SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 33,998
- Like
- 65,600
(This is even longer that my "Facilities" post, so I'm posting it in two aprts to make it look a little elss intimidating.)
Whenever the SU football program takes a dip, the same suggested cure always makes its appearance on internet boards, radio shows and letters to the editor: The University ought to pony up and hire (fill in name of a famous unemployed coach). He’ll be the answer. I think it’s another issue that needs some historical perspective. I thought I’d go over the history of SU head football coaches and see what it can tell us. My intention was to be brief but, well, you know me. I like a good story.
Syracuse’ first head football coach was Bobby Winston, an English rugby player and boxer who had immigrated to this country in 1883 and was Syracuse’ athletic trainer. The school had played its first football game the previous year, losing 0-36 to Rochester. Winston led the team through its first full season, winning 8 and losing 3. (The schedule, such as it was, included two games against Rochester, both victories, a split with Hamilton, two one-sided losses to Union, two wins over St. John’s. later Manlius, Military Academy and ended with three straight wins over the Syracuse athletic club.) Ken Rappoport, in “The Syracuse Football Story”, (in a chapter entitled “The Stone Age”), quotes a contemporary observer: “Winston’s services were timely. He instilled an enthusiasm and love of the game into the players, which, though it has sometimes dwindled in times of poor support and defeat, has never left the team. His odd English ways and London songs made him a great favorite and, when he left, the team had the principles of the game as played at that time well in hand.” He left for other jobs after that and was also the first head coach at the University of Georgia in 1894. Maybe Scott Shafer should try some “London songs”.
One more note on facilities: “The players dressed in a tiny room in the basement of the school library and after practice bathed one after another in an old wash tube filled with cold water. (Bob Snyder’s “Orange Handbook” says that “the players took postgame baths by raising a trapdoor and dropping into icy water beneath the library”. At least they had hydrotherapy. ) The campus playing field was no better that a stone quarry. The ground was hard as diamonds, uneven in spots and punctuated by boulders the size of watermelons. Stones filled the area. Miniature craters abounded.” One player recalled: “We had to spend a day or two raking and picking off the stones, filling up the holes with dirt and sawdust.” Syracuse undoubtedly had some of the worst facilities in the nation at that time. They were a mess.
Winston was replaced by William Galbraith, who became the first SU head coach to get fired- I think. He had played center for Cornell and doubled as the team manager. Rappoport’s book shows Galbraith as the coach for the whole season but “Syracuse University Football: A Centennial Celebration” by Michael Mullins says that Galbraith was replaced by Jordan Wells after an opening 0-68 loss to Cornell. They didn’t waste time in those days. SU’s second game was a 6-12 loss to Cornell’s “second team”, (I assume this was a JV squad). According to Mullins it was coached by William Galbraith! Bum Phillips used to say of Don Shula: “He can take his’un and beat your’un or he can take your’un and beat his’un”. Like most coaches, Galbraith needed to have better material than his opponent. That was Galbraith’s only year as a collegiate head coach.
Jordan Wells “coached as well as he could” but 1892 was SU’s only winless campaign, (despite all of G-Rob’s efforts). That was his only year on the official records as anybody’s head coach, although, if Mullins’ account his correct he should be credited with the four victories from the prior year. But it seems a shame to spoil a spotless record, (although the 1892 team did tie Syracuse Athletic club 0-0, one of four games with them). The next year we tried not having a coach and that was actually an improvement, as we went 4-9-1, beating Hamilton, tying Rochester and ending the season with a three game winning streak over “Syracuse High School”, Onondaga Academy and Cazenovia. Those Lakers are tough to beat!
At this point James Roscoe Day became Chancellor. He was a big man who loved sports and football;. Under him the first athletic department was organized, a gymnasium built and a special training table for athletes established. (We catch up to other schools eventually.) Also, George Bond, one of Winston’s players, became our fourth coach and led the team to a 6-5 record. “Fighting against defeat and hoping against hope, (we) knew that the dawn of better days was breaking.” One of his players said that “the father of Syracuse football was George Bond. He was an uncanny diagnostician of the offense, a great teacher, mean as the devil on the football field but a fine chap off.” But that was also his only year as a college head coach.
Another former Winston player was George Redington, who would coach the team for the next two seasons, winning 11, losing 5 and tying 4 (there were lots of ties in those low-scoring days). He was noted for being very strict about training rules and keeping schedules. He was the first SU coach to last two full seasons. But like Galbraith, Wells, and Bond, those were his only seasons as a collegiate head coach. He had spent the 1896 commuting from his New York City law office to coach the team, (no mean feat in those days), and decided to stick with the law.
He was followed by Frank Wade, who became our first three year coach, going 17-9-2. He was our first coach who had been a head football coach anywhere else before getting the job here, having spent one year coaching DePauw in Indiana to a 3-3-1 record. He was attending law school here. He was credited with upgrading the athletes in the program: “Not only were they smarter about the game: they were also faster and in better condition.” I wonder if he did what we would now call “recruiting”? His great accomplishment was considered to be a near-upset of Army in 1899. Wade then began a long career as a lawyer and businessman in the Syracuse area and Syracuse began a new century.
