The Grand Old Man Takes a Final Bow Amos Alonzo Stagg

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Strap on your helmets and step back in time! This podcast dives into the gridiron twilight of a coaching legend: Amos Alonzo Stagg. We'll be dissecting the final game Stagg coached for the Chicago Maroons, a team he led for an astonishing 41 seasons.

Join us as we uncover the secrets behind Stagg's coaching prowess, explore the atmosphere surrounding this momentous game, and analyze its impact on both Stagg's legacy and the trajectory of Chicago Maroons football. Whether you're a die-hard football fan or a history buff curious about a bygone era, this podcast promises a fascinating journey into the world of early college football.

Timothy Brown shares the information and story of this epic moment in gridiron history based on his original Tidbit titled: Stagg's Last Game At Chicago .

You can also enjoy this conversation on our podcast format: Stagg's Fianl Game Coaching U of Chicago.

-Transcription of Stagg's Final Game in Chicago with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal for positive football history. And welcome to another Tuesday where we visit with FootballArcheology.com's Timothy P. Brown, the master historian, who's going to tell us about another one of his great tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you. Thank you. I have a quiz for you.

I'm not going to hit you with the dad joke, but I'm going to hit you with a quiz. Okay. What makes this podcast special? This particular one, this episode.

This episode, what makes it special?

Well, probably the guest, as most people are going to tell us.

Come on. Come on. You and I have done 99 podcasts together before this one.

Really? Is this the 100th one? What makes this one special? This is the century mark, huh? That's right. Wow.

That is quite an accomplishment. Numero one hundred. I'm mixing my German and my Spanish, but yeah, this is our 100th podcast.

Now I think, you know, I was on your podcast once or twice before we kind of got together on a regular basis. So this is our 100th when it was, you know, on a regular basis. So this is the 100th Tuesday in a row that- That's correct.

Yes. Wow. So we're going to hit the two-year mark in two or four more episodes.

Yeah. All right. Well, hey, that is quite an accomplishment.

Anything. So, thank you for sharing. I didn't realize that.

I knew it was a whole bunch, but- Yeah. So I just, you know, I'm kind of a dork. And so I've numbered them. Just when we started doing them, I started numbering them.

So we just happened, this happens to be the one that says 100 before. Well, if I would have known that I would have baked a cake or something. So, I apologize.

I just wanted to surprise you. Yeah. Surprise parties are always the best.

Yeah, that sure is. I need to have some like fireworks things going off in the background here when we go to do the editing on here. So, well, hey, great.

Great for sharing that. So, you know, this is, well, part of this century mark. We're going to talk about somebody who lived for almost a century.

That's right. And then a tidbit that you wrote a little while ago called Stagg's last game at Chicago. So the grand old man of football had his last game for the Chicago Maroons on the sideline.

So, you know, the background here is Mr. Stagg right there. Now, this isn't at the 100th game, but that's him along the sidelines at Chicago. And so, you know, one of the things that I actually opened that tidbit with was just the thought that you know, so from my vantage point, football really started in 1876, not 1869.

And then Camp died in 1925. He was actually at one of the meetings too, you know, one of the rulemaking meetings. So he, Camp, saw the first 50 years of college football.

And Stagg, who was, I think, three years younger than him, and just, you know, maybe a couple of more, it took him a little bit longer to get to Yale as a young man. But so he's a little bit delayed in terms of, you know, his class from Yale. But nevertheless, he was born before football came about.

He was born during the Civil War. And, you know, he saw football's first 90 some years, you know. So, I mean, two central figures, obviously, you know, if Camp is the father of football, Stagg's the uncle, right, you know.

And so here's two really influential guys in the history of the game. And then Stagg lives 40 years longer, you know. So he saw, I mean, you just think about what he saw after 1925.

So, you know, very much, you know, the forward pass coming into play, he saw the, you know, more, you know, a greater acceptance of African American players. He sees, you know, modern transportation, allowing teams to travel and, you know, much more intersectional play. Radio, he saw the beginnings of television, you know.

So, I mean, there were things that he saw and changes to the game that, you know, Stagg or Camp never saw. So anyway, it's just kind of an interesting way to think about their times. But so, you know, Stagg went to Yale, coached and attended Springfield College, so the YMCA school for, you know, for a year or two.

He was then recruited to the University of Chicago by the then president, who was a former Yale faculty member who had had him as a student. And so he recruits him to become the head of athletics. So, it was a faculty position, but, you know, that meant he was the football coach, baseball coach, track coach, you know.

So he became a really influential figure, actually, you know, football and track for sure, you know, major figure. And so he was the coach there from 1892 through 1932. So, in the first 40 years of school, you know, he's the football coach.

And, you know, won a national championship or two and, you know, a bunch of Big 10 championships and everything. But as he was, you know, kind of getting on in the years, Chicago brought in this new young president who didn't like athletics and especially didn't like football. So the guy eventually just, you know, bled the budget of the athletic department.

And then he forced Stagg to retire. So, at age 70, which was the university policy. So, you know, he can do that.

And so then Stagg ends up. So, you know, it was known before the season started that this was last year. So every opponent would like to honor him, you know because he had been such a central figure.

And so most of the teams were giving them like a letter sweater from their school or an award blanket, which a lot of schools gave out at the time, rather than sweaters and jackets. Michigan was so damn happy to get rid of them that they gave them a silver service. So, but then his last game is they're playing Chicago, and they got a new coach by the name of Clarence Spears, who I just say that because, you know, he'd hung around, he was coached in a number of places, you know, for 30 years or whatever.

He was one of those guys who was a doctor and a physician and would coach during the fall. Another interesting thing about the game. So, in the last game of the season, the referee for the game was Frank Birch, who was the guy that invented the referee signals, you know, for penalties and touchdowns and all that kind of stuff.

So, you know, here's another barely central figure in the game. But, you know, it was one of those games where, you know, Wisconsin scores first, they don't convert, then Chicago scores in the second quarter to take the lead because they converted. And then the Badgers score again before halftime, a 12-7 lead.

And then, I mean, I'm a Badger fan, but unfortunately for Stack, the Badgers scored again. And then, you know, there was one play in the second half where the Chicago halfback takes off wide open, nobody there to touch him, and he trips over a line or whatever, but he trips and falls. And so they never score, and they end up losing 18-7.

So Stack loses his last game, ends up with the losing record for the season. So he ends up 3-4-1 that year, which left him at 244, 111 and 27 in his career at Chicago. And in the big 10, he went 115-74-12, with 30 of those losses coming since his last championship in 24.

So he lost a lot of his games in the last ten years of his coaching because they just, again, like I said, they kind of got bled out and, you know, academics just became the key. But then what's kind of cool is that he then leaves Chicago, gets hired at the University of Pacific, and he coached there for 14 years. He won five conference titles.

And then once that passed, then he goes out, one of his sons was coaching out at Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. So he was, sometimes his son would say, well, he was a coach and officially his son was a coach. So I'm just going to say he assisted there for six years.

And then he goes out, he's like 91 or something like that, goes out to, retires in California, but it still is the kicking coach for a local junior college. You know, so the guy ended up, you know, with, the guy ended up with, what is it? Sixty plus years of coaching football, you know, at the college level. And even more, because I'm not even counting his Springfield years.

So, you know, low sixties. So anyway, I'm just unbelievable, you know, the guy who was, you know, on the rules committee, you know, a number of football innovations are credited to him. He was one of the guys he and the Harvard captain in the same year who invented tackling dummies.

Right. So, I mean, there are so many things, like flankers. You know, he was the guy who really created a lot of core football elements that, you know, we just take for granted today. And as you said, he's right there within the first, you know, not even a decade; football's not even a decade old when he starts playing the game.

So he's probably observing it, you know, as a youngster, but it's amazing just to take that full circle, and what a brilliant career. Excellent. Yeah.

Yeah. There's something else. And, you know, obviously, playing at Yale at the time, Yale and Princeton were the best football teams during the 1800s.

Yeah. So he was right there in the middle of it all. And he was quite the baseball player, too.

I think major league baseball sort of wanted him, and he decided he was against professional sports, and that's sort of why he went to the coaching career. He was a very big advocate of collegiate and amateur sports. So.

Yeah. He was, you know, a religious guy, too. And so, you know, he's an interesting dude.

He's a vegetarian and he's just, you know, kind of unconventional in a lot of ways. But yeah, unique individual. If you live well into your nineties and you're still coaching in your nineties and working and still good brainpower, maybe we should all get rid of meat then and become vegetarians.

Cause yeah. Well, you know, the other thing that's funny is that he was. There are a lot of stories about him, and there were different times when I forgot exactly what it was. He had some health issues, you know, from time to time, and his wife would take over.

And so, you know, like his wife, a lot of times would be at practice. Like if he couldn't be there, she'd kind of run things. And she apparently knew her share of football, right? And the team was not, you know, it wasn't like a substitute teacher where kids are trying to screw around.

Like they knew that she knew what was going on, and they weren't going to get away with anything with her, or they'd meet the consequences of nothing else. I wonder if Nick Saban's wife was doing that, like when he had to take a day off. Yeah, I doubt it, but I'm not sure.

He probably had more assistants. That could be, that could be. Well, Tim, that is great stuff on a great, you know, innovator and an important figure in football history.

And God, we really enjoy that you were able to talk about that last game and give us some of the history before and after that game too. So it comes full circle on there. But you, you have some interesting topics like this all the time on your website.

Maybe you could tell folks how they could engage and read your stuff. Yeah. So just go to footballarchaeology.com, you know, bookmark it, go there whenever you want.

Alternatively, you can, you can subscribe, subscribe for free. You can follow me on Twitter or on threads or on the Substack app and, you know, read it as you please. All right.

He is Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com. And Tim, we thank you for joining us in this, giving us another glimpse of football history. And we'd love to talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good.

We'll do 101 next week.

101. Thanks, Tim.

All right.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.