Stagg vs Yost: Willie Heston And The Battle Of Aught-Four

Hello! We've been fortunate enough to have John Kryk, the Toronto Sun's NFL columnist, write for HTTV these last few years. Kryk is an invaluable resource when it comes to the early days of college football and has applied that expertise to a book about the intense rivalry between Fielding Yost and Amos Alonzo Stagg around the turn of the 20th century.

What follows is an excerpt from that book detailing Willie Heston's seventh-year-senior season, and the fights it set off.

Willie Heston (right) returned for a fourth and final season as a Wolverine in 1904. After graduating from the University of Michigan with a law degree in the (then) requisite three years, he studied literature in a tag-on semester.

Amos Alonzo Stagg -- the University of Chicago’s head football coach, athletic director, faculty head of physical education and self-appointed cleanser of Midwestern college sport -- disapproved. Although Stagg had had players at UC who similarly squeezed out every drop of eligibility, and he himself had played sports for six years at Yale (and even suited up for the Maroons in their inaugural 1892 season), he couldn’t resist slamming Michigan and Heston in the Chicago Evening Post on September 27: “The maroon coach cited the case of a rival institution that had a graduate return to take a post-season law course [sic] so that his great value could be utilized in the football eleven this fall.”

Stagg’s hypocrisy aside, this was after all Heston’s seventh season of college football, after three previous at a California teachers college now known as San Jose State University. But that experience at San Jose Normal never counted against Heston’s four years, presumably because of the conference rule that discounted any experience a student might gain at a college whose academics, or even just its football, were of a particularly low order. The conference arbiter, Clarence Waldo, in these years tabulated the Big Nine’s official list of colleges that did make the academic or football grade, and evidently San Jose Normal did not qualify.

Despite being injured in an elevator in St. Louis that summer, Heston probably was healthier in his senior season than he’d been since 1901. As Michigan’s opponents lamented.

In Michigan’s third game, a 95-0 obliteration of vastly overmatched Kalamazoo College in just 40 minutes of play, Heston might have rushed for more single-game yards than any running back before or since, at any level of college football. “As usual, Willie Heston’s performance was the headliner of the matinee,” the Michigan Daily reported. “A review of the game shows that the captain advanced the ball during the afternoon 515 yards — considerably more than a quarter mile.” Heston continually broke away on long gains and scored six of Michigan’s 16 touchdowns, four on runs of 65, 70, 85 and 65 yards.

How fast was Heston? The fastest man in the world in 1904 just happened to be a fellow UM student — Archie Hahn. At the Summer Games in St. Louis that year, the “Milwaukee Meteor” became the first man to win the Olympic sprint double: gold medals in both the 100 and 200 meters. Back then there was a 60-meter dash too, and Hahn won a third gold in that race. Two years later, Hahn won the Olympic 100 metres again. In 1901 he had tied the world record in the 100-yard dash (9 4/5ths seconds) and set a world record of 21.6 seconds in 200-meter straightaway dash, a race long since discontinued.

Michigan’s nationally respected track and field coach, Keene Fitzpatrick, doubled as the Wolverine football trainer. He marvelled at Heston’s breakaway speed and had this idea to help Hahn with his: pit the two men against one another in 100-yard match races on campus. Fitz did so some 200 times. Heston led Hahn at 30 to 40 yards every time. “At that point,” Heston recalled, “I could hear him go by.” Heston occasionally pressed Hahn to the finish but never beat him.

By 1904 Heston had refined his abilities as a running back that would have made him a standout in any era. His stiff-arms were viciously effective, with either arm. At 5-foot-8 and 180 pounds, he was stout enough to be an effective inside power runner. Perhaps best of all, and to a “remarkable degree” as a Michigan sports historian wrote in 1948, Heston was able to “maintain his feet” upon being hit, or leaping, or spinning, or making a harsh cut. “Willie Heston always ran low, with a wide-spread, pumping knee action. He had a cat-like ability to land on his feet, no matter how hard he was hit, his legs still driving forward.” He was unafraid to hurdle sprawled players, or low-charging tacklers — such as Eckersall in the 1903 UM-UC game. Heston first coined the phrase that became a mantra for running backs in the first half of the 20th century: “Use your searchlights and jump the dead ones.”