Our first 20th century coach was Edwin R. Sweetland, still another Cornellian who had played for Pop Warner there and coached Hamilton College, (Mullins reports it as Colgate, which is in Hamilton, New York). At Syracuse he stressed speed. His 1900 team averaged 163 pounds per man. “Syracuse, light almost to frailty, compensated for a clear lack of brute force and achieved success through the sheer rapidity of its play.” Mullins calls Sweetland “a Vince Lombardi type: tough, aggressive, intelligent, a disciplinarian”. (We have had a Vince Lombardi type here, after all.) He was the first Syracuse coach who made coaching a profession: he was also the University’s crew coach and later became Kentucky’s first basketball coach.
The team was also accused of dirty play and brawls with Cornell and NYU caused an interruption in those series. At the same time, Syracuse upgraded its schedule and was now playing the top teams in the East, giving their records more meaning. Sweetland’s teams were up to the task, going 20-5-2 in his three years here. Sweetland wanted more money and returned to Hamilton. From there he went to Ohio State, then came back to coach Colgate, moved on to Kentucky, (one observer said his team “fought like Wildcats”, which became their official nickname), then Miami of Ohio, West Virginia and Tulane, finally winding up at Alfred, finishing his mercurial career in 1918 with an even 100 football wins vs. 41 losses and 10 ties. He retired to become a farmer and part-time lawyer.
SU anticipated something the Chicago Cubs would do decades later and used two coaches who alternated, game by game, in 1903. Unlike the Cubs’ experiment Jason Parrish and Ancil Brown led the team to a winning record at 5-4. But neither of them were head coaches in any other year. They were replaced by Dr. Charles P. Hutchins, who must have had the right prescription, because the team outscored nine opponents 405-57, including a school record 144-0 win over Manhattan College, (whose facilities were not very good). They stopped the game after 32 minutes. We had 25 touchdowns. They had no first downs. (I’m hoping the Florida State game will be closer.) Hutchins was 14-6 in his two years here, before moving on to coach Wisconsin for two years. He went on to become athletic director at Indiana.
He was replaced by the first Syracuse coach who would wind up in the Hall of Fame. Frank “Buck” O’Neill had coached at Colgate for three years, going 18-8-2. He was another coaching lawyer, (I’ll bet those guys knew the rulebook), and took some years off to tend to his law practice in New York City. He was head coach at SU from 1906-07, 1913-1915 and 1917-19 “and his name was synonymous with Syracuse through that era. Of high intelligence and executive capacity, he was forceful, rigorous and adamant in his system, method and discipline. He knew and loved this great game and was impatient with indifferent, incapable or stupid play or players.”
He was a Syracuse native, working in a butcher’s shop in Manlius that supplied meat for the St. John’s Military Academy. He delivered it and became intrigued by football practice. He volunteered to help out the scrubs when they were short a man and filled his derby hat with straw as protection against concussions, (does the NFL know about this?). He was invited to attend the academy and play football for the team, worked hard in class and became an honor student. He went to Williams College. He played football for them and became team captain.
Colgate hired him in 1902 and he coached them while coaching and playing for a professional team representing the Syracuse Athletic Club, which won something called “The World Series of Football”, (a year before the Baseball World Series began), in Madison Square Garden, the first indoor football games ever played. The field was 70 by 35 yards, (Manley Field House’s field is bigger). They beat something called “the New York Team”, (which was from Philadelphia: it consisted of baseball players from the Phillies and Athletics trying to stay in shape during the off-season: they called themselves that to draw more fans in the Big Apple), 5-0, (a touchdown was worth 5 points then). Syracuse could have made it to 6 points but Pop Warner, who was playing for Syracuse, along with his brother and a couple of Carlisle Indians, missed an extra point. Syracuse then beat the Knickerbockers 36-0 and then a team from New Jersey, the Orange Athletic Club, by the same score.
O’Neill and the coaches who followed him benefited from the opening in 1907 of John D. Archbold’s gift to SU, a huge, (by 1907 standards), concrete and steel football stadium named after the benefactor. O’Neill guided Syracuse to a 52-19-6 record, including the 9-1-2 team of 1915 that was invited to the second Rose Bowl, (the first having been held after the 1901 season, to be replaced for 14 years by chariots races), but had to turn it down for financial reasons. And he coached the team that in 1919, crushed Warner’s Pittsburgh team that had won 34 straight games against collegiate teams, 24-3. He then became the coach at Columbia, which was much closer to his law offices, from 1920-22, finishing with a 81-42-8 record. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951, primarily for his record at Syracuse.
During his first interregnum the team was coached, successively, by a pair of brothers who would wind up in the Hall of Fame with O’Neill. The 1908 coach was Howard Jones, who had just finished playing for Yale for three years during which the Elis never lost a game. He directed Syracuse to a 6-3-1 record. This was the year Pop Warner fooled the Orange by stitching a football-shaped decoration on his player’s jerseys and bamboozled the Syracuse players in a 0-12 Carlisle win. They the Indians played Harvard. Coach Percy Haughton had the footballs painted Crimson and Harvard won 17-0. But Jones scored a huge victory over Michigan, 28-4, the team rushing for 400 yards to 75 for the Wolverines.
