Today's Tidbit... Pop Warner Looks Forward and Back
Today's Tidbit... Pop Warner Looks Forward and Back
Grantland Rice spent an afternoon at Pop Warner's Palo Alto home in 1950, ten years after Warner ended his 45-year coaching career. Rice had first seen a Warner-coached team play as a 16-year-old in 1896 when Warner's Georgia Bulldogs visited Vanderbilt. The two had much to talk about as Warner recalled the origins of the Single and Double Wing, his skepticism about the Modern T as a passing offense, and his comparison of Jim Thorpe and Ernie Nevers.
According to Warner, he implemented the Single Wing in 1906 when the new rules made it illegal to assist the runner by pushing or pulling him. Compared to the Traditional T, Warner's Single Wing overloaded the backs to one side, allowing them to block for one another while also facilitating misdirection. In addition, the Wing could release into a route to catch one of the new forward passes.
Warner introduced the Double Wing in 1911 but waited until his time at Stanford in the 1920s and 1930s to make it famous. By 1950, however, the Single and Double Wing were fading, and the Modern T was becoming dominant, much to Warner's chagrin. He thought the T’s quarterback needed too much time to drop back from under center, and the technique most used kept them from seeing the backside of the field while dropping back.
Pop remained convinced the Single and Double Wing would stage a comeback, since UCLA and Princeton had enjoyed recent success using them. He was wrong on that count. Still, the challenges he recognized with dropback quarterbacks were resolved in time by the shotgun and then the spread option since both allowed the quarterback to see downfield the entire play and throw to receivers spread across the field.
Part of Warner's inability to see the future stemmed from his version of football relying on great, multi-dimensional players. Jim Thorpe had been his Single Wing triple threat, and Ernie Nevers held the same role in Warner’s Double Wing. Still, in 1950, football was in the early stages of transitioning to free substitution and the specialized, one-dimensional players that changed the game. That version of football saw quarterbacks quarterback, runners run, and receivers receive until the game transitioned again to flexible quarterbacks with the spread option who once again threw and ran with the ball.
Perhaps we'll see a future Single-Wing-like formation with triple-threat quarterbacks who punt. Then, we may think that old Pop had seen the future when he talked with Grantland Rice in 1950.
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