Yost

By 1904 Yost had tired of defending Heston’s strong play on the other side of the ball. Asked by a reporter in October if Heston was as good on defense as he was on offense, Yost “without thinking” quipped: “Why, really, I don’t know. None of my backs has made a tackle this year.”

[After THE JUMP: "a long ton of meat and bone and the thing moved with an average velocity of about eight yards a second"]

On October 12 Heston scored three touchdowns in Michigan’s 72-0 defeat of the College of Physicians & Surgeons in just 22½ minutes. A week later Heston scored three more times in a 31-6 defeat of Ohio State in 60 minutes. Two minutes into the second half of that game, Michigan fell behind on the scoreboard for the first time in the Yost era. The Buckeyes led 6-5 after cashing in a fumble by fullback Frank Longman. That snapped the Wolverines out of their lethargy. Four days later, the Wolverines beat the American Medical School 72-0 in just 23½ minutes — a worthless outing, as many of the med students appeared unfamiliar with the game.

It was hoped West Virginia — Yost’s Alma Mater — could provide a much stiffer test. But being a team rooted in glacial, doleful Eastern football, the Mountaineers had no idea what hit them in a 130-0 loss in Ann Arbor in 43 minutes of play. The Daily New Dominion of Morgantown wrote that the Wolverines appeared to the Mountaineers as “giant forms which seemed to be clad in football togs, but which acted as no football players ever seen in West Virginia.” Somewhat more seriously, one Mountaineer said this when asked how his team could possibly be beaten 130-0:

“Well, they had a long ton of meat and bone and the thing moved with an average velocity of about eight yards a second. When it collided with West Virginia, West Virginia scattered and the thing went on. Why, I played against a man that weighed 245 pounds stripped. He was faster than the fastest man on our team. Once he carried the ball two yards across the goal line for a touchdown with two of our men hanging on his legs. I had about twenty-five yards to run across the field once to catch Heston. He had at least fifty yards to run to escape me. When I got there he was gone. . . . All we could do was to line up down the field and wait until the bunch came along. Sometimes we would get them, and sometimes we wouldn’t — mostly wouldn’t.”

The Point-a-Minute machine screamed into unseasonably warm Madison on October 30. Yost figured Arthur Curtis and the Badgers would provide the best test of the year. The Badgers, now three years removed from their last Big Nine title, appeared formidable again. They’d won their four previous games of 1904 by a combined 218-0.

With 11,000 boisterous supporters cheering them on, the Badgers twice held on downs after the Wolverines had carried the ball nearly the length of the field, and the first half ended scoreless. But then Yost’s machine kicked into a higher gear and could not be stopped. Michigan scored five touchdowns in the second half, while the Badgers could barely gain a yard against the stout Wolverine defense, and UM won 28-0 in full-length 35-minute halves.

The Chicago dailies dredged up those old machine allusions to underscore Michigan’s impressiveness in their next day’s editions. The Tribune ran a page of photos of star Wolverine players under the header: “Cogs in Yost’s Great ‘Machine’ at University of Michigan.”

For the third consecutive year Michigan knocked Wisconsin out of the championship race before Thanksgiving. Only a warmup foe (this year Drake) and Stagg’s Chicago Maroons stood between Michigan and an unprecedented fourth consecutive Championship of the West.

* * *

Before Michigan’s emphatic win in Madison, Yost had fired this shot toward the Windy City, probably intentionally: “Wisconsin always plays us a hard game. They are the hardest team in the West to beat, much harder than Chicago. We have never had a great deal of trouble beating Chicago.”

Stagg surely saw the story, because it remains in one of his archived 1904/05 clippings scrapbooks. The Inter Ocean kicker headline that labelled Yost the “‘Hurry Up’ Genius” probably rankled Stagg as much as that quote below it.

Stagg

Yost thus splashed another dash of kerosene on the UM-UC rivalry, and worked up Maroon partisans to set the stage for one of the oddest, most entertaining spectacles ever to take place at a Midwestern college football game — not the 1904 season’s climactic Chicago-Michigan game at Ferry Field, but the Chicago-Texas game at UC’s Marshall Field the week before.