Howard Jones moved onto Ohio State the next year, then went into private business. He coached Yale for a year in 1913. His great fame began when he became the coach at Iowa (1916-23), Duke for one year, (1924), and Southern California (1925-40). He turned the latter school into the national power they have been ever since. His overall record was 194-65-21. Jones was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1951, (both he and O’Neill were part of the first class, which had 54 inductees).
Howard turned the job over to his brother, Thomas, Albert Dwight, “TAD” Jones. He had been a star quarterback for Yale in 1906-07. This was his head coaching debut but he didn’t have as much success as his brother. His 1909 team had a losing record for the first time since 1909. His 1910 team got back above the line at 5-4-1 but was a very dull team that outscored ten opponents by a combined 53-42. He didn’t coach another team until he got the Yale job in 1916. With a break for the war, he coached them until 1927, going 69-24-6 overall and getting elected to the Hall in 1958.
He was replaced by Deforest Cummings . The highlight of his two year run, (9-8-2) was a 12-11 win over Carlisle’s greatest team, coached by Warner and with Jim Thorpe at his peak in 1911. Those two teams were the only ones ever coached by Cummings. O’Neill came back for the next three years. Bill Hollenbeck, a former Penn all-American who had coached at Missouri and Penn State, going unbeaten in Happy Valley in 1911-12. He was beatable in Syracuse, going 5-4 before retiring from coaching, preferring business and politics. He’s in the Hall of Fame but as a player, not a coach. Perhaps if he’d kept at it…
O’Neill returned for the third time, greatly assisted by Chick Meehan, his quarterback in 1917 and his assistant coach in 1918-19. When O’Neill took the Columbia job, Meehan took over as coach at Syracuse and coached some of our best teams in 1920-24. His Syracuse coaching record was 35-8-4, including a 1923 team that was ranked #1 in the country by James Howell:
http://www.jhowell.net/cf/cf1923.htm
I call that team our “other” national champion.
Meehan opted to move to New York City and coach NYU, briefly turning them into a national power, and Manhattan, (who had improved its facilities). He retired in 1937 with a laudable 115-44-14 record. He was famous for saying: 'We learn practically nothing from a victory. All our information comes from a defeat. A winner forgets most of his mistakes.'" But he was never elected to the Hall of Fame, probably because of his involvement in a scheme to sell steel on the black market during the Korean War.
Pete Reynolds took over for one year and did a good job, going 8-1-1. As in 1923, the only loss was to Colgate. It was the beginning of the “HooDoo”, when we were unable to beat Colgate for 13 consecutive years, including three where that was the only game we lost, (and that doesn’t include ’23). Reynolds was back the next year, going 7-2-1. Vic Hanson was his big star. That was also the year of the “Massacre of the Plains”, a big brawl after a game at West Point against Army that terminated the series until 1955. Reynolds was at the end of a long coaching career that began in 1909. His previous stops had been at Hobart, Hamilton and Bucknell. He was from Illinois and Wikipedia says he coached at Knox College out there in 1935-37. Most sources don’t list that period but if that’s true, Pete’s overall coaching record was 77-58-14. He settled in Oneida, New York, where he died in 1951.
He was replaced by Lew Andreas, more famous as a long-time basketball coach, (it was his school record for victories that Jim Boeheim broke), and athletic director. He hired Vic Hanson to be his assistant. Andreas sort of stumbled along for three years at 15-10-3 before handing the reigns to Hanson. Vic did somewhat better, going 7-1-1 in 1931 and 6-1-1 in 1935. But he couldn’t beat Colgate and when the 1936 team fell to 1-7, the old hero was fired. Syracuse was the only head football coaching job Andreas or Hanson ever held. Both were alums of the school.
Hanson was replaced by possibly the most prominent coach at the time of hiring we’ve ever had, (Bill Hollenbeck might be the exception but he only lasted that one year and then retired). Ossie Solem has played for Dr. Henry Williams at Minnesota when they were a major national power. Then he went into pro football, coaching a team called the Minneapolis Marines that went on to join the NFL. By that time, Solem had switched to college coach as well as being an athletic director at Luther College in Iowa, (1920), Drake, (1921-31) and Iowa, (1932-36). Drake was a fairly prominent program at that time and his teams went 7-0-0 in 1922 and 7-1-0 in 1928. Wikipedia, in its article on the Drake Bulldogs, says that they “shared the national championship in some national polls. They were invited to the White House for their accomplishments.” I’ve checked the various selectors who list rankings for each year online and I couldn’t find anyone who rated that team higher than 16th. Usually they are around #30. They were what we would now call a good “mid-major”. But it still got Solem some national recognition. Drake was a founding member of the Missouri Valley Conference in 1928 and won its first four championships. .
