Review of "Yea, Coach! Three Great Football Coaches," by Guernsey Van Riper, Jr.

Review of

Yea, Coach! Three Great Football Coaches, by Guernsey Van Riper, Jr. 

Four out of five stars

 Although this book was written for the young adult and is laudatory towards the three coaches profiled, it contains a lot of interesting history. There has been a great deal of publicity recently about the violence in football, with the increasing awareness of head injuries. Often forgotten is how violent and brutal the game was in the early years.

 In the early days, the players wore little in the way of equipment and the flying wedge was a routine tactic. Every season there were many serious injuries and a few deaths, 19 in the 1905 season. Public pressure became so great that President Theodore Roosevelt convened a meeting with the representatives of the three greatest collegiate football powers and “encouraged” them to reduce the violence and brutality. Not only did this lead to the outlawing of formations like the flying wedge, it legalized the forward pass and created the neutral zone at the line of scrimmage.

 Once the rule changes were in place, there was a great deal of room for innovation and two of the coaches featured in this book, Glenn “Pop” Warner and John W. Heisman, developed much of the formations and tactics that live on in the modern game. While their play was still based on running the ball, their introduction of new formations and disciplined teamwork revolutionized the game. Warner’s teams won everywhere he coached, even when his teams should have been outmatched.

 Heisman was the person primarily responsible for lobbying the college football rules committee to make the forward pass legal. This completely changed the game, allowing the offense to spread the field horizontally and vertically. Heisman was so influential in changing and expanding the game of football that the premier award in college football is named after him.

 The third coach profiled is Knute Rockne, considered by many to be the best college coach of all time. The main change introduced by Rockne was the two-platoon system. He thought nothing of starting the game with his second string and then replacing them after they had forced the other team’s first string to expend a great deal of energy.

 There is a great deal of concern that football may once again be in danger of being declared too dangerous to play by enough people that it fades in popularity. However, it seems that the recent rule changes and the heightened awareness will alter it enough so that it will live on. It has happened once before and will no doubt happen again.