As the Maroons lassoed the Longhorns 68-0, who did fans and reporters recognize sitting high up in the Marshall Field bleachers? Why none other than Fielding Harris Yost and William Martin Heston, scouting the Maroons in person. Yost had left assistant coach King Cole in charge as the Heston-less Wolverines faced lightweight Drake. Word of the dynamic duo’s presence spread fast. A Chicago newspaper described this one-of-a-kind festivity:

“Of even more interest to Chicago students than the progress of [the game] was the presence of Coach Yost and Captain Heston of the Michigan team, who closely studied every move Chicago made to aid them in beating the maroons at Ann Arbor next Saturday. Yost was the center of attraction on Marshall field, and as he viewed the game from a section packed with Chicago enthusiasts he was made the object of much good-natured fun. Long yells with Yost’s name on the end were given, and he was continually prodded with witticisms as to what Chicago would do to Michigan next Saturday.”

Yost just smiled. A cartoonist on hand captured the scene for one Chicago daily. He depicted the game as purely secondary attraction, with all heads spun in reverse, looking up at Yost and Heston.

The press box even got in on the fun. Troublemakers sent bogus scores of the Michigan-Drake game to the public-address barker, “to the effect that Drake had scored twice on Michigan,” the Tribune reported. At that, the catcalls really rained down on the Michigan duo — or up, as the case was. “Yost’s face was a study as he heard the ‘news,’” the Trib said.

“Well, what do you think of that?” Yost told the masses. “When the cat is away the mice will play. We should have known enough to stay at home, eh, Martin?’”

In fact, Drake kicked only one field goal, whose value this year had dropped from five points to four, in a 36-4 Wolverine win in 25-minute halves. Not that that would have mattered to the thousands of Chicagoans having the time of their lives at the expense of their arch-nemesis Yost.

Finally, when one jeering Maroon fan asked the Michigan coach aloud, “Why don’t you smile?” Yost could no longer resist. He quickly shot back, “We’ll smile enough next Saturday to make up for it.”

* * *

Heston, the last active varsity member of Yost’s 1901 championship team, suited up in a college football game for the last time on November 11, 1904 -- before a record crowd of 13,125 at sun-soaked Ferry Field in Ann Arbor.

Before kickoff, a film crew from the American Kinetograph Co. of Orange, N.J., captured establishing shots of the crowd, and the starting Wolverines even posed while a camerman panned the line, then shot game action. The filming worked — said to be the first successful film footage (and oldest surviving) of an American football game.

Few thought Stagg’s Maroons had much of a chance to beat the Wolverines. That included UC students, fewer than 50 of whom signed up for the school’s official trip package when hundreds had been expected.

Despite his public digs, Yost wasn’t overlooking the Maroons. He and Stagg liked to throw strategic curveballs at one another, and the Michigan coach had a doozy this year. Throughout his UM career, Heston played left halfback and almost always wrought his damage on runs around Michigan’s right end. For Heston’s swan song, Yost intended to run him more than usual around the opposite side, in part to stay away from Chicago’s All-American end Fred Speik. The new plays for Heston might have been run in the new formation Yost debuted in 1904, among dozens in his arsenal.

The new formation looked like an arrowhead of sorts, and it featured a novel means of attack. Behind either a balanced line, or a line staggered right with a tackle over, the three backs stationed behind the quarterback lined up not parallel with the line, as in “regular” formation — known by Woody Hayes acolytes 70 years later as the “fullhouse T” — but rather in an unparallel line ‘aiming’ just outside right end. From this formation, as the Chicago Journal’s football strategy expert Thomas T. Hoyne explained, Yost debuted a style of attack “setting an entirely new example in aggressive football for the country.” Particularly, it was the manner in which the backs hit the line. Rather than the ball carrier physically helped forward by the other two backs, in unison — to smash into the line as a conjoined threesome for maximum penetration force, as was done heretofore — Yost conceived this “repeater game” of sorts, Hoyne said. “The man with the ball hits the line, and just as he is being stopped, perhaps another one of the backs plunges into him from behind and drives him forward a little farther. A few seconds later the third back strikes the bunch and drives him farther still. This is an entirely new idea in football outside of the University of Michigan.” Indeed, it was the debut of the one-man ball carrier — albeit a sore ball carrier, no thanks to all those smashes from behind. Still, it presaged the sport’s future. Oldtime football men who watched the Yostmen execute these one-man runs against Wisconsin were stunned at their repeated success.