Solem moved on to Iowa in 1932. The Hawkeyes had just been temporarily suspended by the Big Ten due an athletic department slush fund scandal that dated back to the Howards Jones Era. (They were paying players! Horrors!) Even after the suspension, Solem had a hard time filling out his Big Ten schedule because all the members would rather play Notre Dame. The Depression also hit the University hard and they weren’t able to pay Solem his full salary. Nonetheless, he soldiered on to a 15-21-4 record over five seasons. The period was not without its high points. In 1933 they surprised with a 5-3 record and quarterback Joe Laws was Big Ten MVP. But his greatest player was Ozzie Simmons, “The Ebony Eel” who was named second team All-American in 1934 and first team in 1935. Solem was also able to recruit a strong freshman class in 1936 that included Nile Kinnick, who would win the 1939 Heisman Trophy.
But Solem had a run-in with Simmons, whose teammates resented his notoriety and maybe also his color. They decided not to have a captain of the team his senior year to avoid voting for him. Some even refused to block for him. The coach accused him of “laying down” in a 0-52 loss to Minnesota , even though Simmons played the game with an injured leg. Simmons left the team saying “I’ve taken too much abuse this season because of Iowa’s poor showing. I’ve taken more punishment than I did in my sophomore year and Solem has been screaming at me. He doesn’t scream at the other players, just me.” (There was bullying in those days, as well.) Solem replied “Other players on the team were berated for their play in the Minnesota game but they took it without a word. I made one criticism of Simmons and he couldn’t take it.” They later made up and Simmons said, "He probably could have been tougher (on the players), but he was the finest gentleman I've ever been around."
Nonetheless, Solem left Iowa to come east and coach Syracuse for the 1937 season. He assembled perhaps the finest football staff ever with two protégés who had also played for Minnesota assisting him, Clarence “Biggie” Munn and Bud Wilkinson. One of their players was Hugh “Duffy” Daughtery, who gave this scouting report for himself: “He may be small but he sure is slow.” Duffy joined Solem’s staff on graduation. Wilkinson, of course, went on to become coach at Oklahoma, turning them in a dominant program while Munn and then Daugherty coached Michigan State to nearly equal prominence. Despite the quality of the coaching, there were plenty of ups and downs during Solem’s tenure, (1937-45), during which he went 30-27-6. The high points were winning what Grantland Rice called the greatest game he had seen against powerful Cornell in 1938, 19-17, finally breaking the HooDoo against Colgate later the same year, 7-0 and upsetting national power Wisconsin 27-20 in 1941 using the controversial “reverse center” formation which was subsequently banned. (Amos Alonzo Stagg commented that “a time of war was not the time to be showing your backside to the enemy”). The most prominent players were Marty Glickman and Wilmeth Sidat-Singh.
Solem moved on after the war to coach at Springfield College in Massachusetts, (Wikipedia, for some reason, lists it as “YMCA” the first seven years but it was the college). In 1956 his team went 8-0-1 thanks, in part to a center/linebacker named Dick MacPherson , who captained Solem’s last team in 1957. Solem was 44-7-3 coaching the Minneapolis pro team and then 162-117-20 in a 37 season college coaching career, (SU did not field a team in 1943). He had also gone 37-31 in four seasons as the Drake basketball coach. I had thought he was in the Hall of Fame but, in fact, he is not, although his three famous assistants are.
Biggie Munn took over as head coach in 1946 after Solem had a 1-6 season the previous year. He’d been assisting Fritz Crisler at Michigan. He improved the team’s record to 4-5 but left for Michigan State with most of his staff, an offer “that comes once in a lifetime”. It sounds reminiscent of Doug Marrone. State was a large public school that was ambitious to build up its program and try to gain entrance into the Big Ten, which had become the Big Nine when Chicago gave up the sport. Syracuse was not so ambitious. Munn build the Spartans into a national power, winning 28 games in a row from 1950-53, the national championship in 1952 and the Rose Bowl in ’53, the first year they were eligible for it. Munn then became athletic director and appointed Daugherty as his successor. Duffy won the Rose bowl with his 1955 team and the coach’s version of the national title in 1965. Munn was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1959 and Daugherty in 1984
Next up was Reaves “Ribs” Baysinger, an old SU football hero from the 20’s who had been coaching the freshman team. Les Dye: “His success didn’t carry on for reasons beyond my knowledge. And then, consequently football kind of petered out at Syracuse in terms of popularity.” Dye felt that things might have been different in Munn had stayed. “He was considerably more aggressive in his recruiting tactics than Baysinger when he was head coach.”
Baysinger went 3-6 his first year, although he managed to beat Colgate, 7-0. The next year may have been SU’s worst team ever. The beat Niagara in their opening game, 13-9, thanks to a fumble at the goal line in the final seconds. Niagara gave up football after that season, the joke going that they decided to give it up since they couldn’t beat Syracuse. Then came eight losses in a row by a combined 76-235. That was it for “Ribs”.
SU fans had a solution: bring in a famous coach. They were shocked when Lew Andreas chose the head coach at Muhlenberg to be the next coach at Syracuse. In the words of that Muhlenberg coach: “The alumni wanted a big-name coach…and got a long-name coach.”
