Forgotten Innovations: The 12th Man as Field General

One of the significant transitions in football over the last sixty years has been the shift from quarterbacks to coaches calling the plays. The details of how that process occurred are available in an earlier post, but the summary version is that the shift took decades due to the tension between two opposing forces. On the one hand, the game's increasing popularity meant there was too much money at stake -and coaches' livelihoods- for playing calling to be left in the hands of mere students. Many coaches wanted to control their fate, and managing their team's play-calling assisted that process. Conversely, the belief in amateurism and the idea of football being an educational tool for its players remained strong. Many of the latter's strongest proponents were coaches who believed their duty was to prepare athletes to call the plays. Tad Jones, who coached Syracuse and Yale between 1905 and 1927, was among those arguing against coaches exerting greater influence during the game:

Football is developing into a game not of two teams but of two coaches We are all beating the rules. Substitutes are juggles. Men are taken out not because they are hurt or used up but because their coaches want to correct their faults. …I say, once a man goes out, let him stay out. Then there would not be so much complaint regarding the coach's influence on the game.

A handful of rules minimized the coaches role in play calling, including those:

• Limiting substitutions,

• Prohibiting substitute players from talking to teammates during the first play after entering the game,

• Requiring everyone or nearly everyone on the sideline to be seated, and

• Limiting coach-player communication during play and timeouts.

Illustration of the referee's signal for illegal communication (1932 Brown University scorecard)

One proposal to resolve this conflict came from Andy Kerr, then considered one of the game's brightest minds, now primarily known as the namesake of Colgate's football stadium. Kerr was Pop Warner's assistant at Pitt when Warner signed a contract in 1922 to become Stanford's new coach. Since Warner had to honor the two remaining years on his Pitt contract, he sent Kerr to Stanford to coach the team during the 1922 and 1923 seasons and implement the Warner system. Kerr made his way to Colgate in 1929, where his teams lost one game each in five of his first six seasons. In the other season, 1932, his team did not lose a game -shutting out every opponent. After they were passed over for the Rose Bowl, Kerr described his team as "undefeated, untied, unscored upon, and uninvited." 

Colgate s 1932 team scores at Syracuse on their way to a 16 to 0 win. (Special Collections and University Archives, Colgate University)