Stagg’s surviving strategic notes of 1904 contain formations he intended to use to defend against this new Yost brainchild. The Michigan coach must have seen something during the Texas game to be convinced that Stagg would overload his defense to match Michigan’s strength on formations tipping to the offensive right side, thereby leaving the Maroons’ other side vulnerable. Stagg’s notes reveal that very intention. Yost was ready for it. In the week before the Maroons game he installed new plays for Heston to run left, to Chicago’s vulnerable side, from right halfback as well as from his usual left. Yost’s only concern: Heston was uncomfortable and unsure carrying the ball in his left arm, after 43 games of mostly tucking it into his right arm.

Apparently Yost instructed quarterback Fred “Norky” Norcross not to use the new plays right away. The Wolverines didn’t need to. On their first possession, starting from their 38-yard line, they drove 72 uninterrupted yards for a touchdown, in 14 plays, to go up 5-0.

Chicago’s tiny, supremely athletic marvel of a quarterback -- Walter Eckersall -- pinned Michigan at its 15 with a long ensuing kickoff. (Teams usually elected to kick off rather than receive after being scored upon, a conservation tradition carried over from rugby.) The Wolverines kept right on marching. Ten plays later, from the Chicago 50, Norcross finally called one of the new plays for Heston around left end. The ruse worked. Heston circled the right side of the Maroons defense and burst for 42 yards, down to the 8 after Eckersall finally shoved Heston out of bounds. On the next snap, Tom Hammond scored for the second time and Michigan led 10-0 after another failed conversion.

Michigan wound up winning 22-12, a result closer than expected. The Maroons drove once for a touchdown in the first half, and Eckersall returned a Heston fumble for a second-half score. No team had scored twice on Michigan since 1900, before Yost’s arrival, and no college team had scored twice on a Yost-coached squad since 1899, when Yost’s Kansas Jayhawks surrendered 20 points to the formerly Yost-coached Nebraska Cornhuskers.

From a yardage standpoint, the game was no closer than the three previous Yost/Stagg clashes. The Wolverines outgained the Maroons 280 to 60 in the first half and 268 to 12 in the second. Other than the opening drive, when the Maroons moved 30 yards, and their first-half touchdown drive of 37 yards, Chicago advanced the ball but five yards on the day. Michigan’s 100 yards in penalties and fumbles helped to keep the Maroons in the game.

The Chicago youngsters — starters and inserted backups alike — put forth a plucky effort that won the admiration of the press and fans from both sides afterward. UC president William Rainey Harper sent a message of hearty congratulations to the team, closing with: “Never did an Alma Mater have more reason to be more proud of its sons.”

Said Stagg afterward: “I am proud of the team. There is not a quitter on it and all the men played a magnificent game against fearful odds. It seems strange the fatality that pursues us when we play Michigan. I wish we could meet them again with a whole team and let the twenty-two men fight it out. I would not be afraid of them.”

Yost said the final score would have been about 40-6 had his team not made so many blasted mistakes. When it was suggested to him a few days later that, per some reports in Chicago, the Maroons had been the equal of the Wolverines before all those key player losses and bad luck, Yost all but laughed: “Do you know how much ground they gained in actual scrimmage? Just about 65, while we gained over 500. . . . They claim we were outplayed but being outplayed like that will win us games right along.” As for the claim of “hard luck in having their regulars put out of the game,” Yost pointed out that Michigan scored two quick touchdowns at the outset with all of the Maroon starters in. “For my part, I wish the regulars had stayed in,” he said.

* * *

Heston was hailed as the hero of the game, despite his fumbles. He gained 239 yards on 38 carries, many around the left end. He thus finished his Wolverine career without ever experiencing defeat; Michigan went 43-0-1 in his four years. A Michigan alumnus at the time wrote to Walter Camp to sing Heston’s praises and claimed that “detailed statistics will show that in each of the past four football seasons, Heston gained more ground than any other two players in the country.” No such statistics survive to verify the incredible claim.

