Glenn Warner

Glenn Scobey Warner (April 5, 1871 – September 7, 1954), most commonly known as Pop Warner, was an American college football coach at various institutions who is responsible for several key aspects of the modern game. Included among his innovations are the single and double wing formations (precursors of the modern spread and shotgun formations), the three point stance and the body blocking technique. Fellow pioneer coach Amos Alonzo Stagg called Warner "one of the excellent creators". He was inducted as a coach into the College Football Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural class in 1951. He also contributed to a junior football program which became known as Pop Warner Little Scholars, a popular youth American football organization.

In the early 1900s, he created a premier football program at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School—a federally-funded, off-reservation Indian boarding school. He also coached teams to four national championships: Pittsburgh in 1915, 1916, and 1918 and Stanford in 1926. In all, he was head coach at the University of Georgia (1895–1896), Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm (1895–1899), Cornell University (1897–1898 and 1904–1906), Carlisle (1899–1903 and 1907–1914), Pittsburgh (1915–1923), Stanford (1924–1932) and Temple University (1933–1938), compiling a career college football record of 319–106–32. Predating Bear Bryant, Eddie Robinson, and Joe Paterno, he once had the most wins of any coach in college football history.

Early years

Warner was born April 5, 1871 on a farm in Springville, New York. He was the son of William Warner, a cavalry officer in the American Civil War, and schoolteacher Adaline Scobey. In 1878 a railroad came to Springville, and four years later the family moved to a house on East Main Street.

Plump as a child, Warner was sometimes known as "Butter". He began playing baseball at an early age, and was a skilled pitcher. Nobody in town owned a football; his only exposure to the new sport at a young age was with an inflated cow's bladder, and as few knew the rules, the game more resembled soccer. Warner's East Main Street house attracted a number of friends; when a neighbor told his mother that the boys' play would damage her lawn, she replied: "I'm raising boys, not grass."

In 1889 at 19 years old, Warner graduated from Springville-Griffith Institute and joined his family in moving down to Wichita Falls, Texas, to work on their new purchased cattle and wheat ranch totaling over hundreds of acres. Aside from ranching, Warner got a job assisting a tinsmith. He was already interested in art as a child—learning how to paint watercolor landscapes, and as a tinsmith he learned how to use tools to make things like cups, teapots, baking pans, and lanterns.

Student years at Cornell

In 1892, Warner returned to Springville and began to use his cowboy experience to gamble on horse races. Although he had no interest in college, soon after coming back he attended Cornell Law School, as he had lost all of his money at the races. Later Warner wrote "I dare not write to my father and tell him I was broke"—he felt that the only way to get funds was to inform his father that he had decided to study law. His father, who had always wanted him to be a lawyer, sent him .

Eventually, Warner became known as "Pop" because he was one of the oldest students at Cornell. Warner graduated from Cornell in 1894 and began working as an attorney in Buffalo, New York. This job only lasted for a few months.

Playing career

On Warner's train ride to Ithaca (the site of Cornell), he met Carl Johanson, then Cornell's football coach, who was impressed by Warner's weight (200 pounds). Johanson practically ordered Warner to attend practice. This happened even though Warner admitted that he had never handled a real football.

Despite his commitment to football, at the time Warner's true passion was baseball. During one of his first practices at Cornell he badly injured his shoulder and never played serious baseball again. Warner also participated in track and field and was the school's heavyweight boxing champion for two years.

=Football

=

During his three years at Cornell, Warner played as a guard on the football team. Even though he graduated in the spring of 1894, he returned as a post-graduate and was named captain of the 1894 team, which had a 6–4–1 record.

Due to the then-tradition of alumni coming back to assist their undergraduate teams in rivalry games, Cornell's coach Marshall Newell left for several weeks to assist Harvard in its rivalry game with Yale. As a captain, Warner was put in charge during the coach's absence. It was during this time that Warner came up with his first original play: Three backs who normally protected the rusher would fake a run to one side, while the quarterback kept the ball and would hand it to the runner, who now had an open field to run through on the other side. During the first in-game execution of the play, Warner carried the ball and was able to run clear for 25 yards. However, as Warner was a guard and not a runner, he was incorrectly holding the ball, and fumbled upon being tackled.

