Football History

Fielding Yost coached at Ohio Wesleyan, Nebraska, Kansas, and Stanford in consecutive seasons before he was hired as the head coach of the Michigan Wolverines. He had great teams at those other schools, but his best coaching work was yet to come. 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.

Fielding Yost's impact was immediate as the head coach of the Michigan Wolverines. In his first five years, his high-powered teams were virtually unstoppable, compiling a record of 55–1–1. They played with a stifling defense and a fast-paced offense, always on the lookout for any weaknesses in their opponent's defense. The results were staggering, with these Michigan teams outscoring their opponents by a massive margin of 2,821 to 42.

The teams from 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.

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.

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.

Yost grew up in West Virginia, and his family had a store where equipment for the mining industry was sold. Yost participated in hard work as a youngster at the urging of his mother; he attended Ohio Wesleyan to become a teacher. He taught school for about a year and then decided he needed more out of a career to satisfy him, so he returned to school at West Virginia University. There, he was introduced to playing football as his rugged build and strong stature made him a perfect candidate to play tackle in single platoon football of the era. He soaked it up like a sponge and enjoyed the game.

Fielding Yost the early years of his football journey with biographer Dr. John Behee. Join us in this exciting discussion with the biographer and expert on this important person in the development of the game.

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A look at the early yardage penalties in football and the evolution of the yardage enforcement on Football Arcaeology

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Timothy P. Brown explains why we often forget about the 1902 Rose Bowl Game, in his tidbit How We Forgot, Then Remembered The 1902 Rose Bowl.

-Transcription of Fielding Yost and the Fake Field Goal with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, Darin Hayes and PigskinDispatch.com. It is Tuesday, and once again, we are going to visit with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thank you.

Look forward to chatting again. I think we've got a good one to cover this evening. Yeah, this one is a subject that I know a little bit about.

I've talked to an author that's wrote quite a bit about this famous coach, Fielding Yost of Michigan. This is probably his most famous stance or most famous position. That's where the school he's most associated with.

Let me try to get that out of my mouth. But you have a very interesting story on him that sort of takes back through his whole career and sort of settles a dispute by digging through the old newspapers and everything. It's a really interesting, great job of work on your part.

I will let you take it from here, sir. Yeah, thank you. This is one that you're kind of digging around for playing detective, reading old newspapers.

All of a sudden, you find something that I wasn't expecting, quite the ending to the story. This is one of these ideas or issues where everybody talks about football. There's nothing new, right? There's nothing new in football.

Everything gets recycled. Everything gets adapted. That's, at some level, reasonably true.

There are certain true innovations, and one of those is embedded here. It's also a bunch of these people copying ideas over and over again. Part of the funny thing about this story is that there's an instance where things got copied, and this sports writer didn't know that.

Apparently, it was the first time he saw this occur in a game. What it was is that I came across an article from a 1913 game when Michigan played Penn. During the game, Michigan attempted a fake field goal.

This writer just wrote a follow-up after the game about this fake field goal attempt and praising Fielding Yost, talking about what a great innovator he is and blah, blah, blah. When I came across that, I was like, is that possibly the first time somebody ran a fake field goal? I would have thought, even just due to a bad snap or whatever, somebody would have tried one. Then maybe said, geez, this works pretty well.

I'm going to do this again. I'm going to back up just a little bit and say that until 1886, every field goal attempt was a dropkick. There was no snap from the center to a holder who held the ball for the kicker.

It took some human beings to figure out how to do that. It turned out it was these two brothers who played at Otterbein in Ohio, a small school there. They figured out, hey, we could snap the ball, have a guy hold it, and the kicker could kick it.

We've got a better chance, especially under the right weather conditions, a place kick typically had more power and was more accurate than a drop kick because the ball didn't bounce true off the uneven turf and grass at the time. We moved ahead then to 1913 and this Penn-Michigan game. Michigan sets up for a regular field goal attempt.

They snapped the ball, but instead of the holder putting the ball down on the ground, the kicker moved forward and swung his leg forward just like normal, but the holder stood up and then went sprinting around the left end. He scored a touchdown rather than the field goal attempt. Part of what's funny about that is that the writers said, this is tremendous.

The execution of this play was incredible. In fact, the play got called back due to holding, so the execution wasn't that great. Then it was like, here was a fake field goal, obviously a planned fake field goal.

I started looking around, when did these things first occur? As I said earlier, 1886 was the first time that any team snapped to a holder and then executed a placement kick. The first fake field goal that I could find, and this is just through searching newspaper articles, was an 1897 game between Kansas and Iowa when Kansas faked a field goal. Then, the next year, the second one I found is 1898, when Nebraska ran a fake field goal against Kansas.

The guys who did it, as far as I can tell, invented it, and have it executed against them the following year. Then the key thing about that, or the interesting thing about that, is that the coach of Nebraska in 1898 was Fielding Yost, a coach at Michigan whom this writer was just effusive with praise about. So anyway, after doing additional searching and everything, there were fake field goals all over the place.

I'm not saying there were thousands a year or anything like that, but most years, once the placement kick from scrimmage got started, people were also executing the fake field goals. Unfortunately, the writer was an anonymous column, so I couldn't figure out who the writer was that came up with this because otherwise, I would have tried to reach his relatives and tell them that their grandpa was lacking in his football history skills. Okay, so Kansas did it first, and then they had it done against them the following year by Nebraska.

