Three College Football Coaches Who Became U.S. Presidents

The third Monday of February arrives in a few days, and with it comes the celebration of Washington’s Birthday, Washington and Lincoln Day, President’s Day, or Presidents’ Day, depending on the state doing the celebrating. I live in Michigan, which is the only state to celebrate Presidents Day (no apostrophe), so I’ll join my fellow Michiganders in honoring all who held the role rather than the policies or achievements of specific officeholders.

I’ll take a different spin on the Presidents Day theme to look at the three U.S. Presidents who coached college football prior to entering politics. I'll close with a quick review of how each President since Teddy Roosevelt was connected to football (or not).

I'd venture that few Americans could correctly name the three football-coaching Presidents prior to reading this posting. One of them was among the first to ever 'coach' football when the game was in its early days.

Woodrow Wilson

In Fields of Friendly Strife, I describe how then-President Wilson gave the go-ahead for the 1918 Rose Bowl and noted that his experience as the secretary of the football association at Princeton during his undergraduate days made him view football favorably. My understanding at the time was that Wilson handled the scheduling and financial matters for the team. I did not imagine he had a hand in on-the-field coaching. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Some of Wilson’s story may be a bit fanciful, but the world of college football was quite different in those days. Parke H. Davis provides some perspective. Davis was the national championship-winning coach at Lafayette in 1906 and his 1911 book, Football, America's Intercollegiate Game, was one of the first histories of the game. Davis noted that coaching was more informal during the 1800s and often amounted to alums coaching by committee. Any given alum might appear for a few days and return two weeks or a month later. In fact, the term ‘coach,’ did not arrive from Britain until the late 1880s, and the earliest use of the term “football coach” in a newspaper came in 1891. (“Baseball coach” appeared in newspapers three years earlier.)

As the story goes, Wilson saw his first football game at age ten, three years before the first intercollegiate game in 1869, so the game he witnessed was likely some form of folk game or a game played under rugby or soccer rules. He played baseball at Davidson before transferring to Princeton and was there in 1877 when Harvard challenged Princeton to a game. Previously, what we now consider college football was played under association or soccer rules, but the elite eastern colleges agreed in 1876 to play intercollegiate games under modified rugby rules. It turns out that Wilson was the only one at Princeton that understood rugby, so he was elected to the football board and helped ‘coach’ the team, in addition to handling the finances.

Woodrow Wilson in 1875 (Pach Bros.)

Wilson graduated from Princeton and wandered a bit professionally before earning a Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins. He then joined the faculty of Wesleyan in 1888, where he found a football team needing direction and, after volunteering his services, was elected the team’s faculty adviser. In effect, Wilson was the team coach before that term was used and before coaches controlled their teams as they have for the last century and more. Notably, under Wilson’s direction, Wesleyan had its best season in 1889, beating the likes of Penn, Lehigh, and Rutgers.

Wilson joined the faculty of Princeton in 1890 and sometimes worked with the football team for the next few years. Parke H. Davis, the football coach and historian mentioned earlier, was a freshman at Princeton in 1890 and recalled that Wilson was the first ‘coach’ he met on the practice field.

Of course, Wilson became Princeton’s President before being elected New Jersey’s governor in 1910 and U.S. President in 1914.