Coaching career

Iowa State, Georgia and Cornell

In the spring of 1895, Warner was asked for a reference to fill the vacant head coaching position at Iowa Agricultural College, in Ames, Iowa. Instead of giving a reference, Warner himself applied for the job and received an offer for $25 per week (). At the same time, he decided to apply to other schools and received an offer of $34 per week () from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Because Iowa State began its season in August—almost one and a half months prior to the beginning in Georgia—Warner was able to work out a deal. For , he would coach in Iowa from August until the second week of September, and then head to Georgia and begin coaching there.

Iowa State

Ultimately, not only did Warner end up coaching at Iowa State before his time at Georgia; but while in Athens, he also received weekly updates from Iowa and sent back telegraphs with detailed advice for the following week. One story recounts that in the middle of September (just before leaving for Georgia), Warner took his team north west for a previously agreed-upon game against the Butte Athletic Club of Butte, Montana. Apparently overconfident, Warner bet the entire sum of his Iowa State wages——on his team's victory. At halftime, his team trailed 10–2. Warner decided to enter the game, filling in at the guard position. Though this had a positive impact, it was not sufficient as his team still lost 12–10. In a 1947 publication by Francis J. Powers, there is an alternate take on the causes of the Butte loss: "The game was played on a field as devoid of grass as a glacier and there was nothing green ... It was impossible for the center to snap the ball to the quarterback on the bounce or even roll it without chances for a fumble ... Whenever Iowa State threatened to score, the referee (a home towner) would make a decision which chilled the Cyclones' offense ... spectators, who followed up and down the sidelines, would whip out their six shooters and blaze away with enthusiasm, which also chilled the Iowa college boys." In order to try and make up for losing all of his Iowa State wages, Warner worked out a deal where, for , he would stay in contact with Iowa State while at Georgia.

Soon after Warner left for Georgia, Iowa State had its first official college game of the season. In Evanston, just north of Chicago, underdog Iowa State defeated Northwestern 36–0. A ''Chicago Tribune'' headline read, "Struck by a Cyclone". Since then, Iowa State teams have been known as the Cyclones. The team finished with three wins and three losses and, like Georgia, retained Warner for the following season. In 1896, Iowa State had eight wins and two losses. Despite leaving Georgia for Cornell in 1897, Warner remained head coach at Iowa State for another three years, posting winning records.

Georgia

In Warner's first season at Georgia, he was hired at a salary of $34 per week. The school was a charter member of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SIAA), the first athletic conference in the South. The football team had three wins and four losses, including a loss to North Carolina from a not-yet-legal forward pass. He was rehired at a salary of $40 per week, and the next season Georgia had one of the school's first great teams. With an undefeated record, the team won its first conference title. It also avenged the loss to North Carolina, winning 24–16, "For the first time in Southern football history the football supremacy of Virginia and North Carolina was successfully challenged."

During those two years Warner also played two games against John Heisman, another future coaching legend. Heisman was the head coach at Auburn University, and they faced each other in the 1895 and 1896 games of the "Deep South's Oldest Rivalry," an annual confrontation which has continued to the present day. In 1895, the Auburn Tigers defeated the Bulldogs 12–6. The Auburn team was led by quarterback Reynolds "Tick" Tichenor, known for his punt returns. Tichenor had executed the first " hidden-ball trick" in an earlier Auburn game against Vanderbilt, and used it again against Georgia. The next year, Tichenor faced Georgia's Richard Von Albade Gammon, a star quarterback in his first year under Warner. Both quarterbacks played well and, unlike the previous year, Warner's team won 16–6. The second touchdown came right after the first onside kick in the South.

Cornell

After Georgia's outstanding 1896 performance, Warner returned to his '' alma mater'' Cornell at twice his Georgia salary. While remaining head coach at Iowa State, he coached Cornell to records of 5–3–1 in 1897 and 10–2 in 1898; in the latter season, Cornell outscored its opponents 296–29. Despite its 1898 success, tension existed within the team, as its assistant coach (backed by a large proportion of the players) lobbied to replace Warner. Acknowledging an issue with his leadership, Warner resigned.

=Return to Cornell

=
In 1904, after five years at Carlisle (see below), Warner returned to Cornell but his 1904 team featuring Clemson transfer James Lynah was little improved over the previous year. The following two years were better, with the 1905 team losing to undefeated champion Penn by one point. Their game next year was a scoreless tie, and Cornell lost only one game that season (to Princeton).