Whenever the SU football program takes a dip, the same suggested cure always makes its appearance on internet boards, radio shows and letters to the editor: The University ought to pony up and hire (fill in name of a famous unemployed coach). He’ll be the answer. I think it’s another issue that needs some historical perspective. I thought I’d go over the history of SU head football coaches and see what it can tell us. My intention was to be brief but, well, you know me. I like a good story.
Syracuse’ first head football coach was Bobby Winston, an English rugby player and boxer who had immigrated to this country in 1883 and was Syracuse’ athletic trainer. The school had played its first football game the previous year, losing 0-36 to Rochester. Winston led the team through its first full season, winning 8 and losing 3. (The schedule, such as it was, included two games against Rochester, both victories, a split with Hamilton, two one-sided losses to Union, two wins over St. John’s. later Manlius, Military Academy and ended with three straight wins over the Syracuse athletic club.) Ken Rappoport, in “The Syracuse Football Story”, (in a chapter entitled “The Stone Age”), quotes a contemporary observer: “Winston’s services were timely. He instilled an enthusiasm and love of the game into the players, which, though it has sometimes dwindled in times of poor support and defeat, has never left the team. His odd English ways and London songs made him a great favorite and, when he left, the team had the principles of the game as played at that time well in hand.” He left for other jobs after that and was also the first head coach at the University of Georgia in 1894. Maybe Scott Shafer should try some “London songs”.
One more note on facilities: “The players dressed in a tiny room in the basement of the school library and after practice bathed one after another in an old wash tube filled with cold water. (Bob Snyder’s “Orange Handbook” says that “the players took postgame baths by raising a trapdoor and dropping into icy water beneath the library”. At least they had hydrotherapy. ) The campus playing field was no better that a stone quarry. The ground was hard as diamonds, uneven in spots and punctuated by boulders the size of watermelons. Stones filled the area. Miniature craters abounded.” One player recalled: “We had to spend a day or two raking and picking off the stones, filling up the holes with dirt and sawdust.” Syracuse undoubtedly had some of the worst facilities in the nation at that time. They were a mess.
Winston was replaced by William Galbraith, who became the first SU head coach to get fired- I think. He had played center for Cornell and doubled as the team manager. Rappoport’s book shows Galbraith as the coach for the whole season but “Syracuse University Football: A Centennial Celebration” by Michael Mullins says that Galbraith was replaced by Jordan Wells after an opening 0-68 loss to Cornell. They didn’t waste time in those days. SU’s second game was a 6-12 loss to Cornell’s “second team”, (I assume this was a JV squad). According to Mullins it was coached by William Galbraith! Bum Phillips used to say of Don Shula: “He can take his’un and beat your’un or he can take your’un and beat his’un”. Like most coaches, Galbraith needed to have better material than his opponent. That was Galbraith’s only year as a collegiate head coach.
Jordan Wells “coached as well as he could” but 1892 was SU’s only winless campaign, (despite all of G-Rob’s efforts). That was his only year on the official records as anybody’s head coach, although, if Mullins’ account his correct he should be credited with the four victories from the prior year. But it seems a shame to spoil a spotless record, (although the 1892 team did tie Syracuse Athletic club 0-0, one of four games with them). The next year we tried not having a coach and that was actually an improvement, as we went 4-9-1, beating Hamilton, tying Rochester and ending the season with a three game winning streak over “Syracuse High School”, Onondaga Academy and Cazenovia. Those Lakers are tough to beat!
At this point James Roscoe Day became Chancellor. He was a big man who loved sports and football;. Under him the first athletic department was organized, a gymnasium built and a special training table for athletes established. (We catch up to other schools eventually.) Also, George Bond, one of Winston’s players, became our fourth coach and led the team to a 6-5 record. “Fighting against defeat and hoping against hope, (we) knew that the dawn of better days was breaking.” One of his players said that “the father of Syracuse football was George Bond. He was an uncanny diagnostician of the offense, a great teacher, mean as the devil on the football field but a fine chap off.” But that was also his only year as a college head coach.
Another former Winston player was George Redington, who would coach the team for the next two seasons, winning 11, losing 5 and tying 4 (there were lots of ties in those low-scoring days). He was noted for being very strict about training rules and keeping schedules. He was the first SU coach to last two full seasons. But like Galbraith, Wells, and Bond, those were his only seasons as a collegiate head coach. He had spent the 1896 commuting from his New York City law office to coach the team, (no mean feat in those days), and decided to stick with the law.
He was followed by Frank Wade, who became our first three year coach, going 17-9-2. He was our first coach who had been a head football coach anywhere else before getting the job here, having spent one year coaching DePauw in Indiana to a 3-3-1 record. He was attending law school here. He was credited with upgrading the athletes in the program: “Not only were they smarter about the game: they were also faster and in better condition.” I wonder if he did what we would now call “recruiting”? His great accomplishment was considered to be a near-upset of Army in 1899. Wade then began a long career as a lawyer and businessman in the Syracuse area and Syracuse began a new century.
