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JOB-HUNTING TIP: For those of you who attended my 1998 and 1999 spring clinics --- the list of advantages of this offense that I listed is not only useful in selling the Double Wing to your assistants, your players, and your parents --- it's also a very important tool to take with you into a job interview. There is likely to be someone there who will ask you why you intend to run such a goofy-looking offense, and you'd better be able to give them some good reasons, or they'll hire the guy who told them he's going to run the West Coast Offense - "the same thing the 49ers run."  (Only after he's hired will he break the news that Steve Young won't be coming with him.) For some ammunition, read  My 1996 Article in TEXAS COACH magazine - lists advantages and disadvantages of the Double Wing

INCIDENTALLY...For those of you who are exploring the job market... I have come across a relatively new web site that may have some promise:  "COACHING JOBS"

Coaching Resources

Coach Homer Smith, a "Coaching Resource" in his own right, is a regular contributor to this web site. On his own page, he deals with the most fundamental and the most theoretical aspects of the game, sharing with our readers a knowledge and wisdom acquired in a distinguished coaching career.

If you live in or near a big city, check out the used book stores.(Just stay out of Powell's World of Books,  in  Portland, Oregon - I saw it first. Just kidding. It is reputed to be the World's Largest Independent Book Store, and you never know what you might find there.) Nowadays, coaches supplement their incomes with shoe contracts and TV shows, but in the old days they wrote books, and if you think you can't learn anything from those old books, you're missing out on an important part of your education as a coach. From time to time, I will review some of those books that I have been fortunate enough to find. (One unfortunate side effect of the Internet and all the book-searching that it enables people to do from their living rooms is a pronounced increase in the prices of old football books.)

Simplified Single Wing Football - By Kenneth W. Keuffel, Ph.D. , Prentice-Hall, 1964 - People familiar with my materials know that I am a great admirer of the single wing and the part it has played in my offensive thinking. Coaches occasionally ask me for references on the single wing, and I have been able to recommend several very good ones. But now, through the good graces of Ed Racely, undoubtedly the football world's leading single wing enthusiast, I am in possession of a photocopy of this magnificent book by the acknowledged master of the offense.

A prep school classmate of former President Bush, Dr. Ken Keuffel (he uses the German pronunciation KER-full) learned his single-wing from the masters. He played his college football at Princeton for the legendary Charlie Caldwell, two of whose assistants, Dick Colman and John Stiegman, went on to become successful college single wing coaches themselves. Following graduation from Princeton, Coach Keuffel continued his learning as an assistant coach at Penn under single wing master George Munger. At the time Coach Keuffel wrote this book, he was head coach at Wabash College, in Indiana, but in 1967 he returned to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he continues to coach to this day.

This is clearly one of the best football textbooks I have ever seen. Surely, it will awaken anyone reading it today to the debt that so much of present-day offensive football owes to the single wing. Coach Keuffel writes well, and ranges in his thinking from broad philosophy to individual techniques:  I was especially impressed with his method of teaching the center snap. He even included a chapter on how to defend against the single wing. (Don't worry, you single wingers out there. One of his key bits of advice for your opponents is that they have a "single wing team" of their own to run against their defense. Good Luck.)

This book is not dated. It is as fresh as today. You are almost certain to find something in it that you can use in your program. Best of all, it is available in bound photocopies. Ed Racely, as a favor to Dr. Ken Keuffel and single wing enthusiasts everywhere, is offering it at a very reasonable price: send a check or money order for $21 to: Ed Racely, 95 Reservoir Rd., Atherton CA 94027 (Be sure to let Ed know how you heard of Dr. Keuffel's book.)HELP! ED CALLED ME TO LET ME - AND MY READERS - KNOW THAT HE HAS BEEN SWAMPED WITH ORDERS, AND HE IS GOING ON VACATION UNTIL THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST- HE ASKED ME KINDLY TO ASK YOU TO HOLD OFF ON THE ORDERS UNTIL THEN, IF YOU WOULD. THIS WHOLE BOOK DEAL IS AN ACT OF GENEROSITY THAT ED IS PERFORMING, AND WE DON'T WANT IT TO BECOME A HASSLE FOR HIM!

My Kind of Football - By Steve Owen  (David McKay and Company, New York, 1952) is the reminiscences of Steve Owen, who served as head coach of the New York Giants from 1931 to 1953, and was voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as both player and coach. In his 23 seasons as head man in New York, he had the Giants in eight NFL championship games, and won two NFL titles. Only six of his teams had losing records.

Even in his playing days, Owen, a big man, came honestly by the nickname "Stout Steve. " According to Owen, Tim Mara, Giants' owner, informed him of his hiring by telling him, "I'm tired of buying uniforms for you, Owen. You're the coach."

A direct man whose straighforwardness reflected his Oklahoma upbringing, Owen told his players, "I only ask one thing of you guys. I want your ass for one hour of playing time every Sunday."

He wasn't asking for much. But he wouldn't settle for anything less. As one of his former players, Hall of Famer Tuffy Leemans, recalled, Owen was known to say to his players, after they had just lost a game, "Well, boys, we're going to work a little bit now." And right then and there, the Giants would practice. "One time," Leemans remembers, "we went at it for two and a half hours. Knocked heads all the way."

Owen was one of the last of the old school guys. "The game is  played in the dirt," he once said scornfully of Paul Brown's devotion to the passing game."There is no mystery to football," he wrote, "but no easy way to play it, either. Some teams claim to use hundreds of plays on attack, and that sounds mighty impressive and awful difficult. But fundamentally, every football club operates with six to ten basic plays.  All the rest are variations. In fact, the most brilliant set of plays won't mean much if a team cannot gain off tackle. That is the essential bread-and-butter play.

"In my time I have seen the rudimentary game of the early twenties, a smash-and-shove affair of brute force, grow into the streamlined, exciting, scientific, long-scoring football of today (1952). But the fundamentals are unchanged - block, tackle, and practice."

One of the NFL's last converts to the T formation, Owen was famous for his "A" formation, which he claimed combines "the essentials of the T formation with the power blocking of the single wing." The name had nothing to do with the shape of the formation. Owen started out calling this formation "A" and the single wing "B", but after seeing the new formation's possibilties, he wrote, "we forgot about B and the other twenty-four letters as well."

STEVE OWEN'S  "A FORMATION"

In 1952, after 22 years of professional coaching, Coach Owen wrote, "I started in football by knowing nothing at all about it. The longer I've been in it, and the more football I've seen, the more convinced I am there is always plenty more to learn."

PB: The Paul Brown Story - By Paul Brown with Jack Clary (Signet, New York, 1979)  "Paul Brown"  is the answer to the question up above (and also at the top of the Home Page). I'm not going to divulge too much else, though, because I intend to synopsize his book at greater length in coming weeks. Coach Brown was a man of uncompromisingly high standards who won championships at the high school, college, service and professional level. He is the man who more than anyone built the great high school football tradition in Massillon, Ohio. He grew up there and returned to win state championships as their coach. (Their 20,000-seat stadium is named Paul Brown Tiger Stadium in his honor). He won a national championship at Ohio State, helping to raise the bar almost impossibly high for his successors. Given the virtual pick of every football player inducted into the Navy during World War II, he put together a powerhouse service team at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. And after the War, he assembled one of the greatest professional football teams ever, the All-America Football Conference's Cleveland Browns - named for him, as many people know, but not because of any great ego on his part. Originally named the Cleveland Panthers, the club was informed by someone who had once owned a semi-pro team by that name that it would cost them thousands of dollars for the rights to the name. Unwilling to pay him off, the club held a "Name-the-Team" contest, and, no doubt because of Coach Brown's renown from having coached at Massillon and Ohio State, "Browns" received the most votes. Thirteen years later, Coach Brown was let go by a new owner (hint: the same guy who would later move the Browns to Baltimore), unhappy with Brown's insistence on total control over the football operation. If that had been today, Coach Brown would probably have signed on as a TV color analyst (although it is hard to picture Paul Brown, a stern, focused man, yukking it up with Howie and Terry), but such employment for ex-jocks and ex-coaches was unheard-of then,  so he settled back in retirement in a beachfront home in LaJolla (la-HOY-a), California.  But he was a football guy, and five years of sunny, golf-filled days didn't satisfy his craving for more football, so when old Ohio friends - including the Governor - approached him about getting involved in a professional team in Cincinnati, he jumped at the chance to return to the game.  This time, though, there would be no meddling owners to interfere with Coach Brown - this time he would be an owner himself, with complete control over the operation of the club. In his first year, 1968, the Cincinnati Bengals became the first expansion team ever to win three games; in his second year, Coach Brown was voted Coach of the Year; in his third year, the Bengals won their division championship. He retired as coach after the 1975 season. Of all Coach Brown's many contributions to the game, perhaps his most significant was being the first professional coach to actively recruit black football players. By the way, the 1972 Dolphins were not the only professional team to make it through a season unbeaten: the 1948 Cleveland Browns finished 15-0 in the All-America Football Conference, a fact that the NFL stubbornly refuses to recognize as a pro record. LOOK FOR MORE ABOUT PAUL BROWN

