Stagg great coach but no saint in football ethics

David Sumner’s Tribune op-ed “Here’s a football coach who understands the college game should not be about money” could have been subtitled “But sure should be about winning.“ The coach is legendary University of Chicago coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who Sumner’s implies, walked on water during his 41 years at U of C as well as his namesake Stagg Field.

During Stagg’s early glory years of 1901 – 1905, he was locked in a titanic battle with rival University of Michigan coach Fielding Yost for football glory. Both coaches used underhanded means of recruiting gifted athletes, with little talent or inclination for academics, to defeat each other, as both vied for the Western Conference (Big 10) title as well as the national championship. In addition, both coaches influenced professors and administrators to retain unqualified star footballers.

The most egregious example was Stagg’s top player Walter Eckersall, 3 time All American, who led Stagg’s Maroons to their first win over Yost’s Wolverines in 1905 after 4 straight losses. The victory ended Michigan’s 56 game unbeaten streak, and garnered for Stagg both the Western Conference and national football titles.

But Eckersall’s gridiron heroics hid the fact he was essentially a paid ringer. He spent his freshman year enrolled solely in remedial courses to simply qualify for college academics. In 4 years he earned just 14 credit hours, 22 shy of a degree. To exasperated professors he might not have been the ‘Galloping Ghost’ on the gridiron but sure was the galloping ghost on class attendance sheets’.

Yet, if there was one thing Stagg was as good at as coaching, it was hiding his and Eckersall’s shenanigans to achieve the pinnacle of football glory. Eckersall’s sorrowful academic record remained safely buried behind Stagg’s pious pronouncements of collegiate football purity, free from the corrupting influence of money; gratuities offered gifted athletes notwithstanding. Even when ethical reforms were implemented for the 1906 season to combat rampant chicanery by Stagg, Yost and others, Stagg’s reputation remained pure as Ivory Soap.

As a now 54 year alum of the University, I still remember attending a ‘scrimmage’ against North Central College on November 8, 1963. I showed up at Stagg Field to watch the rebirth of football at U of C, 24 years after President Robert Hutchins abolished the sport to keep academics supreme. Two hundred of my classmates showed up to clog the field, stopping the game to protest the mere idea of football returning to University of Chicago. The delayed game finally was played, but only after 4 students, including one of my dorm mates, were arrested.

Maybe those protesters were a bit of poetic justice for Stagg’s lust for football glory using tainted ethics 60 years earlier.