Our first 20th century coach was Edwin R. Sweetland, still another Cornellian who had played for Pop Warner there and coached Hamilton College, (Mullins reports it as Colgate, which is in Hamilton, New York). At Syracuse he stressed speed. His 1900 team averaged 163 pounds per man. “Syracuse, light almost to frailty, compensated for a clear lack of brute force and achieved success through the sheer rapidity of its play.” Mullins calls Sweetland “a Vince Lombardi type: tough, aggressive, intelligent, a disciplinarian”. (We have had a Vince Lombardi type here, after all.) He was the first Syracuse coach who made coaching a profession: he was also the University’s crew coach and later became Kentucky’s first basketball coach.
The team was also accused of dirty play and brawls with Cornell and NYU caused an interruption in those series. At the same time, Syracuse upgraded its schedule and was now playing the top teams in the East, giving their records more meaning. Sweetland’s teams were up to the task, going 20-5-2 in his three years here. Sweetland wanted more money and returned to Hamilton. From there he went to Ohio State, then came back to coach Colgate, moved on to Kentucky, (one observer said his team “fought like Wildcats”, which became their official nickname), then Miami of Ohio, West Virginia and Tulane, finally winding up at Alfred, finishing his mercurial career in 1918 with an even 100 football wins vs. 41 losses and 10 ties. He retired to become a farmer and part-time lawyer.
SU anticipated something the Chicago Cubs would do decades later and used two coaches who alternated, game by game, in 1903. Unlike the Cubs’ experiment Jason Parrish and Ancil Brown led the team to a winning record at 5-4. But neither of them were head coaches in any other year. They were replaced by Dr. Charles P. Hutchins, who must have had the right prescription, because the team outscored nine opponents 405-57, including a school record 144-0 win over Manhattan College, (whose facilities were not very good). They stopped the game after 32 minutes. We had 25 touchdowns. They had no first downs. (I’m hoping the Florida State game will be closer.) Hutchins was 14-6 in his two years here, before moving on to coach Wisconsin for two years. He went on to become athletic director at Indiana.
He was replaced by the first Syracuse coach who would wind up in the Hall of Fame. Frank “Buck” O’Neill had coached at Colgate for three years, going 18-8-2. He was another coaching lawyer, (I’ll bet those guys knew the rulebook), and took some years off to tend to his law practice in New York City. He was head coach at SU from 1906-07, 1913-1915 and 1917-19 “and his name was synonymous with Syracuse through that era. Of high intelligence and executive capacity, he was forceful, rigorous and adamant in his system, method and discipline. He knew and loved this great game and was impatient with indifferent, incapable or stupid play or players.”
He was a Syracuse native, working in a butcher’s shop in Manlius that supplied meat for the St. John’s Military Academy. He delivered it and became intrigued by football practice. He volunteered to help out the scrubs when they were short a man and filled his derby hat with straw as protection against concussions, (does the NFL know about this?). He was invited to attend the academy and play football for the team, worked hard in class and became an honor student. He went to Williams College. He played football for them and became team captain.
Colgate hired him in 1902 and he coached them while coaching and playing for a professional team representing the Syracuse Athletic Club, which won something called “The World Series of Football”, (a year before the Baseball World Series began), in Madison Square Garden, the first indoor football games ever played. The field was 70 by 35 yards, (Manley Field House’s field is bigger). They beat something called “the New York Team”, (which was from Philadelphia: it consisted of baseball players from the Phillies and Athletics trying to stay in shape during the off-season: they called themselves that to draw more fans in the Big Apple), 5-0, (a touchdown was worth 5 points then). Syracuse could have made it to 6 points but Pop Warner, who was playing for Syracuse, along with his brother and a couple of Carlisle Indians, missed an extra point. Syracuse then beat the Knickerbockers 36-0 and then a team from New Jersey, the Orange Athletic Club, by the same score.
O’Neill and the coaches who followed him benefited from the opening in 1907 of John D. Archbold’s gift to SU, a huge, (by 1907 standards), concrete and steel football stadium named after the benefactor. O’Neill guided Syracuse to a 52-19-6 record, including the 9-1-2 team of 1915 that was invited to the second Rose Bowl, (the first having been held after the 1901 season, to be replaced for 14 years by chariots races), but had to turn it down for financial reasons. And he coached the team that in 1919, crushed Warner’s Pittsburgh team that had won 34 straight games against collegiate teams, 24-3. He then became the coach at Columbia, which was much closer to his law offices, from 1920-22, finishing with a 81-42-8 record. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951, primarily for his record at Syracuse.
During his first interregnum the team was coached, successively, by a pair of brothers who would wind up in the Hall of Fame with O’Neill. The 1908 coach was Howard Jones, who had just finished playing for Yale for three years during which the Elis never lost a game. He directed Syracuse to a 6-3-1 record. This was the year Pop Warner fooled the Orange by stitching a football-shaped decoration on his player’s jerseys and bamboozled the Syracuse players in a 0-12 Carlisle win. They the Indians played Harvard. Coach Percy Haughton had the footballs painted Crimson and Harvard won 17-0. But Jones scored a huge victory over Michigan, 28-4, the team rushing for 400 yards to 75 for the Wolverines.
Howard Jones moved onto Ohio State the next year, then went into private business. He coached Yale for a year in 1913. His great fame began when he became the coach at Iowa (1916-23), Duke for one year, (1924), and Southern California (1925-40). He turned the latter school into the national power they have been ever since. His overall record was 194-65-21. Jones was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1951, (both he and O’Neill were part of the first class, which had 54 inductees).
Howard turned the job over to his brother, Thomas, Albert Dwight, “TAD” Jones. He had been a star quarterback for Yale in 1906-07. This was his head coaching debut but he didn’t have as much success as his brother. His 1909 team had a losing record for the first time since 1909. His 1910 team got back above the line at 5-4-1 but was a very dull team that outscored ten opponents by a combined 53-42. He didn’t coach another team until he got the Yale job in 1916. With a break for the war, he coached them until 1927, going 69-24-6 overall and getting elected to the Hall in 1958.
He was replaced by Deforest Cummings . The highlight of his two year run, (9-8-2) was a 12-11 win over Carlisle’s greatest team, coached by Warner and with Jim Thorpe at his peak in 1911. Those two teams were the only ones ever coached by Cummings. O’Neill came back for the next three years. Bill Hollenbeck, a former Penn all-American who had coached at Missouri and Penn State, going unbeaten in Happy Valley in 1911-12. He was beatable in Syracuse, going 5-4 before retiring from coaching, preferring business and politics. He’s in the Hall of Fame but as a player, not a coach. Perhaps if he’d kept at it…
O’Neill returned for the third time, greatly assisted by Chick Meehan, his quarterback in 1917 and his assistant coach in 1918-19. When O’Neill took the Columbia job, Meehan took over as coach at Syracuse and coached some of our best teams in 1920-24. His Syracuse coaching record was 35-8-4, including a 1923 team that was ranked #1 in the country by James Howell:
http://www.jhowell.net/cf/cf1923.htm
I call that team our “other” national champion.
Meehan opted to move to New York City and coach NYU, briefly turning them into a national power, and Manhattan, (who had improved its facilities). He retired in 1937 with a laudable 115-44-14 record. He was famous for saying: 'We learn practically nothing from a victory. All our information comes from a defeat. A winner forgets most of his mistakes.'" But he was never elected to the Hall of Fame, probably because of his involvement in a scheme to sell steel on the black market during the Korean War.
Pete Reynolds took over for one year and did a good job, going 8-1-1. As in 1923, the only loss was to Colgate. It was the beginning of the “HooDoo”, when we were unable to beat Colgate for 13 consecutive years, including three where that was the only game we lost, (and that doesn’t include ’23). Reynolds was back the next year, going 7-2-1. Vic Hanson was his big star. That was also the year of the “Massacre of the Plains”, a big brawl after a game at West Point against Army that terminated the series until 1955. Reynolds was at the end of a long coaching career that began in 1909. His previous stops had been at Hobart, Hamilton and Bucknell. He was from Illinois and Wikipedia says he coached at Knox College out there in 1935-37. Most sources don’t list that period but if that’s true, Pete’s overall coaching record was 77-58-14. He settled in Oneida, New York, where he died in 1951.
He was replaced by Lew Andreas, more famous as a long-time basketball coach, (it was his school record for victories that Jim Boeheim broke), and athletic director. He hired Vic Hanson to be his assistant. Andreas sort of stumbled along for three years at 15-10-3 before handing the reigns to Hanson. Vic did somewhat better, going 7-1-1 in 1931 and 6-1-1 in 1935. But he couldn’t beat Colgate and when the 1936 team fell to 1-7, the old hero was fired. Syracuse was the only head football coaching job Andreas or Hanson ever held. Both were alums of the school.
Hanson was replaced by possibly the most prominent coach at the time of hiring we’ve ever had, (Bill Hollenbeck might be the exception but he only lasted that one year and then retired). Ossie Solem has played for Dr. Henry Williams at Minnesota when they were a major national power. Then he went into pro football, coaching a team called the Minneapolis Marines that went on to join the NFL. By that time, Solem had switched to college coach as well as being an athletic director at Luther College in Iowa, (1920), Drake, (1921-31) and Iowa, (1932-36). Drake was a fairly prominent program at that time and his teams went 7-0-0 in 1922 and 7-1-0 in 1928. Wikipedia, in its article on the Drake Bulldogs, says that they “shared the national championship in some national polls. They were invited to the White House for their accomplishments.” I’ve checked the various selectors who list rankings for each year online and I couldn’t find anyone who rated that team higher than 16th. Usually they are around #30. They were what we would now call a good “mid-major”. But it still got Solem some national recognition. Drake was a founding member of the Missouri Valley Conference in 1928 and won its first four championships. .