There is no way ever to know how many yards Heston rushed for at Michigan. Official statistics weren’t kept in college football until the late 1930s. Newspapers never published complete play-by-play accounts of Michigan’s early-season victories, and even if they did there were occasional discrepancies between the dailies as to the identities of ball carriers on various plays, and lengths of runs, etc. Nevertheless, long runs usually were mentioned in every game report. I have gleaned from them that Heston in his Michigan career had at least 40 runs of 20+ yards in length, and probably more. Of those 40, at least 22 runs were 35+ yards long, and 14 were 60+ yards long.

As the years went by, estimates as to how many touchdowns Heston scored kept rising, to as high as 110. Decades later he claimed the correct figure was 92. But contemporary newspaper accounts were quite reliable in this regard and usually agreed on touchdown scorers. Occasional mistaken identities were understandable, considering players did not wear numbers and touchdowns were scored perhaps half a field from the press box usually amid a thicket of collapsing players. The author’s findings nearly match the research conducted in 1958 by Steve Boda Jr., the NCAA’s long-time associate director of statistics. Boda counted 71 touchdowns for Heston. The author could not be so definitive. Depending on which discrepant accounts you choose to believe for two games — against Wisconsin in 1902 and American Medical in 1904 — Heston scored 69, 70 or 71 touchdowns. The NCAA officially credits him with 72, based mostly on Boda’s research. Boda furthermore concluded that in the 17 games for which he could deduce rushing statistics, Heston gained 2,339 yards and averaged 8.4 yards per carry.

What’s more, because of injuries and — in that one instance in Chicago — scouting, Heston played in only 37 of Michigan’s 44 games from 1901-04, and he played minimally in at least four. Thus, Heston averaged nearly two touchdowns per start. Entering the 2010s, the only player in NCAA history to average fully two touchdowns per game was Marshall Faulk of San Diego State from 1991-93.

To put Heston’s TD total in further perspective, no other player from the pre-forward-pass era (i.e., before 1906) is believed to have scored anywhere near 69-71 touchdowns. Colleges across the country by World War I enacted the three-year eligibility rule, after having permitted four or more years before 1906. The only player who came close to Heston’s mark until after freshmen became permanently eligible again in 1972 was the great Jim Thorpe of Carlisle. He scored 70 touchdowns in 44 games in 1907-08-11-12, according to the NCAA. No player after Thorpe scored as many as 60 career TDs until the 1980s.

Consider these additional facts when comparing Heston’s TD total to the moderns: the ferocity of pre-1906 football (his face was a bloody mess at the end of at least two games); he played both ways; there was no passing attack to loosen a defense; and protective equipment outside of a leather helmet, optional nose guard, shin pads and ridiculously large, pillowy knee pads was non-existent.

What cannot be disputed: Willie Heston was one of the most dominant players of any era in college football history. He was the first player to be named All-Western four times, and the first from outside the East to be named a two-time All-American.

* * *

After his Michigan career, Heston coached Drake in 1905 and North Carolina A&M (now N.C. State) in 1906 but won only 7 of 17 games. He gave up coaching thereafter.

Heston played in one big football game as a pro. He commanded $500 or $600 (reports disagreed) to play for Canton against host Massillon on Thanksgiving Day 1905, in a showdown of loaded Ohio pro teams. No one until Red Grange in 1925 would be paid more to play in a single game. But Heston showed up vastly overweight. On his first carry, he ran to his favorite side, the right, and attempted to cut upfield on a hay-covered portion of the field. The Massillon hosts had strewn hay to cover spots of pure ice, and Heston didn’t see the ice. He wiped out, snapping a leg bone. Massillon won 14-4. Heston’s football career was finished.

Thereafter, Heston pursued a law career in Detroit, rising to assistant prosecutor of Wayne County. He then became a judge on Detroit’s Recorders Court criminal bench for seven years. Heston ran a half mile a day into his 70s, entered the 1960s as one of the oldest living All-Americans and died on his 85th birthday in 1963.