Bobby Dodd on Football - by Bobby Dodd (Prentice-Hall, New York, 1954) From 1945 through 1946, the folks at Georgia Tech used to say, "In Dodd we trust." They were talking about legendary Coach Robert E. Lee "Bobby" Dodd, who in the days when there were no more than a half-dozen post-season bowl games - when going to a bowl game was a huge achievement - took the Yellow Jackets to 13 bowl games, winning 9 of them. In all, in 22 years of going up against coaching greats such as Bear Bryant of Alabama, Shug Jordan of Auburn, Wally Butts of Georgia, General Robert Neyland of Tennessee and Frank Howard of Clemson, Coach Dodd won 166 games at Georgia Tech, and in 1952 was named Coach of the Year.  Coach Dodd's teams were unusually well coached and well grounded in the fundamentals, and his book's sections on how to teach blocking and tackling are still useful today. Coach Dodd was a pioneer of the full-house Belly-T, which at the time of its introduction had the same kind of dramatic impact on the game as the wishbone would  later, when Texas sprung it on the football world in the late '60s. Anyone who now runs the Wing-T (not to mention anyone still running the Belly-T) owe a great debt of gratitude to Coach Dodd. On defense, Coach Dodd mainly alternated between a wide-tackle 6 and a 5-3, although he describes a "5-4" (Oklahoma) and a stacked-linebackers version of his "6" as his way of dealing with the Split-T that was becoming popular at the time of the book's publication.  Some of you might find the book handy just for the eight pages it devotes to stopping the single wing (which is still very much with us - Ken Hofer won a state title with a single wing at Menominee, Michigan this year). Bill Curry, who after his all-pro days as an NFL center coached at Georgia Tech, Alabama and Kentucky,  played for Coach Dodd, and recalled, at the time of Coach Dodd's death in 1988, that whenever faced with a bigger, stronger opponent, Coach Dodd would convince his players that they had an edge in intelligence. "He told us, " said Curry, "'We have an advantage because we're smarter than they are. The amazing thing was, we were stupid enough to believe him." 

Texas Coach  magazine is a good resource for football coaches. I've been a subscriber for years. Actually, until not so very long ago it was an excellent resource. It's still pretty good, but in recent years it has appeared to be carrying the banner of gender equity and "fairness", devoting less and less space to hard-core football-related articles and more and more coverage to volleyball and soccer.. The recent October issue, though, contains a nice article by Jerry Valloton on what he calls his "wings-up" Double-Wing formation (what we call "uptight," or "back-off"). If you're interested in a subscription to Texas Coach, it's $13 a year for non-members of the Texas High School Coaches' Association. Send your check to TEXAS COACH, THSCA, PO Drawer 14627, Austin TX 78761.

Football Coaching, by John McKay (Ronald Press, New York, 1966): Few coaches have enjoyed the success of John McKay, who as head man at USC won five Rose Bowls and three National Championships (1962, 1967, 1972). USC even beat Notre Dame back in those days! Coach McKay  made USC football synonymous with the  I-formation , and he had such great tailbacks as O.J. Simpson, Mike Garrett and Anthony Davis, usually running behind so many blockers that the USC power sweep was humorously tagged "Student Body Right." Coach McKay's book describes the basics of an I-formation oriented offense and the blocking rules and patterns for its base plays, as well as the base 50 defense and the techniques of the individual defensive  positions. Coach McKay includes some fundamental drills, along with sections on practice organization, scouting and public relations. One glaring example of an area in which the football of Coach McKay's era has been left behind is the USC weight training program detailed in his book: players are to do 4 sets of 3 reps each on the bench press, starting with their body weight, and increasing 10 pounds per week!

Parseghian and Notre Dame Football (Doubleday & Co., 1971). This one is a classic. I didn't buy it used, though. (I paid $9.95 for it, new, in 1973.) . Coach Parseghian was coming off a national title (due in part, by the way, to having run a major portion of the time from the Double-Wing.) The book covers Coach Parseghian's thinking on offense and defense, including individual positions, with drills useful at any level. He holds nothing back in offering advice to other coaches. This book has been an important resource for me since the day I bought it, and for that I will always be grateful to Ara Parseghian. That, and the fact that for me, he defines the term "class act": in 1974, when I was working as Player Personnel Director of the Philadelphia Bell, helping to put together a brand-new World Football League team, I got a call one day from - Ara Parseghian! It was like getting a call from God. He was calling about a couple of his players, non-starters who were being overlooked by the pro's. He was in the middle of spring practice. Those kids had never started for him and they'd used up their eligibility - they were of no further use to him -  If he he had been that kind of guy. But here he was, taking the time to try to find them a job. Certain other "name" coaches wouldn't even return my calls, but Ara Parseghian, Coach of the Year, returning the loyalty that unpublicized kids had demonstrated to him and  to Notre Dame, called me. (They weren't bad players, either. One of them, Dennis Lozzi, a big kid from Whitman, Mass., started every game for us at offensive tackle.) Incidentally, Joe Paterno did the same thing for a couple of his back-ups. 

Homer Smith's Handbook for Coaching the Football Passing Attack (Parker Publishing, 1970) is a fundamental textbook that every coach ought to read. Coach Smith, who recently retired as offensive coordinator at Arizona, had a varied and successful career as head coach at Davidson and Army, and offensive coordinator at UCLA, Alabama and Arizona (I may have missed a place or two).  His book is useful not only for its insights into passing phil