That's correct. Fielding Yost was the coach at Nebraska, and then he was coach again at Michigan when they did this in 1913. Well, I was trying to think about it, because I know from a previous author I had on the biography on Yost, I know he was in Kansas too, but I'm looking right now, he was in Nebraska 1898, he was at Kansas 1899, so it was reverse, where I was thinking he might have been a coach for both of those games, head coach who did it, but he was Kansas on the other side.

And then he ended up, he was at Stanford, right? In 1900? Yeah, Stanford, and then at the end of the season, San Jose State, he did a championship game and then went to Michigan. Pretty well-traveled coach. Yeah, for a little bit there.

And he was Ohio Wesleyan before all of that too. And he was a ringer when he played in college too. Yeah.

He went to West Virginia, but he played for Lafayette in the big game where they took down Penn and snapped their win streak, whatever it was, 2018. Yeah, Park H. Davis, the famous historian, was the coach of Lafayette. So yeah, there's a lot of historic ties there.

Which is why he names that team the National Champs. Yeah, he named a lot of odd ones, National Champs. You can go back and scratch your head a few times.

Yeah, that's a really, really cool story. I love how that sort of circles back around to him, you know. And what was there, 20, almost 20 years in between, 15 years in between the plays.

But I guess the credit is due to him in some respects. Yeah, well, hey, you know, he picked up something, he saw something he liked and executed it. Yeah, plus I think there was, I don't have my note here on it, but I'm almost positive Michigan ran a fake field goal too before the 1913 game, so under Gilst.

Yeah. You know, it brings back that fake field goal. And I'm sure it wasn't a rule at the time.

I'm sure it was a rule put in afterwards. But there was a rule in high school, and I think it was at the collegiate level too, that if somebody, you know how a holder was usually down on a knee to take the snap. That's the only exception where you can have a live ball with a person with their knee on the ground.

So with that exception, they have to hold for a kick or an attempted kick. So if that holder is on a knee, takes that snap, and stands up and throws a pass or runs, it's a dead ball because he was a runner with his knee on the ground with a live ball. So I'm sure, like I said, it probably wasn't back in that era.

They probably put it in. So we had a game, a high school game, where a very clever coach told us before the game, you know, usually they want to make sure we don't kill their brainstorm idea that they had all overnight or something. This guy would get down in a catcher's position.

So both knees are off the ground. He's just in a squat. And the defense, you know, is probably not paying attention to what he's doing, but he would catch the ball.

The kicker would come up similar to what you're saying, fake a kick. This kid would, the holder would pound the ball with his hand. So it sounded like there was a foot hitting the ball and then taking off.

And I think he was going to throw a pass is what his intent was. So, you know, just some clever things that they do out of these, these fake field goals, but that knee-on-the-ground exception. Well, you know, back then, both in the 1898 and the 1913 example, having a knee on the ground, wasn't yet a rule that made the ball dead.

Right. I mean, in that race, you could be tackled and still get up and run. You know, you had to be held to the ground still, but yeah, you know, the, the, the, the catcher squat that you mentioned, that was actually some of the early field goal teams did that.

I mean, those, those executing a placement kick, they did that instead of, of going to the knee. And part of that was because that was still in the time when they, when a lot of teams, still were rolling the ball sideways back from the center to the quarterback. Right.

And so the quarterback, if he was on one knee, he couldn't, you know, the ball would bounce crazily. And so, you know, the squat helped them just, you know, catch the ball properly, or at least be able to reach the ball. And I've even, I've got a picture of Arizona.

And I want to say it was like 1938 or 1936, something like that, where their, their holder is in that kind of squat position. So people continue doing that for, you know, for some time. And probably, you know, they may have just been in a situation where, you know, who knows? It might've had a substitute center, or somebody just wasn't a very, very effective long-snapper.

And so. He was a substitute center. He was also a starting catcher on the baseball team in the spring.

Yeah. Great stuff. That's very fascinating.

Just like every evening, you have these great little pieces and nuggets of information about football history that you don't hear mainstream. And you don't see in every football history book you read in, you know, just like tonight, you took, it took some digging for you to do that. I'm sure, you know, it took a few hours of research going through the old newspapers.

I can feel your pain on that sometime, but it's fun. Yeah. The problem is that, you know, half the time I'm doing these things while I'm watching some football games.

So I don't even watch half the game. I'm just looking online where those 30 points come from. Yeah.

Yeah. Good stuff as always. Why won't you share with the listeners that they, too, can enjoy your tidbits each and every night? Yeah.

So, you know, my website is footballarchaeology.com. So you can go on there. You know, every post allows you to subscribe, which then means you will get an email every night, you know, into your inbox with the story. You can also follow me on Twitter at football archaeology.

And so whichever one works for you, whichever way you prefer to consume information, have at it, or hey, you can do both. So either way. Yeah, I do.

And you get double the pleasure. You get the, the Twitter and the email. So good stuff as always.

Tim, we appreciate you sharing this with us, as well as the great research you do at footballarchaeology.com, your daily tidbits, and, you know, your great writings. Thank you very much for sharing with us each and every week. We hope to talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Always enjoy it. And glad to, glad to spread the word with you on football history stuff.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.