Solem moved on to Iowa in 1932. The Hawkeyes had just been temporarily suspended by the Big Ten due an athletic department slush fund scandal that dated back to the Howards Jones Era. (They were paying players! Horrors!) Even after the suspension, Solem had a hard time filling out his Big Ten schedule because all the members would rather play Notre Dame. The Depression also hit the University hard and they weren’t able to pay Solem his full salary. Nonetheless, he soldiered on to a 15-21-4 record over five seasons. The period was not without its high points. In 1933 they surprised with a 5-3 record and quarterback Joe Laws was Big Ten MVP. But his greatest player was Ozzie Simmons, “The Ebony Eel” who was named second team All-American in 1934 and first team in 1935. Solem was also able to recruit a strong freshman class in 1936 that included Nile Kinnick, who would win the 1939 Heisman Trophy.
But Solem had a run-in with Simmons, whose teammates resented his notoriety and maybe also his color. They decided not to have a captain of the team his senior year to avoid voting for him. Some even refused to block for him. The coach accused him of “laying down” in a 0-52 loss to Minnesota , even though Simmons played the game with an injured leg. Simmons left the team saying “I’ve taken too much abuse this season because of Iowa’s poor showing. I’ve taken more punishment than I did in my sophomore year and Solem has been screaming at me. He doesn’t scream at the other players, just me.” (There was bullying in those days, as well.) Solem replied “Other players on the team were berated for their play in the Minnesota game but they took it without a word. I made one criticism of Simmons and he couldn’t take it.” They later made up and Simmons said, "He probably could have been tougher (on the players), but he was the finest gentleman I've ever been around."
Nonetheless, Solem left Iowa to come east and coach Syracuse for the 1937 season. He assembled perhaps the finest football staff ever with two protégés who had also played for Minnesota assisting him, Clarence “Biggie” Munn and Bud Wilkinson. One of their players was Hugh “Duffy” Daughtery, who gave this scouting report for himself: “He may be small but he sure is slow.” Duffy joined Solem’s staff on graduation. Wilkinson, of course, went on to become coach at Oklahoma, turning them in a dominant program while Munn and then Daugherty coached Michigan State to nearly equal prominence. Despite the quality of the coaching, there were plenty of ups and downs during Solem’s tenure, (1937-45), during which he went 30-27-6. The high points were winning what Grantland Rice called the greatest game he had seen against powerful Cornell in 1938, 19-17, finally breaking the HooDoo against Colgate later the same year, 7-0 and upsetting national power Wisconsin 27-20 in 1941 using the controversial “reverse center” formation which was subsequently banned. (Amos Alonzo Stagg commented that “a time of war was not the time to be showing your backside to the enemy”). The most prominent players were Marty Glickman and Wilmeth Sidat-Singh.
Solem moved on after the war to coach at Springfield College in Massachusetts, (Wikipedia, for some reason, lists it as “YMCA” the first seven years but it was the college). In 1956 his team went 8-0-1 thanks, in part to a center/linebacker named Dick MacPherson , who captained Solem’s last team in 1957. Solem was 44-7-3 coaching the Minneapolis pro team and then 162-117-20 in a 37 season college coaching career, (SU did not field a team in 1943). He had also gone 37-31 in four seasons as the Drake basketball coach. I had thought he was in the Hall of Fame but, in fact, he is not, although his three famous assistants are.
Biggie Munn took over as head coach in 1946 after Solem had a 1-6 season the previous year. He’d been assisting Fritz Crisler at Michigan. He improved the team’s record to 4-5 but left for Michigan State with most of his staff, an offer “that comes once in a lifetime”. It sounds reminiscent of Doug Marrone. State was a large public school that was ambitious to build up its program and try to gain entrance into the Big Ten, which had become the Big Nine when Chicago gave up the sport. Syracuse was not so ambitious. Munn build the Spartans into a national power, winning 28 games in a row from 1950-53, the national championship in 1952 and the Rose Bowl in ’53, the first year they were eligible for it. Munn then became athletic director and appointed Daugherty as his successor. Duffy won the Rose bowl with his 1955 team and the coach’s version of the national title in 1965. Munn was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1959 and Daugherty in 1984
Next up was Reaves “Ribs” Baysinger, an old SU football hero from the 20’s who had been coaching the freshman team. Les Dye: “His success didn’t carry on for reasons beyond my knowledge. And then, consequently football kind of petered out at Syracuse in terms of popularity.” Dye felt that things might have been different in Munn had stayed. “He was considerably more aggressive in his recruiting tactics than Baysinger when he was head coach.”
Baysinger went 3-6 his first year, although he managed to beat Colgate, 7-0. The next year may have been SU’s worst team ever. The beat Niagara in their opening game, 13-9, thanks to a fumble at the goal line in the final seconds. Niagara gave up football after that season, the joke going that they decided to give it up since they couldn’t beat Syracuse. Then came eight losses in a row by a combined 76-235. That was it for “Ribs”.
SU fans had a solution: bring in a famous coach. They were shocked when Lew Andreas chose the head coach at Muhlenberg to be the next coach at Syracuse. In the words of that Muhlenberg coach: “The alumni wanted a big-name coach…and got a long-name coach.”
