sum him up? What would that be? Or one story, you know, however, you want to sum it up? First of all, he was a perfectionist.

He left nothing to chance that he could influence in a positive way. He was remarkably flexible in his approach to the game while people would come up with an offense that someone was doing really, especially some of the East, Harvard, and Yale, that they were doing very well.

And then they just copied that. He didn't copy anybody. He was as innovative as they come. Looking back over 29 years of coaching, four major traits, calm strengths that we will can be seen in Coach Yost.

They seem to be replicated in most high achievers in many different occupations. First, curiosity. Yost had an insatiable desire to learn. It drove him from a country schoolhouse to a law degree. From the East Coast to the far West, a trip he would eventually take 20 times from his father's outfitting supply store to a deep understanding of mineral exploration.

From preparing a young team for a football game to building a program that would produce national champions. He never stopped thinking and learning. Second, risk-taking. As a college athlete, Yost chose to test his athletic and mental skills against the best.

He made mistakes, learned from them. And incidentally, that's why risk -taking is so important to high achievers. because you then learn how to handle defeat and come back in a different way, learning, having learned more, and overcome the the loss.

He chose an occupation, the hunt for veins of minerals, a business fraught with risk. Then he said about to learn enough to turn risk into profit. And setting a schedule at Michigan, he loved the high stakes big games.

Third, preparation. He learned that his success was coarsely aligned with the thoroughness of his preparation. Fourth is charisma. Back in 1970, when Vinnie Ustrand, Michigan's great, great all-American, read my manuscript of the Oost, the host and his coach.

I asked him, what was it about Coach Yost that you were most impressed with? He did not hesitate. He said when Coach Yost entered the room, he had a commanding presence. He had charisma. When he put pen to paper, he made his ideas clear and convincing.

His self-assurance moved our teams from We should do it; we can do it in practice to We will do it by game time. Looking back on Coach Yost, he gave evidence of that leadership quality even in those early coaching years.

I don't think I'm reading this now correctly. I am getting a little bit of an error here. And then, of course, well, I think that's it: curiosity, risk-taking, preparation, charisma. Wow. That is really some great wisdom for coaching in any sport in an era that could be very valuable to anybody out there.

And I thank Coach Yost for sort of learning that on the fly in from some great people that he was around, and you know his great networking ability, and I'm going to get on my soapbox here for a little bit because you doctor your book is so filled with information about Coach Yost, but at the same time it preserves such a great period in football history, and there there are so many little stories and tangents that we could have gone on in this conversation, and I think I'll save that for your readers to get a copy of the book and get this and once again you can get that it's called Coach Yost Michigan's tradition maker behe .com and he's got some information here where you can go to, and you'll learn all these little stories and the ins and outs not only about Coach Jost but some of the other aspects of football it goes into a lot with you know like Coach Amos Alonzo's stag and some rivalry he had with there.

There are so many little stories that I'm going to treasure and probably read again here real soon because it's just such a fascinating book, and the readers will find that excessively satisfying to their football appetite as I have.

And just one of those books is great. And Dr. Behee, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing with us this incredible story of Dr. Jocelyn for sharing and writing this second book to give us this information on this great man in football history and preserving the football industry.

So thank you, sir. You're welcome, and Darin, thank you for having me. And if we get some conversations going later on, you and I, there were some exciting things we need to discuss. First of all, in that 1903 game, We had one of our students in Michigan who was really good at telegraphy; the telephone company built him a 40-foot tower near the 55-yard line, which was Midfield, and he sent back information to the students gathered at the university in the hall, so they had ten telephones.

Well, anyway, it was very interesting how they got some play-by-play in 1903. And then we got sophisticated enough. One of the Ohio State faculty fellows in the 1910s and 15s came up with a grid grab.

It was a big football clock. It had all kinds of information on it, like the game, you know, the scoreboards today. And that thing—we didn't have about 4,000 students sitting there watching that game.

They couldn't get up to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to play, to see the game, so there were a number of things there that I think were really interesting that would surprise people who did not know what those innovations were.

We will have you on again. And we can do some other things for your listeners. Okay, I find that they gotta get your book. That's for sure. That's for Sure, Dr.

Thank you again, and we will talk to you again soon. I'll get you on another podcast here. Thanks.

Thanks, Darren. That was a great conversation.

We have Dr. John Behee, a great biographer, writing about Coach Yost, Michigan's tradition makers, the book's name for the second time. You can get it at behe .com, B -E -H- E -DOT -COM. You could look for the links here in the show notes or go to pigskindispatch.com for any one of the three parts that we've had with Dr. John Behee talking about his Coach Yost book. A great coach, part of football history, and some of the traditions that Michigan has been carried on through all, even to this day, some a hundred-odd years later. So, it was a great book and a great conversation. Thank you Dr. Behee.