Stagg, Amos Alonzo
Basketball, Football
b. Aug. 16, 1862, West Orange, NJ
d. March 17, 1965
"All football comes from Stagg," Knute Rockne once said. It was not much of an exaggeration. During American football's formative years, Stagg's inventive mind came up with hundreds of innovations, especially on offense, that have since become either standard or out-dated.
An end at Yale, Stagg was named to the first All-American team in 1889, when he was a student at the divinity school. He was also an outstanding baseball pitcher who had a 17-3 career record against arch-rival Harvard. Because he had difficulty speaking to an audience, he gave up his plans to become a minister and in 1890 entered the YMCA International Training School at Springfield, MA, now Springfield College.
Stagg organized and coached the school's first football team, known as "Stagg's stubby Christians." One of the players was James Naismith, who invented basketball in 1891.
Stagg played in the first basketball game that was open to the public on March 11, 1892, scoring the only basket for the faculty as they lost to the students, 5-1.
When the University of Chicago was established in 1892, its president, James Rainey Harper, decided that a winning football team would help the school became famous fast, and he hired Stagg for $2,500 a year, also giving life tenure. Since there were no eligibility rules at the time, Stagg actually played for the first two teams he coached.
Chicago soon became a power in the Western Conference (now the Big Ten), winning seven championships between 1896 and 1913. Four of his teams were undefeated. Stagg invented the idea of shifting offensive players into a new formation and running a play before the defense could react. As early as 1890, at Springfield, he developed the wingback principle by pulling his ends into the backfield.
From early in the century until the modern T formation was created in 1940, shifts and wingback formations dominated offensive football. Among Stagg's other important innovations were the quick kick, the onside kick, the use of double flankers, the pass-run option play, and the man in motion. He was probably the first to have the quarterback standing behind the center to take a direct snap, the essential principle of the T formation.
Stagg was also instrumental in encouraging the spread of basketball through the Midwest. In 1917, he organized the National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament, which brought together high school teams from throughout the country, helping to standardize the rather haphazard rules of the time. The tournament was an annual event through 1931, when it was ended by the depression.
Stagg left Chicago in 1932, when he reached the university's mandatory retirement age of seventy and coached at College of the Pacific from 1933 through 1946. He was named coach of the year in 1943 when his team upset UCLA and the University of California. At eighty-nine, he became co-coach with his son at Susquehanna College, handling the offense.
Pudge Heffelfinger, a teammate of Stagg's at Yale, once said, "For all his biblical precepts, Lon was the foxiest of gridiron tacticians. He thought two plays ahead of the other fellow, like a master surveying a chessboard."