Carlisle

After leaving Cornell the first time, Warner became head coach of the football team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1899, a flagship Indian boarding school founded to teach children and young men skills to advance in American society. Its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century football teams were nationally prominent, and Warner was paid , an exceptionally high salary for a coach at the time.

His previous Cornell team had once faced Carlisle, and he had been impressed by his opponent's approach to the game. Since the players were outweighed by every other team in the nation, they relied on speed and agility instead of size and physical force. Despite those strengths, Cornell won the game 23 to 6. The referee was a former Cornell graduate and was accused of helping out Cornell during the game. After the match, while addressing the journalists, Warner acknowledged that there had been assistance from the referee. He stated that "We outscored 'em but we didn't defeat 'em, if you follow me. Pop Warner always made references to Bugs Bunny." It has been said that after that game he considered Carlisle to be the future of college football.

The head coach dealt with young players who differed from the white, East-Coast students with whom he had previously worked. At the beginning, he used the then-customary coaching methods of rough language and a strict routine. The Native American students were unaccustomed to such an approach, and several key players stopped attending practices. Warner adjusted his technique, saying that he "found I could get better results. I don't think I ever swore at a player from that time. Maybe I did a little cussing, now and then, but never at players."

His coaching brought immediate improvement. In 1897 and 1898, the Carlisle teams had 6–4 records. In 1899 (Warner's first year), Carlisle won nine and lost two games—to the country's two best teams: Harvard and Princeton. That year saw Carlisle's first major victory, against one of the " Big Four" teams, beating Penn 16–5. At the end of the season, the school played Columbia at the Polo Grounds in New York City, a premier sports venue at the time, defeating them 42–0. The Columbia game was the first time that a crouching start, a form of what is now known as a three point stance, was used by the running backs. Before Warner's innovation, the stance for a back before the ball was snapped was bent forward with his feet well apart and his hands on his knees. Warner realized that if his players took a stance similar to the one taken by sprinters, the legs would be bent, the back leaning forward, with one hand on the ground and the other arm cocked back to the thigh/hip region. Like with sprinters, this similar stance maximized the speed of his players. Shortly after, it became the standard football stance for both backs and linemen.

At the end of 1899, Warner was appointed the school's athletic director and his salary more than doubled. A track-and-field program was started that year. Warner knew little about the sport; to prepare as coach he bought every book available and consulted Jack Moakley and Mike Murphy, two of the era's leading head coaches. The program was successful; running was a Native American tradition, and students from the Southwest were known for their stamina in long-distance races.

Warner's next two years were less fruitful. The 1900 football team went 6–4–1, losing three games to the Big Four, and the 1901 season was a losing one, with Carlisle posting a 5–7–1 record. The following year, the team posted an improved 8–3 record, when Warner began implementing double (lateral) passes. Carlisle's quarterback Jimmy Johnson would make a lateral pass to the halfback running towards the sideline, bringing the defense with him as he tossed the ball back to the fast-running Johnson.

In 1902, Warner played one professional football game for the Syracuse Athletic Club during the first World Series of Football at Madison Square Garden. In the first professional indoor football game, Syracuse defeated the heavily favored New York team. During the series, Warner was seriously cut on the side of his head. Although he laughed it off at first, the injury turned out to be more serious and he was replaced with Blondy Wallace for the rest of the series. For the tournament, Warner and the other team members each earned , although each player's expected share had been ; it was a financial failure.

Carlisle's 1903 season was a success, with only two losses. The 12–11 defeat by Harvard is known for the "hunch-back", or " hidden-ball", play which Warner learned from Heisman; he had a tailor sew elastic bands into the waists of several players' jerseys before the game so the play could be executed. It was used during a Harvard kickoff; when the ball was caught, Carlisle formed a circle around the returner and pushed the ball up the back of the player's (altered) jersey. Carlisle then broke the huddle and spread out in different directions. Each player except the returner (who had the hidden ball) pretended to carry the football. The ruse confused the Harvard players, who scrambled to find the ball carrier, and the returner (ignored, with both hands free) ran untouched into the end zone. Warner's next step was a brief return to Cornell.

Back to Carlisle

After three years at Cornell, Warner returned to Carlisle. He considered his second stint there his best. From 1907 to 1914, the team won ten or more games a season five times.

During this time at Carlisle, Warner made several significant contributions to football offense, including the body block technique and the single- and double- wingback formations. Under Warner, Carlisle quarterback Frank Mount Pleasant and fullback Pete Hauser became two of the first regular spiral

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases