What you’re about to read is true.
Tulane football was once in a position to turn down a Rose Bowl invitation. All NFL quarterbacks – from Bradshaw to Brady – can trace the beginnings of their career to the area between the Freret Street garage and Bobet Hall. And the Chicago Bears, bound for Super Bowl XLI, wouldn’t be where they were had it not been for a former Wolfpack football coach.
Thank the innovative body of work of Clark Shaughnessy (the College Hall of Famer worked here from 1926-32, amassing a 48-18-5 record) left the game of football for that.
“I consider him the biggest contributor in football alone for being the father of the modern T-formation and for what he did for quarterbacks,” said revered Times-Picayune sports columnist Peter Finney. “I’ve always said he should be in the NFL Hall of fame – they give him credit, but not enough.”
JUST AROUND THE CORNER
In 1925, Shaughnessy marshaled the Tulane Green Wave to an undefeated season. Behind running back Charles Flournoy (still Tulane’s single-season scoring record holder), the Greenies merited an invitation from the Rose Bowl commission to college football’s premier bowl.
But, unexpectedly, the university’s administration declined the invitation so as to keep the players from missing class.
“A lot of fans I imagine wanted to go. Tulane had a chance to really make a splash – if you’re invited to the Rose Bowl, you go. But the university just wasn’t ready for that,” Finney said, adding that Tulane merited and accepted a Rose Bowl invitation six years later.
Infuriated – and partly because Shaughnessy, who played fullback at the University of Minnesota from 1910-14, changed jobs so much the Associated Press called him “football’s man in motion” – Shaughnessy left Tulane and trekked one block down St. Charles Avenue, opting to sign with the neighboring Loyola Wolfpack, coined the “Maroon Cyclone” by writers of the fledgling Maroon.
Shaughnessy coached under Ed Reed on the fabled undefeated 1926 Wolfpack football squad that led the entire country in scoring, eclipsing even national champion University of Alabama.
But Reed pursued a career with an actors’ guild in the French Quarter and left the head coaching reigns in Shaughnessy’s grasp.
Shaughnessy inherited the pedigree of a nationally-recognized, undefeated program armed with the talents of William “Bucky” Moore, a mercurial touchdown-machine whose yardage total in the 1926 season demolished college legend Harold “Red” Grange’s single-season record.
The football gods dealt Shaughnessy’s first season in charge a sour deck, however.
In a game against Howard University, Moore erupted a 21-yard gallop in which he broke one tackle and cycloned by another before being dragged down.
As Moore was tackled, a Howard defender fell across his head, rendering Loyola’s star unconscious.
Medics failed to bring him back to consciousness and ambulanced him to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
It was then that Shaughnessy brandished his genius in managing what football fans today appreciate as the modern quarterback – a position he was in the process of literally drawing up in the dirt during practices held in Loyola Stadium, which once stood in between Freret Street and Bobet Hall.
He turned to an uninspiring physical specimen on his bench – 5-foot-8, 165-pound Junior Lopez, a first-year Biloxi product who coolly took the field and hit star lineman Raymond Drouilhet for a 13-yard gain on his first pass attempt.
Shaughnessy’s season saw Loyola tie and lose its first games in three years – they finished at an unimpressive 6-3-1 but he coached Lopez into being “one of the ablest field generals he’d ever handled,” The Maroon wrote.
Despite being without Moore, whom Loyola’s critics saw as the only player on a one-man team, Shaughnessy managed dramatic wins: 19-0 over Loyola-Baltimore (The Maroon dubbed them “the most formidable visiting eleven New Orleans fans have had the pleasure of witnessing in action”) and 19-12 over bitter rivals Loyola-Chicago (Chicago had dealt the Wolfpack a 45-0 shellacking in 1925 before New Orleans responded with a 46-0 win in 1926).
But it was once he left uptown New Orleans for the University of Chicago in 1932 that Shaughnessy cemented a friendship that quite literally made football, at least the offensive side of the ball, what it is today. It was then he helped the ancestors of the Chicago Bears win an NFL championship.
POWER PLAYS
Atop Chicago, Shaughnessy struggled – with the university phasing football out, he had trouble securing talent for the program so as to improve it.
But while in the Windy City, Shaughnessy befriended legendary coach George Halas – the trophy awarded to the champion of the modern-day NFC bears his namesake – of the NFL’s Chicago Bears. Football’s man in motion became intrigued with the T-formation and spent his days “dreaming about ways to improve it,” according to the College Hall of Fame.
So, as the Chicago University football program floundered, Shaughnessy found off-shoot work as a “consultant” to the Bears and slowly began introducing to their offense the innovations he was drawing up in the dirt outside of where the Danna Center now stands: the modern T-formation.
The hand-to-hand snap from center to quarterback, as opposed to the short toss snap of yore. Splitting the offensive lineman a yard to provide tailbacks ready-made holes. A play in which the quarterback would turn and hand the ball to a tailback attacking one of those holes at full-speed – the modern-day run. He’d exploit the defense’s reaction to the offense’s first move, where the quarterback would fake a toss to the tailback and deftly hand it to the person closest to him in the backfield (a fullback draw). Or he’d fake a hand-off and have his quarterback fire a pass to a receiver downfield, ideally freed up because the defense reacted to stop the tailback (a play-action pass).
“He made the quarterback’s role what it is today, but everyone thought it was just a fad,” Finney said.
After a 1-7-1 season at Chicago in 1939, the university dropped football and fired Shaughnessy.
The University of Stanford (1-9 in 1939) snatched him up, and shortly after his hiring, Shaughnessy announced that he’d employ the modern T as his primary offense.
Said football icon Glen “Pop” Warner, “If Stanford wins a single-game with that crazy formation, you can throw all the football I know in the Pacific Ocean.”
Stanford won nine of them in an undefeated, untied season and merited Shaughnessy the trip to the Rose Bowl that Tulane’s administration kept him from – to face the University of Nebraska, where he’d execute football’s greatest motion play.
TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE
Almost simultaneous to when Shaughnessy was preparing Stanford for the Rose Bowl, Halas and the Bears had clawed to the NFL championship game (pre-Super Bowl era) to face the Washington Redskins.
Problem: The Redskins had downed the Bears 7-3 just three games prior.
Halas phoned in backup. Shaughnessy flew from Palo Alto, Calif., to Bears headquarters in Chicago and installed the game plan, prominently featuring the modern T play package.
“You have a college coach going to the Chicago Bears and putting in the gameplan for the NFL championship game,” Finney said in disbelief.
Armed with Shaughnessy’s play package, Halas and the Bears epically mauled the Redskins 73-0 for the 1940 NFL championship.
Shaughnessy, without missing a beat, flew back to Palo Alto and left the Rose Bowl a victor with a 21-13 win over the Cornhuskers.
“Can you imagine that happening today (leading up to Super Bowl XLI)? You fly across the country to put the game plan in place for the Chicago Bears, then turn around and fly right back to coach Stanford in the Rose Bowl? It wouldn’t happen.
“The 1940 season marked a revolutionary turnaround for football. Bigger than any in the last 80 years. The T really caught on after those two games, thanks to Shaughnessy,” Finney said.
Ramon Vargas can be reached at [email protected].
An Oct. 7, 1927 clipping of The Maroon bears Clark Shaughnessy’s likeness.
